Premium Content

Access "Point-Counterpoint: Do both SDN and data center network fabrics fail?"

Rivka Gewirtz Little Published: 07 Dec 2012
Data center fabric wars

This article is part of the August 2012 Vol. 3, No. 4 issue of Data center fabric wars

When it became clear that virtualization and the cloud would strain the data center network—with new east-west traffic patterns, extreme application workloads and the need for flexibility and convergence—all of the major vendors began battling to prove they had the best solution for the problem. For each of them, that solution was a complex and costly data center fabric that promised flat, non-blocking, end-to-end transport between any node on the network. And then software-defined networking (SDN) came and shook things up. Suddenly, proponents of SDN promised that the control plane of the network would be decoupled and centralized, making it possible to build a network of dumb devices that could be granularly controlled down to the individual traffic stream. This technology could be used to spin up virtual network instances on demand and treat compute, storage and networking merely as pools of flexible resources. With that kind of manageability and flexibility, who needed cumbersome traditional networking architectures? In fact, who needed data center ... Access >>>

Access TechTarget
Premium Content for Free.

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy

Already a member? Login to access this content.

What's Inside

Features

More Premium Content Accessible For Free

Back to top