What upstream/downstream services are in use?

Q: What are the upstream/downstream services? What feeds/services do the systems host?

Meet the expert Martin MacLeod is an IT consultant based in London with several years' experience deploying and supporting blade servers in volume. He also blogs at bladewatch.com, where he tracks news on blade servers, grids and virtualization. Listen to the rest of Martin's answers on blade server virtualization by downloading our blade server virtualization podcast.

If you have a lot of feeds coming in and out of each of the application systems, then that will have a requirement in terms of the SAN storage and the network capacity you're going to be putting through these systems. How do these hang off -- do you need dial-up modems, ISDN connections, FTP, secure file transfer? How do you employ and support those configurations within a virtual infrastructure?