I especially agree with Rob Whitely's take on the network becoming the backplane. As network performance and capability have increased we have seen two tectonic shifts based on it: 1) Servers have increasingly become disaggregated. 2) Network technologies have consolidated.

Application architectures have also evolved in a consistent fashion - becoming more network dependent than ever before, significantly increasing the relevance of application aware technologies.

The next few years will certainly be interesting - the shift to 10GbE is upon us, that enables tremendous consolidation opportunities. The VM is becoming the atomic unit of the new data center - that drives significant network equipment changes and topology/architectural considerations. Everything we build is becoming virtualized- SAN, LAN, Firewall, Load Balancer.

And I believe over the next year you will see the network and the server get closer together than ever before. Virtualization brings some challenges - there are opportunities to add more value there.

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