Technically speaking, I fundamentally believe there are tradeoffs customers make between performance and functionality all the time. With certain applications, you may want to go for the highest performance and the lowest cost. Whereas there may be other applications that require more policy enforcement, network control, and traffic-inspection visibility, and you want to have that traffic pass through intelligent network elements.
As a customer, I believe I'm going to want to have both of those capabilities available to me. Our position in the Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB) group is that this distributed architecture gives you the best of both worlds. That's as compared to the alternative, which is a unified-computing-type system, which is very centralized, proprietary, and requires all traffic to traverse into the core of the network. It doesn't really let you tradeoff between features and performance.
NetworkComputing: Tell me more about the Edge Virtual Bridging group.
Congdon: EVB is Edge Virtual Bridging. It's really all about the architecture, about how servers--whether they're virtual or physical--connect to the network edge. This is where the convergence of computing and networking is occurring.
Inside the hypervisor, there's a switch. But how does that switch interplay with the external switches? How does it allow you to create a consistent environment for those virtual machines, across the data center, with the external network? There's a lot of new protocol, forwarding behavior, and component definitions that need to occur so that we can better include that piece.
