Standardization on x86 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers within the data center has been a movement for some time because the architecture offers versatility, cost-savings, easier integrations, more attractive maintenance and management profiles, and, overall, a lower total cost of ownership than a proprietary hardware approach. But there are new requirements that are driving data center server choices these days, namely the need to support carrier virtualization, programmability, and the massive data sets that come with machine learning and advanced, real-time analytics.
Network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) in particular have started to take hold in the data center in real ways, and the underlying hardware layer has become abstracted from the intelligent software running above.
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