On prem networking is going towards stateless services only as connectivity towards the cloud will be the most important factor soon.

Before AWS, Azure and GCP had true connectivity from on-prem networks using fiber connections, we had to rely on running a lot of our core business applications in our own data centers and branch offices. Now when we can move workloads to the cloud without having to compromise fast and reliable network connections, it is possible to to truly scale down our on prem networks to containing only the necessary stateless applications for core functionality: DNS, DHCP and other small services.

Two racks is enough

Future core data center infrastructure will be dependent mostly around how many copper ethernet connections that are needed for each office. Two racks, where top racks have fiber connections, mid contain copper ethernet and the rest modular blades will be enough. Branch offices can already today be fully equipped with a self contained modular network appliance, split in two with two power sources and self contained network input and switching.

Focus on pure network throughput

The main reason is that we don’t need to run stateful applications on prem anymore. DHCP, DNS, Radius, and more can run as stateless containers. Whitebox network appliances are becoming more and more powerful and you are already able to run a whole datacenter full of containers just on those without any type of virtualization and overhead. Many large data centers are already moving towards white box servers where the core functionality is pure network throughput. Email, business intelligence, sales-marketing and other stateful servers that once were a part of the core data center are instead run in the cloud as either SaaS managed services or auto scaling and self healing applications. The most important thing is network connectivity towards the cloud providers and between each branch office and the main data center.

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