Organizations everywhere recognize that changing application environments are creating new demands for the IT infrastructure that supports them. Application workloads are deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructure, requiring a network infrastructure that provides consistent connectivity, security, and visibility across a range of bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments:

• Application instances are created dynamically. As a result, the provisioning, modification, and removal of application network connectivity needs to be dynamic as well.
• Business units demand accelerated application deployments. IT departments have to provide shared IT infrastructure to address time-to-market needs and to increase their return on investment (ROI).
• With organizations deploying a mix of custom, open source, and off-the-shelf commercial applications, IT departments must manage both security and quality of service (QoS) for environments that support multitenancy.
• Applications have been transitioning over time to a less monolithic, scale-out, multinode model. IT infrastructure that supports this model must scale with the speed of business and support both 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.