A number of recent trends—including mobility, new application architectures, and evolving types of applications—are driving divergence between campus and data center architectures. Evolving needs require different architectures, making the same network does all design a thing of the past. The data center network now requires a very different architecture from the campus network in order to successfully deliver applications.

The situation within the data center is similar. Evolving application requirements, the emergence of storage convergence and virtualization, cloud security threats, and the growing need to interconnect data centers all demand different designs and architectures to achieve different goals for different types of data centers.