That’s why many data center switching vendors, like Juniper, are proposing flat fabrics that enable any-to-any connectivity, with resources that feel like they’re one hop away. Juniper’s recently introduced is intended to achieve this by presenting a single distributed switch instance between servers. 

Others with skin in this game include Cisco, with its Nexus switches and FabricPath software; Brocade's Brocade One products; Arista's 7000 series switches; Avaya's VENA architecture; Alcatel-Lucent's "Application Fluent" switches; Extreme’s Open Fabric architecture; Force10’s new Z-series switches and software; HP’s S12500 and 6600 series switches and Intelligent Resilient Framework blueprint; and platforms from Enterasys.

“It’s a really exciting time… to be enabling the exponential data center,” Gray said.

in Network World's LAN & WAN section.