NWC: And worse, if you do have a problem, where do you point your finger?
Metzler: Right, who are you going to complain to? A tool can allow them to measure the pain, but in most cases, there's nobody to call to say "I'm suffering a lot of pain from you." A lot of this is just out of control in terms of management and optimization. And I'm an advocate of cloud, I really am, but the management and optimization issues are huge in my mind.
NWC: So there seems to be a battle brewing among the big vision infrastructure vendors like Cisco, HP and IBM, about mobility of servers within a data center and being able to track that and you could literally, as Cisco put it, move any server to any port to any place any time. So the idea is that your data center becomes this white board where you can just plug stuff in, and the network magically knows that the server is on this port, but now it's being move to some server five racks away, oh, and so we can move it, and all of that networking, storage, etc moves with it. Now that's an interesting vision, but from an operating management standpoint there are a couple of issues, primarily, identifying where those machines are, so if you need to troubleshoot, etc you can actually locate it. So there is a battle between things like managing port profiles that provision the port at the access point, versus doing tagging, making the access to the aggregation "dumb." Do you see that?
Metzler: I definitely see that those kind of battles are being fought out on all of the fronts we're talking about. Part of the curiosity here is that Cisco is in the server business, and suddenly people who used to be friends, HP and IBM, are not that friendly these days, now Cisco is looking at this big server market, and seeing only upside, this has certainly emboldened some of the traditional networking competitors, like HP and Juniper -- I can't say they are all that worried about Arista -- to come out with their own vision for how the network should look. The issues you mentioned, tagging, etc are just example of issues in play that haven't been played before, because the question didn't exist before. How does the Cisco vision differ from the HP, etc? So it's going to be a fun show from that perspective, as well.
