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You've heard of VMs, but what about virtualized I/O? As virtualization spreads, the network is next.

Before virtualization, when it came to corporate computing, companies kept their data in a box. When someone needed the data, a request was sent out over the network and routed to that box. The information was then sent back over the same path. But as boxes became more powerful, the amount of processing power they had and work they did didn’t really take advantage of that improvement in performance. So some companies virtualized the hardware, making one box look like many virtual machines. But as where data is stored becomes more fluid, virtualization has pushed further into the data center infrastructure; the network fabric, or virtualized I/O, is the latest innovation to emerge.