Companies like Verizon Wireless, Google and Amazon Cloud require an “exponential data center” to accommodate the exponential growth in traffic and virtual resources, said Alex Gray, senior vice president and general manager of the campus and branch networking division at Juniper. Gray was delivering the Juniper keynote in place of David Yen, the former Juniper executive vice president and general manager of the company’s fabric and switching business group, who . 

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With growth in virtual servers outpacing the growth of physical servers, software being offered as a service, and storage now shared instead of dedicated, every major facet of IT has evolved – except the network, Gray said. Now that these resources are shared in scalable pools, they need to appear to be one network hop away from the user, Gray said.

The network needs to be the foundation of these cloud environments, he said. That requires an uprooting of the typical “tree” structure of data center networks which may include multiple hops between servers.

“Every hop introduces more latency, more disassembling and assembling of packets,” Gray said. “Location matters in a tree architecture.”