How will distributed compute and storage improve future networks

The age of virtualization and cloud began with the promise of reduced costs. It achieved this by running all types of workloads on homogenous, generic commercial off-the-shelf hardware (COTS) which would be hosted in dedicated, centralized data centers.However, today’s use cases are maturing. As such, emerging applications such as cyber-physical systems face much stricter requirements regarding data volumes, latency guarantees, energy efficiency, privacy and resiliency.These challenges will be tackled by the future network platform by taking advantage of the two following parallel trends.firstly, through seamless integration of specialized compute and storage hardware enabling better performance of a wider range of emerging, complex applicationssecondly, by moving these advanced compute and storage capabilities to the edge of the network, closer to where the data is generated
As a result, the future network platform will be able to provide optimal application support by leveraging emerging hardware innovation distributed throughout the network. In the meantime, it will still continue to harvest the operational and business benefits of cloud computing models.