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HP's Next CEO Needs To Steer The Ship
August 13, 2010 10:01 AM
With Mark Hurd out of HP, the company has an opportunity to find a replacement who can carry the company forward. One of the striking moments at CiscoLive was listening to CEO John Chambers during the keynote and in a smaller gathering, and realizing how firmly he has his finger on the pulse of Cisco's business and technology direction. He is clearly driving the company. Whoever takes over HP, and apparently our own Art Wittmann interviewed for the job, has a number of challenges facing them, not the least of which, as Bob Evans points out, is defining and articulating the HP data center and networking strategy.
Net Neutrality: Where The Money Goes
August 12, 2010 8:00 AM
As we all know, Google and Verizon have reached a private agreement to for Google to pay for priority shipping of its bits over Verizon's networks. Both companies are getting beat up for that agreement. Google is getting beat up because they have long been proponents for net neutrality and have turned their back on the wireless side. Verizon is getting beat up because they are Verizon. But the pernicious FUD that is spread about Net Neutrality is appalling. It started long before October 2009, when the FCC rules were proposed, and hasn't stopped since. Net Neutrality doesn't stop providers from doing business. It does attempt to stop them from doing business unfairly.
Request For Information: Data Center Networking
July 26, 2010 2:00 PM
In the coming months, I am going to be spending a lot of time getting up close and personal with networking vendors' data center product sets. Jim Metzler and I are working on a data center networking RFI that Network Computing will publish, along with the vendor responses, in October. Jim and I are also going to present the results at the Interop NY show in October. I am looking forward to developing the RFI and reviewing the responses. In the last two years, there have been a ton of changes in the data center networking space driven by virtualization, data and storage networking consolidation, improvements in hardware efficiency, and new protocols to support increase demand. Typically, data centers are isolated enough from the campus LAN have unique demands that using a different vendor than your campus LAN makes sense. We want to get your input as well on what you think is important.
The Cloud May Not Need Server Virtualization, But Enterprises Do
July 21, 2010 9:00 AM
Considering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), I think by far the most interesting one is PaaS. The idea behind PaaS is that the service provider manages the development environment providing the core language and libraries while maintaining a separation between customer apps and data. You can get that now with a virtual hosting environment, but PaaS adds things like scalable storage, processing capacity, networking and other neat stuff. PaaS lets your developers focus on what's important, which is application functionality. Even so, you won't be tossing out virtualization in your data center anytime soon.
Signing The DNS Root Is Only One Step Forward
July 19, 2010 1:01 PM
The DNS root zone was signed on July 15th, 2010. Did you feel it? Did you even notice? The root zone of Internet is now more secure, signed cryptographically w/ DNSSEC. Unless you are really focused on DNS, you probably didn't notice. Frankly, this is a milestone for ICANN and friends, but it's not particularly actionable today or the near future. Many other things have to happen before DNSSEC becomes useful for most of us, such as .com and .net being signed, registrars start supporting DNSSEC, DNS servers starting to support DNSSEC, workstations and other endpoints starting to support DNSSEC. It also needs to be widely deployed.
Putting The Catalyst 6500 In Its Place
July 12, 2010 11:00 AM
The 6500 is a workhorse in the core and the data center. Network admins love to hate it and hate to love it. The variety of blades that can be inserted for in switch processing makes the platform applicable to many different network requirements. It's also an old platform and is getting pretty long in the tooth. With a paltry 80Gbps (full duplex) interconnect to the back plane, the 6500 simply isn't suited to stand as a next generation core data center switch. It's time to start thinking about putting it out to data center/LAN edge or as a core campus switch. Fortunately, you will have options for replacing the data center network. While I had this thought circulating in my head for awhile now, a blog Cisco's Rip and Replace Dilemma from Stuart Miniman at Wikibon, a follow-up by John furrier at Silicon Angle, and then a response by Steve Schuchart with Current Analysis prompted me to chime in. They are pretty smart characters, but I think I might be able to add something to the discussion.
Cisco's Vision Of Trust And Security: Building It With Or Without You
June 30, 2010 3:46 PM
I am pretty impressed with Cisco's breadth and depth of vision on where the information technology is heading and the role of the network in that vision. One item stuck out during Pamasree Warriors Keynote address today, and that is the requirement for trust and security in the borderless endzone, borderless Internet and the borderless data center. The inference I take from that is that security and trust have to follow information and services as they are accessed and located in the varying zones. I agree that security and trust are necessary, but getting there is going to be extremely difficult. What strikes me is that Cisco's vision in the near term to perhaps even 10 years out requires either an all-Cisco network or a ton of standards development that I don't even see on the horizon.
Why You Need To Demand Standards, Now
June 24, 2010 3:00 PM
In technology, there is lots of talk about the need for standards for this or that technology. I am an unabashed proponent of standards. There are lots of very smart people who work on standards either as part of their job or on their own time. The standards get pushed through the working groups, are ratified by the standards bodies, and are published to the world. Then those people move on to other things while vendors scramble to implement the standards in their products and update their data sheets.
WAN Encryption: Just Do It
June 2, 2010 7:00 AM
One my philosophy professors asked the question "Where is your car parked?" I told him where I parked it. He then asked me how I knew it remained where I left it. "Is it possible," he asked, "that a group of pranksters picked it up and moved it elsewhere?" I'd pulled that prank, so I knew it was possible. Then he asked, "What if one set of pranksters moved your car elsewhere, and then another set of pranksters moved back to the spot where you left it by coincidence? Would I know?" The exercise goes right to the heart of network security. What assurances do you have that what you expect to happen is actually happening? One of the ongoing issues with wide area networking is how secure is secure enough? Once the data leaves your network, you have no idea what happens to it. If it leaves unencrypted, you have no idea if anyone snooped on it.
The Many Shades Of Open
May 21, 2010 10:49 AM
Every time I hear a vendor say "We have an open this or that" somewhere in the world, a Richard Stallman acolyte dies. Or that's the way it seems. Vendors have glommed onto "open" as if it is the all-important aspect of their product, whether the product or feature is in fact open or not. It belittles those features/protocols/standards that actually are open, while doing little to characterize what the specific feature is. There is nothing wrong with proprietary features and there are actually a number of benefits. But let's drop the gratuitous use of open.
Pricing Elastic Application Delivery
May 19, 2010 9:11 AM
One of the claimed benefits of cloud computing is that you can scale up or scale down applications based on demand. Autoscaling is supposed to be automated and on demand, which is great in theory, and can even be done in practice, but automatic scaling ignores a related but important issue: licensing. Citrix announced their Burst-Packs for Netscalar at their user conference. It's an interesting concept, but it's inelastic.
Calling It: NUMA Will Be The Shizzle In Two Years
May 4, 2010 9:00 AM
No matter how much hardware and software we throw at data center computing, there is the hard fact that we are limited to using only the resources on a single piece of server hardware. Oh, we can virtualize the PCI bus and share peripherals among multiple servers with virtual IO, and that has use cases. Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is used in high-performance computing to aggregate fundamental computer resources like CPU, RAM and IO across a high speed bus. NUMA has the capability of virtualizing the hardware itself and it's going to be the hot thing within two years.
Interop: Weaving New Fabrics
April 29, 2010 10:00 AM
I sat down and said, with a grin, "Infiniband is dead." Asaf Somekh VP of marketing and Christy Lynch, director of corporate communications for Voltaire, took the shot well, but my comment framed the conversation in a way that was useful. Over the last few days at Interop, the differentiator--the long term differentiator--in Ethernet switching is not going to be speeds and feeds. Network performance will always improve, sometimes in baby steps, sometimes in leaps. The differentiator is services, which aren't cut from the same cloth.
Interop: Session Round-Up, 4/28
April 29, 2010 8:45 AM
As mentioned in my previous blog, since we can't make all of the sessions ourselves, we have some reps out there doing the legwork for us, and we have a round-up from the yesterday's sessions by Jay Sumresh Bhansali, Ashutosh Tusharbhai Bhatt, Paridhi Nadarajan and Benson Mathews Poikayil.
Interop: Dog Fooding IT
April 28, 2010 8:57 AM
Interop is like a box of chocolates and my chocolates are filled with nuts. I spend the better part of my day talking with vendors about their product plans and what I see happening in IT and the market. My view doesn't always jibe with what they see in the market. Whether it's Cisco who still hasn't deployed NAC too deeply, HP who is crowing about their all HP data center, or F5 who was also bitten by McAfees dat file debacle last week, It's also good to remember that these companies are themselves IT shops and they feel the pain of supporting users.
Interop Data Center Chair Jim Metzler On Networking
April 22, 2010 10:12 AM
We caught up with Jim Metzler who is the track chair of both the Networking track chair at Interop. He is also track chair for Application Delivery 2.0, as well. A lot is changing in Ethernet beyond "just faster," such as new standards for multi-pathing Ethernet and doing away with spanning tree, lossless Ethernet and better flow control. All of these feature will impact how you design networks.
Interop Data Center Chair Jim Metzler On Application Delivery
April 20, 2010 8:00 AM
We caught up with Jim Metzler to discuss his plans for the Interop Application Delivery 2.0 track. Application delivery has always been important, but new demands are being made on IT to delivery applications to user where ever they are on what ever device they are using. Users are getting spoiled by ubiquitous bandwidth and more powerful computing devices like netbooks and PDA's. Getting the app to the user efficiently and securely is a challenge. Where that application resides such as a data center or cloud service certainly impacts IT's ability to deliver. These are some of the topics in the Interop Application Delivery 2.0 track.
Interop Data Center Chair Doug Washburn On Data Center Strategy
April 9, 2010 10:11 AM
It's no secret that the recession has had an impact on IT, but business demands march on. The longer IT projects are put on hold, the increase in that pent-up demand is going to force companies to move plans forward anyway, but with limited funds, says Doug Washburn, an analyst at Forrester Research and the chair of Interop's Data Center conference track. Whether you are consolidating data centers, building a private cloud, interested in cost savings and green IT or simply keeping current on new technologies, architectures and business drivers for building data centers, the Data Center conference track will have something for you. We asked Washburn what he sees as the hurdles and opportunities in data centers for 2010 and 2011 and how that is reflected in the track sessions.
VMware Workstation Out; Sun's VirtualBox In
April 7, 2010 1:00 PM
My on-going process to investigate a good, stable personal virtualization strategy that will let me consolidate all the computers I use on a single hardware platform has taken me to VirtualBox. Taking a queue from my Twitter clan (four votes for VirtualBox, one for Ubuntu and KVM, and no votes for VMware Server), I installed VirtualBox and I am running my VMs in there. I had a few minor bumps along the road, but spent all of five minutes reading the documentation. At first blush, I am hopeful.
Shortest Path Bridging Will Rock Your World
March 25, 2010 10:08 AM
Whether you're planning to deploy FCoE in the data center or voice and video on your LAN, chances are you will have to redesign your network to be more efficient and robust than it is today. The way we design LANs today means we often over-provision because we build choke points through which all traffic has to pass even when the traffic is going to a neighbor. The distribution and core layers have to be over built just to overcome the choke points. It's wasteful and only addresses a symptom of a tree like design, such as inefficient paths. Short path bridging is going to change all that.
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