As data processing evolves towards large scale, distributed platforms, the network will necessarily play a substantial role in achieving efficiency and performance. Modern high-speed networks such as InfiniBand, RoCE, or Omni-Path provide advanced features such as Remote-Direct-Memory-Access (RDMA) that have shown to improve the performance and scalability of distributed data processing systems. Furthermore, switches and network cards are becoming more flexible while programmability at all levels (aka, software-defined networks) opens up many possibilities to tailor the network to data processing applications and to push processing down to the network elements. In this talk, I will discuss opportunities and present our recent research results to redesign scalable data management systems for the capabilities of modern networks.