Government agencies are turning to next-generation data centers that enable reduced operational cost and deliver transparency to citizen services through an open architecture. Leveraging the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), the U. S. government has sought industry input to develop IT solutions that optimize investments in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology to cost-effectively build high-performance data centers. This white paper reviews an approach that a government agency used to create a best-in-class virtualized network environment that uses open standards-based and industry-accepted interfaces and can be replicated across the enterprise.

You will learn about network virtualization and the various technologies that provide data, control, and management plane virtualization. This paper outlines networking best practices, technologies, and products that support virtualized data centers, with a special focus on the requirements of government agencies' data center networks in the areas of:

• Energy efficiency
• Visibility
• High availability disaster recovery
• Network connectivity and security