Dayle Wilson, Principal Technical Consultant – Macquarie Telecom<\/p><\/div>\n

Networking is a rapidly changing area of IT. Much of the progress in network infrastructure has gone from ethernet, cable, and fibre optic networks to virtualisation. Network virtualisation is the idea of shifting customer segregation from a VLAN and hardware network devices into software. This is why the term software defined networking is often used to describe network virtualisation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the benefits of virtualisation is the ability to easily move servers elsewhere in the case of incidents such as underlying hardware failure. Because everything is stored in a database, functionality has shifted from a hard-coded configuration on a switch to a piece of software connected to a server. This speeds up the failover process from an administrative perspective, while also driving the trend of single tenancy.<\/p>\n