Cloud Network and I/O Virtualization

As the demand for information technology (IT) increases, so do the challenges for IT organizations to ?>do more with less.?> Cloud is an approach that provides a new mechanism to consume IT as services, addressing some of the challenges in IT organization. Hence, the infrastructure hosting cloud services needs to be virtualized. Cloud network is a key component of the cloud infrastructure, and can be virtualized via several techniques. This chapter discusses how key network and computer input/output virtualization techniques can be leveraged as key underpinnings of a cloud network. The key focus of this chapter is not only to discuss virtualization techniques, but also to review the use cases and benefits.