The way data centres and the servers, storage and networks that form a vital part of them are architected could change dramatically in the coming years. And not just in terms of the technologies employed to deliver increasing levels of performance and service.

Willie Oosthuizen, Cisco's technical director for Middle East and Africa (MEA), says that cutting-edge networking designs the company is working on today could well see servers becoming nothing more than a logical grouping of resources such as processors, main memory and storage.