In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.

In the second half of our discussion (first half is here) we focused on these topics:

• How do you move from a single central box (load balancer or firewall) to a more distributed and resilient architecture?
• How do we move from the overly large L2 domains so popular in some data center environments toward a more sane and resilient network architecture?
• Does VXLAN help to reduce the layer-2 failure domains?
• Have we started moving from high availability implemented within the infrastructure to highly-available application architectures?
• Does vMotion between data centers make sense? Where?
• What happened to SDN and whitebox switches?
• Does the pure SDN architecture make sense?
• Who is using whitebox or britebox switches?
• What software are the whitebox customers deploying?
• How much could you save with whitebox switches?
• Is anyone running containers in production?
• How do you get a container system that’s fit for production use?