Achieving Network Modernization for the Decade Ahead

Sponsored by: VMware and Intel

Brad Casemore

May 2020

IDC OPINION

This year, more than those that preceded it, marks the beginning of new enterprise strategies and priorities. In response to COVID-19, organizations of all sizes are prioritizing the need to empower employees to work from home. With the rise of business continuity and resiliency challenges — including workforce connectivity, virtual desktop performance, and datacenter security — the need for network modernization is undeniable. Driven by the imperative of business resiliency, in conjunction with digital transformation, enterprises need to define or refine their cloud operational models amid the growing embrace of hybrid IT.

Well before it made its way to the network, virtualization had been essential to efficiency gains and consolidation efforts in the enterprise datacenter. The consolidation of computing resources on virtualized servers helped reduce Capex, and it also lowered OPEX by simplifying and streamlining the management of datacenter resources.

A relative newcomer, network virtualization (which extends throughout the protocol stack and through all places in the network) is poised to play a valuable role in helping further modernize network infrastructure.

This White Paper examines how VMware and Intel have worked together to deliver network virtualization capabilities that leverage software and hardware innovation to provide a wide range of business and operational benefits to enterprises that need their networks to be every bit as agile, flexible, secure, and elastically scalable as their other infrastructure supporting the business resiliency, availability, and performance of increasingly valuable applications and workloads.