Posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 11:56 am
The emergence of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, virtualization and unified switching fabrics is ushering in a major shift in data center network design: three-tier switching architectures are being collapsed into two-tier ones. Higher, non-blocking throughput from 10G Ethernet switches allows users to connect server racks and top-of-rack switches directly to the core network, obviating the need for an aggregation layer. Also, server virtualization is putting more application load on fewer servers due to the ability to decouple applications and operating systems from physical hardware.
