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Q&A: HP ProCurve CTO Paul Congdon: Page 4 of 12

NetworkComputing: Isn't one of the challenges the fact that, in increasingly virtualized environments, there are different bandwidth demands, depending on whether you're talking about interprocessor communication, processor to memory, or out to storage?

Congdon: Absolutely. That's another dimension. Each application may have different requirements, and then certain things like storage and clustering-type applications have different bandwidth and latency requirements. So now we have more constraints on how we try to meet the needs of those applications.

In the past, you'd like to just throw bandwidth at these applications. That's always the easiest way to do it, but it's fairly expensive to make the jump to 100Gb Ethernet in the data center. We'll get there; we'll continue to drive the prices down. But there's a point in time where that higher- speed link is not necessarily cheaper than a bunch of lower-speed links aggregated or distributed in a certain way.

This means that, today, if I have to meet QoS requirements, bandwidth requirements and latency requirements, I have more of a challenge as to how I'm going to allocate that bandwidth to manage it.

NetworkComputing: Is there any tension between desire of vendors to become a sole solution and everyone working and playing well together to develop interoperability standards?