The network infrastructure in a data center devoted to cloud computing. Cloud networking interconnects all servers and storage systems. In huge data centers, the traffic is not just to and from the external world (north-south) but also within the data center (east-west) in order to retrieve all elements that make up today's complex Web pages. A robust, switched network infrastructure is required to support such data centers with tens of thousands of servers.
Arista Networks, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, which is known for its family of highly scalable Ethernet switch products, coined the term cloud networking to refer to this north-south plus east-west I/O infrastructure requirement. See
I/O virtualization.