Cloud Fabrics and Virtual Networks

In the last couple of years, nearly every networking equipment vendor is touting their new data center fabric aimed at the creation of clouds. Take a look at the [partial] list below, culled from the respective web sites:

Company	Fabric Offering
Arista Networks	????
Brocade Communication Systems, Inc.	Data Center Fabric
Cisco Systems	Unified Data Center Fabric
Extreme Networks	Open Fabric Data Center
Force10 Networks	Open Cloud Networking
HP	FlexFabric
IBM	BladeCenter
Juniper Networks	QFabric
NEC	????

At the Cloud and Virtualization SIG on Virtual Networks

This SDForum Cloud and Virtualization SIG meeting saw a set of very exciting set of presentations by vCider, Big Switch and Cisco. There have been mature commercial availability of CPU and storage clouds, but there have been no rich commercial offerings of [virtual] networks¹.

Virtual Networking and Clouds.

Recently, in a blog post written by Chris Marino, titled Virtual Networking, It’s Not Just a VLAN…, I came across a beautiful definition of what a virtual network is:

"A virtual network is a network you control that runs on top of another network that you don’t control."