Beyond the Hypervisor: A Holistic Approach to Developing Next-Generation Data Center Architecture

As organizations work to evolve their IT infrastructure from a static collection of individual assets into a system capable of rapidly adapting to meet business demands, they have become very interested in the concept of infrastructure virtualization. And for good reason: properly architected and deployed, today's virtualization technologies hold significant promise in helping IT meet the three perpetual business demands of better, faster, and cheaper.

To optimize the delivery of the benefits that virtualization promises, as an architect you should approach the problem holistically: look beyond the hypervisor and consider the entire system of services connected to the virtual workload via the network.

This paper examines the topic of data center virtualization from an architectural perspective and points out where established and emerging network technologies can play a key role, not only in keeping down costs and ensuring operational continuity, but in helping make IT infrastructure an enabler of business agility.

Virtualization will be at the heart of next-generation data centers. Architects need to take an active role in planning for this transformation. As with all transformations, consider it a journey that will surely evolve further as more innovations are introduced by different vendors, both for on-premises solutions and for the cloud.