"The networking industry has been growing extremely rapidly for the last 20 years. But in the enterprise, the time from 2000 to 2009, a lot of people standardized on . In many ways, that was the right decision to make at the time," Germanow says.

His colleague, senior product marketing director Dhritiman Dasgupta, says that shifting traffic patterns have made parts of the consequent network structure redundant, however.

So-called "flatter" networks, unburdened by the older multi-tiered model, "are at the heart of ," he states. The rapid growth in Ethernet speeds - from 100Mb to 1Gb to 10Gbps and so on - also helped to create new capabilities, while simultaneously exacerbating architectural concerns.

Past a certain point, however, simply adding fatter pipes in order to boost performance becomes vastly less economical than restructuring the way the network handles traffic.