For more than a decade, the focus of networking professionals has been on physical network architectures with high levels of redundancy and fault-tolerance. From the endpoint inward, enterprise networks are designed to provide high availability with device redundancy and multiple paths among users and data. One of the key components of these architectures has been the network appliance, purpose-built devices that are designed to perform a specific function such as routing, switching, or gateway applications. In fact, today it is very difficult to find an enterprise network using general-purpose hardware running an off-the-shelf operating system for network infrastructure functions like routing, because appliances have proven to be far superior in terms of reliability, availability, and serviceability.
Interestingly, core network services—like DNS, DHCP, IPAM, RADIUS, NTP, and file distribution—are deployed primarily using the same architectural design approaches that network designers abandoned a decade ago. Most core network services “infrastructures” are built on general-purpose servers running common operating systems with off-the-shelf or open-source software. Managing and coordinating these disparate servers is difficult, especially when they are administered by different departments and functional areas. The need to integrate these services is a challenge that will only grow in the future as new devices and applications are added to IP networks.
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