Why Networking is Ripe for Reinvention in the Cloud World

Grazed from Wired. Author: Dan Conde.

Cloud computing has been on minds of many people, but there are many definitions depending on who you ask. For some people, it means services or apps that are run off-premises as Software as a Service (files stored in the cloud, or music that is stored and played from the cloud instead of your own disks). For others, it is defined as servers or other resources are spun up on-demand from a data center somewhere in the cloud.

Let’s look at the second definition since we’re talking about how networking needs to be re-invented, and because the performance of cloud servers rely heavily on the networking. On top of that, many providers of Software as a Service use an on-demand model in their data center, so ultimately, the network underpins cloud computing in general. When people designed the datacenter systems with traditional servers, storage and networking gear, it was carefully designed with a particular workload in mind…

For example, one system may be designed to run databases well, so it may be configured to access large amounts of data quickly, and the storage systems were tuned appropriately. Another system may be created especially for web application server workloads, so it may be designed to spread the load across multiple back-ends. This type of carefully customized server and the storage designs gradually disappeared as virtualized servers and server consolidation took hold…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/09/why-networking-is-ripe-for-reinvention-in-the-cloud-world/