"The one thing that [operators] can control in this whole ugly process is how much disorder the network might contribute. If [they] can control that by flattening the data center architecture, it frees [them] from concerns and constraints that might really complicate life down the line."
Given their vast footprints and the complexity of overhauling so much legacy infrastructure, most traditional service providers won't be ready to fully embrace next-generation data center architecture on a large scale soon. In the meantime, however, they can look to early adopters, such as hosting or cloud providers, for a potential path to deployment.
Peer 1 began to see stress on its network shortly after it acquired ServerBeach in 2004, picking up customers such as YouTube and WordPress, Bains said. The hosting provider's 16 legacy data centers traditionally housed only one line of business and were built with a multi-tier switching architecture.
As Peer 1 steadily grew and prepared to launch a new Toronto data center that would house all three lines of its business under one roof, Bains said the need to change its data center architecture became apparent.
"We've been growing out our network and had a lot of challenges in terms of scalability, capacity and features, and we got to a point where we said, 'Look, we need to do a wholesale revisit at the edge and distribution designs of these networks,'" he said. "We saw the network industry converging to a strategy of a collapsed data center."