Data Center Handbook

20Virtualization, Cloud, SDN, and SDDC in Data Centers^a

Omar Cherkaoui¹ and Ramesh Menon²

¹ University of Quebec à Montréal (UQÀM), Montreal, Quebec, Canada

² IBM Corporation, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

20.1 Introduction

Virtualization and Cloud have significantly impacted the data center infrastructures and, in particular, the network infrastructure. There are many additional demands on today’s data centers and an increasing number of devices and applications. In addition, servers and storage are becoming virtualized and Cloud computing is creating dynamic resource pools. And yet, data center cannot keep up because something keeps getting in the way: the network. The network is becoming increasingly complex to manage. Applications behave differently depending on where data is located and where it needs to flow. Depending on where it sits in the data center, it can be fast or slow.

The network in data centers has become a focal point. The current solution of adding more devices in order to scale has an impact, and the solution becomes exponentially complex. There is a need for solutions to simplify the problem while guaranteeing performance.

The network in data center is not completely virtualized, and there are still many network challenges impacting the new data centers. The first challenge lies in the ability to easily configure the data center network. The second is to facilitate network operations in a virtualized environment. The third challenge is around resource constraints, ...