IT networks have reached a juncture where they must transition from static, host-centric, vLAN centric infrastructures, to modern, efficient programmable network fabrics that allow enterprises to leverage capacity on demand. They must also have the ability to move virtual machine (VM) workloads within the data center, between data centers, and into the external cloud. However, this VM mobility places new requirements on data center networks to efficiently support multi-tenant environments.
As organizations make the shift from a virtualization-driven data center toward an infrastructure designed for cloud computing, they must shift their focus to application consolidation at scale for multiple customers in multi-tenant data centers. While virtualization has reduced the cost and time required to deploy a new application from weeks to minutes, driving costs down from thousands of dollars to a few hundred, reconfiguring the network for a new or migrated virtual workload still takes approximately a week and can cost thousands of dollars.