Why Network Latency Matters for Virtualized Applications

My colleague Russell Skingsley has an interesting take on the effects of latency on virtualized application performance. The purpose of virtualization is to optimize resource utilization. As Russell pointed out it isn’t just an academic conversation. For the cloud hosting provider it’s about revenue maximization. Network latency has a direct impact on virtualized application performance and therefore revenue for the service provider. Your choice of network infrastructure will impact your business, but it can be difficult to see how investing in high performance networking solutions will improve your business. I will try to connect the dots.

Don't Sell it Just Once
It’s a service provider axiom that you don’t want to waste your valuable assets by selling them to a single customer, even at a premium. Take dark fiber for instance, every SP has come to learn that selling a fiber to a single customer will never bring scalable revenues. Making the move to adding DWDM to the service mix allows you to scale up the number of customers and is an improvement over selling dark fiber, but is limited by the number of lamdas that can fit in the spectrum on a single fiber. The scaling is linear. A similar situation exists for shared cloud computing resources.