As the demand to deliver value grows at a rapid pace, IT leaders have turned to application modernization and cloud operating models as keys to successful digital initiatives. To support this, traditional infrastructure must be modernized, but that can create as many challenges as it solves. Many organizations are unprepared, facing pockets of siloed compute and storage, disjointed network and security architectures, and operations that hinder centralized IT management, orchestration, security, policy, and visibility.
Next-generation data center fabrics allow organizations to move away from legacy architectures and compete on the same level as hyperscalers by consolidating stateful functions to the entire fabric, providing a wide variety of infrastructure services in a new and integrated manner. This requires a shift from thinking of the fabric as just a segmentation and connectivity solution, to one that supports all infrastructure services allowed for workload scale.
This paper examines five critical data center design principles to consider when designing a future data center:
- Modernize with hardware-accelerated DPU-enabled switches
- Transition to a fourth-generation distributed services architecture
- Extend Zero Trust closer to applications
- Blend network and security AIOps
- Leverage the edge, colocation, and IaaS