Like enterprises, most service providers haven't veered off from the traditional three-tier approach to data center switching -- core, aggregate and edge.
Data center vendors - including Cisco, Juniper, Brocade and HP Networking - have unleashed their visions of collapsed, two-tier data centers that aim to simplify cloud computing by eliminating the need for a separate aggregation layer with more powerful switches and new routing protocols.
"This architecture of three tiers of switching, which has always been done traditionally, is a thing of the past," said Dhritiman Dasgupta, senior manager of product marketing at Juniper, which recently announced its "3-2-1" flat data center strategy. "It is too complex, affects performance by making the performance slow and adds cost."
This flatter next-generation data center architecture will require a significant capital investment from service providers as they build new or revamp legacy data centers.
But reducing the volume of switches will reduce latency between them and simplify management -- two important objectives for operators delivering services from fluid and multi-tenant cloud computing environments, Nolle said.
"As [service providers] get into virtualization and cloud computing in more detail, they start to realize that the way that an application is actually hosted is very important," Nolle said.