Methods and apparatus related to virtualization of data center resources

An apparatus, comprising;

• a switch core having a multi-stage switch fabric, the multi-stage switch fabric having a plurality of ingress ports and a plurality of egress ports;
• a first peripheral processing device coupled to an ingress port from the plurality of ingress ports and coupled to an egress port from the plurality of egress ports via a connection defined by an open standard interface;
• and
• a second peripheral processing device coupled to an ingress port from the plurality of ingress ports and coupled to an egress port from the plurality of egress ports via a connection defined by the open standard interface,
• the first peripheral processing device being a first storage node having virtualized resources, the first peripheral processing device configured such that the virtualized resources is substitutable with virtualized resources of a second storage node associated with the switch core,
• the second peripheral processing device being a first compute node having virtualized resources, the second peripheral processing device configured such that the virtualized resources is substitutable with virtualized resources of a second compute node associated with the switch core.

An apparatus, comprising:

• a switch core having a multi-stage switch fabric associated with a cell-based communication protocol;
• a first plurality of peripheral processing devices coupled to the multi-stage switch fabric by a plurality of connections associated with a packet-based communication protocol, each peripheral processing device from the first plurality of peripheral processing devices being a first node type and associated with a security protocol;
• and
• a second plurality of peripheral processing devices coupled to the multi-stage switch fabric by a plurality of connections associated with the packet-based communication protocol, each peripheral processing device from the second plurality of peripheral processing devices being a second node type and associated with the security protocol.