

Today, data centers are composed of physical servers arranged in racks and multiple racks forming a row.

It shows how overlays meet these changing needs and requirements. It describes how data centers have evolved technologically, their major requirements, and popular architectures. Hooda, Shyam Kapadia, and Padmanabhan Krishnan, provides a listing of changing data center requirements and the different architectures that are considered to meet these requirements. This chapter excerpt, Need for Overlays in Massive-Scale Data Centers, from the book Using TRILL, FabricPath, and VXLAN, by Sanjay K.

If your organization is using the TRILL or FabricPath protocols, you'll want to read further. New networking technologies are evolving to address the huge demands of cloud computing, mobility, and big data initiatives. For large enterprises, the focus on the network of late has been in the data center.
