Yesterday in partnership with Forrester Consulting, we released a new report, “Building For The Next Billion: What The New World Of Business Means For The Network”, which revealed how demands from big data, mobile and cloud computing have pushed networks to a breaking point. 

In addition to a blog post by Bask Iyer detailing the topline findings, we hosted a webinar with Forrester’s Andre Kindness, BMC Software’s Mark Settle, and Juniper’s Bask Iyer and Mike Marcellin, to discuss the implications of the research.  If you missed the event, you can listen to an on-demand replay here.  We also wanted to address some of the questions that came in from the community that we were not able to respond to during the event:   

Server virtualization is often hailed as a panacea that delivers on the promise of cloud deployments and networking environments, reducing the time required for provisioning new applications and services from weeks to literally hours/minutes.

While this is true, many people ignore the fact that it still takes days to set up the network services—for instance, configuring and synchronizing network services with the virtual network—that these applications and services require. Virtualization has simplified spinning up a new applications; it has also complicated how compute, storage and the network are managed in a cloud deployment. The only way to reduce this set up time, some contend, is to virtualize every aspect of the data center, including compute, storage and the network.  Virtualizing all the resources is just the first step, the next step is to manage all these resources in a higher level of abstraction, thus removing the complexity that virtualized resources bring to a cloud environment.