Today’s static, hierarchical network infrastructure is not equal to the dynamic computing needs of today’s data centers. In addition to being highly scalable, networks need to assure operational continuity, demonstrate efficient power and cooling usage, have high density and high switching capacity, be easy to provision and manage, support unpredictable traffic patterns and any-to-anyc onnectivity. They must easily integrate with other infrastructure resources and support open source SDN software and protocols such as Open Stack, Open Daylight, and Open Flow.

Virtualized enterprise networks, as the natural evolution from virtualized servers and storage, are essential to providing consistent network services for development and test environments and for applications that span physical, virtual, cloud-based, wired and wireless environments. They are a necessary step in the evolution to programmable and active networking.

As with the deployment of any technology, careful planning, knowledge-based design and development, and testing under a full spectrum of use cases are required to better ensure that expectations for productivity, manageability, reliability and cost-effectiveness are met.

Working with your IT staff, the Business Links approach begins with analyzing your existing network topologies, QoS requirements for each type of traffic pattern, end-use requirements and growth expectations. The virtualized network design begins with the data center fabric. Network virtualization is layered on top of the fabric, and decisions are made for routing, security and load balancing. Tests for a variety of usage patterns, management, reporting and failure scenarios are performed. Depending on how the network will be deployed, tests can include sample VM migrations, measurements of server utilization and bandwidth optimization, dynamic resource allocation based on changing usage, provisioning and configuration of new resources.