Paul Congdon: How we're going to manage the sprawl that's taking place--the fact that we have thousands and thousands of servers, whether they're physical or virtual, and how we manage this new environment where the network and the server are intimately related.
You're very well aware of the challenges behind VMotion [live migration of virtual machines] and mobility within the data center. That's a huge value to customers -- being able to move workloads around and being able to optimize performance and power efficiency. Live migration is a really valuable tool, but it puts some challenges on network design and topology.
The big thing that we're all trying to solve is how to scale Layer 2 networks [i.e., the data link layer, where addresses are flat] out to be really large and flat, so that we can better manage this mobility. I don't know if this is the initial knee-jerk reaction to solve the problem, or if this is going to be the long-term answer, but having large Layer2 networks is going to make things simple, because that's how administrators are used to dealing with their virtual networks, their switches; they're deploying their applications right now.
Getting Layer 2 to scale out is not necessarily as easy as it sounds, especially the numbers we're talking about -- hundreds of thousands of servers. And if you have VMs running, you're talking millions of servers.
NetworkComputing: Isn't part of the difficulty the fact that people don't have good visibility into their networks now, and things are getting vastly more complex?
