The network industry could be entering yet another new stage of innovation and growth, fueled by a flood of new demands and an increasingly likely new tech refresh cycle driven by increasing network infrastructure automation and control. 

At the core of this new cycle is a flood of new devices being attached to the network, and at an unprecedented pace.  Connectivity, or the ability for a network to recognize what is attached, becomes critical as technology users accumulate IP addresses like children building Pokémon decks.

New Demands

Let’s put this in historical perspective, as 1999 marked the beginning of high growth in network connectivity.  2003 began a hyper growth period that shows little sign of slowing, at least if you follow the smart phone and netbook headlines.

In 1999 there were less than 100 million computers attached to the Internet.  Today there are about 700 million.  With smart phones and netbooks proliferating, this trend is likely to continue, further stressing network connectivity.  Many of these new devices are portable, increasing rates of endpoint mobility unfathomable in the 1990s. As mentioned before Cisco predicts 1 Trillion Net Connected Devices by 2013.

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Increasing complexity on the outside of the network will drive enterprises to control/automate more aspects of network infrastructure, which will ultimately reduce the operating expense of the network and fuel a new tech refresh cycle.  Think network automation and control, as enterprises race to automate specialized, high risk processes.  CIOs will ultimately gain as much visibility into the state of their IT infrastructure as CFOs have into the state of their business.

A VP cloud for a larger enterprise told me that his networking team had more than 30 steps to simply provision a server to the network.  There were close to a dozen highly-skilled network pros involved in the process.  He discovered via audit that the cost to move a server was more than half the cost of buying a new one. 

Those types of manual labor-driven environments made up of specialists will soon be replaced by smaller teams of generalists who will manage larger networks, make fewer mistakes and drive new strategic value to new business models.  Like the phone companies decades ago, network connectivity is about to be automated.

As the network industry wraps up 2010 expect to see more network automation announcements than ever.  Their customers are ready and waiting.

I’m a Vice President at Infoblox and a contributor at Infrastructure 2.0.

I’ll be speaking on a panel at Cisco Live on July 1.  I’m looking forward to talking about the new demands on network infrastructure, and whether or not the enterprise is ready for seamless cloud.  Frankly, so much of the discussion about cloud is for SMEs (or regarding apps) and so little is about the readiness of cloud for the enterprise that it is refreshing for Cisco Live to embrace this topic.

Even the mention of “private cloud” gets negative reactions from some of the clouderati.   I heard: “No such thing” yesterday on a cloud pundit call.  Yet at the end of the day enterprises will be assessing when, where and what can be delivered from any cloud versus a private cloud and the answers will have a significant impact on the evolution of cloud computing.

While I think Amazon and Google have done well delivering undifferentiated services via subsidized business models, it is fair to ask when and how can enterprises take to the clouds.  IMHO it’s when the network is ready.

You can view the session abstract here: Seamless Enterprise Extension to Cloud (SEEC) – Ready for Primetime?

Or you can read it here:

Length:		2 Hours
Abstract:		Infrastructure resources acquired by enterprises in a Cloud typically remain isolated from the enterprise (DC and network). Enterprises typically run classes of applications that are not mission-critical, does not require high degree of security or trust, are not real-time or suitable for batch processing (we refer to infra resources and applications as just resources). These resources may not also need full application of enterprise policies (security, access control, QoS, firewall, etc.). But can we extend the scope of Cloud to support wide range of enterprise resources? In other words, can we seamlessly extend an enterprise to Cloud and vice versa? What are the mechanisms (such as security, network, VPC: Virtual Private Cloud, Cloud Service Level, and InterCloud capabilities) that are needed to facilitate SEEC?
Speaker:		David Lively Director of Engineering, SP Systems Development Cloud and Data Center Systems Cisco Glenn Dasmalchi Technical Chief of Staff, Cisco CTO Office Cisco Yousef Khalidi Distinguished Engineer Microsoft Corporation Steven Hill Director Terremark Federal Greg Ness VP Infoblox Tobias Ford Assistant VP of Technology, AT&T Application Services AT&T

You can follow my (Twitter) rants in real-time at Archimedius.  I am a vice president at Infoblox.

Future In Review Panel: Is the Network Ready for Cloud Computing?

Future in Review is Mark Anderson’s annual tech conference, described by The Economist as “the best technology conference in the world.”  Our session on networks and clouds followed Mark’s interview with Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie on “The Complex World of Emerging Platforms, from Cloud to Phone.”  After Ray and Mark set the stage by talking about new platforms and complexity, we had the opportunity to explain why today’s networks need to be automated.

This 30 minute panel “Is the Network Ready for Cloud Computing” includes:

• Glenn Dasmalchi, Tech Chief of Staff, Office of the CTO, Cisco Systems;
• Lew Tucker, former Cloud CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems;
• Mark Thiele, VP Data Center Strategy, ServiceMesh;
• Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Windows Azure, Microsoft;
• Richard McDougall, Chief Cloud Application Architect and Principal Engineer, Office of the CTO, VMware; and
• Greg Ness (blog author), Vice President, Infoblox.

 

You can view the session here.

FIRE: Cisco’s Dasmalchi and Service Mesh’s Thiele with VMware’s McDougall

You can also check out a recent video interview at Interop on network automation and a recent blog featured at A Bright Fire.

The Future in Review panel last week on the demands that virtualization and cloud are putting on networks was a sobering contrast to the surge of cloud computing conferences and announcements.  Senior executives from VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, ServiceMesh and a former cloud CTO from Sun all explained how networks would need to evolve and automate in order to address new challenges, including:

1)     connectivity (as more devices are connected to networks);

2)     partitioning (security, access); and

3)     load (a greater share of application communications over networks versus motherboards).

FIRE: Implications of Manual Processes in the Network

Future in Review is Mark Anderson’s annual tech conference, described by The Economist as “the best technology conference in the world.”  Our session on networks and clouds followed Mark’s interview with Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie on “The Complex World of Emerging Platforms, from Cloud to Phone.”  You can read more about the session here.  Our session was Wednesday at 8:45AM.

We introduced the session by sharing research results demonstrating how networks get increasingly expensive to manage (on a per IP address standpoint) as they grow; and then shared Cisco’s Warrior’s prediction of 1 trillion net-connected devices by 2013.  I think this issue alone represents a strategic challenge to most of the cloud deployment models, especially private clouds where users will require differentiated access to a wide variety of applications from an ever-wider spread of locations via an ever larger variety of devices.

In addition to heightened complexity, virtualization and most cloud models introduce higher rates of change for networks.  Increasingly complex networks managed by scripts, configurations and spreadsheets will simply not keep up with servers and desktops created by mouse clicks.  This conflict between system automation (virtualization) and the lack of network automation is perhaps the biggest impediment to the pervasive adoption of virtualization in the data center and the ability to truly monetize cloud as a standalone business.

FIRE: Cisco’s Dasmalchi and Service Mesh’s Thiele with VMware’s McDougall

After we established that most large enterprises are unprepared for the explosion of net-connected devices we discussed how networks would have to evolve and the implications of that evolution for IT.  It seems that we all reached the conclusion that networks were strategic to IT again; they were a critical element in the evolution of virtualization and cloud (that is often left out of the cloud conversation).

In the coming days I’ll post a link to the 30 minute panel session.

Forrester on Network Automation

This conflict between pockets of automation within IT kluged together by manually-managed networks plays into an early June Forrester webinar on Network Automation.  It’s a perfect next layer down in the conversation, with Forrester Senior Analyst Glenn O’Donnell, author of “The Shifting Sands of IT Create a New Landscape for IT Automation Tools” and US Bank VP Product Operations Eric L. Cummings.

You can register here for the webinar.

You can also check out my video interview at Interop on network automation and a recent blog featured at A Bright Fire.

You can follow my (Twitter) rants in real-time at Archimedius.  I am a vice president at Infoblox.

If you drew a triangle and placed Cisco, Microsoft and VMware, respectively, at each corner you would have a good idea of where the center of power is regarding the future direction of the IT industry and the emergence of cloud computing.  And plenty of well-heeled tech companies would love to keep this status quo in tact for as long as possible, simply because they’ve run out of steam and are counting on complexity and lock-in to postpone the revolution.

Outside each point, of course, you could list competitors who are potential partners or disrupters, including HP, F5 Networks, Citrix, Juniper Networks, Amazon, Google and IBM. They are missing a few critical components to reach into the enterprise and disrupt the triumvirate, but they have the incentives to insert themselves and their own powerful spheres of influence, from technology to business model.

Outside those spheres of influence you could list category players who have survived or who threaten because of their best of breed status.  They are there because they can transform a particular category (like security, management, Ethernet switching or WAN acceleration, etc.) but not the whole game itself.  Think Silver Peak in WAN; Palo Alto Networks in security; and Arista Networks, etc. in switching.

Yet if you were to draw a circle inside the triangle you would identify a “no vendor’s land” or a kind of meat space of manual processes, configurations, scripts, spreadsheets, committees, checklists, etc. pretty much centered around the increasingly complex and growing network.  It is in this area where most of the cost, risk, and inflexibility that we associate with pre-80s era business practices are still the norm today.

This is IT’s land of opportunity, driven by the need for enterprises to continue growth and vendor’s need to grow their markets as management costs for each of their wares increase.  This is where the next disruption may occur.  We can look to recent history for similar examples.

In effect, VMware’s grand entrance into the data center market came at the expense of an old guard of server and software players who couldn’t wean themselves off the “escalating management and complexity” bandwagon fast enough.  VMware established a $20 billion market cap by disrupting empires of complexity and manual labor and automating server management tasks.

That is why this is where IT automation will go next, in the core of the network infrastructure.  IT automation requires network automation.  Without it you’re stuck with increasingly complex and inflexible VLANS.  Yet network automation, the next frontier for IT automation, will require network infrastructure automation.

As I said at last year’s Future in Review panel on infrastructure 2.0: “Today’s networks are run like yesterday’s businesses”.  Wednesday I plan to address these issues again with senior executives from Cisco, VMware, Microsoft, etc during this year’s follow-on Future in Review 2010 panel on i2.0. 

We’ve seen this all before, except at a different layer in the OSI stack.

The Application Front End Boom

Five years ago we watched the application delivery space boom as the result of the new demands on IT, especially the network.  Enterprises spread their IT assets into smaller regional and branch offices and networks evolved to support the transport of applications initially designed for LANs (local area networks).

Initially network teams invested huge amounts of time simply managing a host of new problems when enterprise apps slogged their way through unprepared networks.  That time, expense and delivery pressure justified billions in new market caps and acquisitions.

Today we’re in the midst of yet another cycle of capital creation, and this one might dwarf the (OSI) layer 4-7 application delivery boom.  I think the next boom will take place at layers 2 and 3, in the “meat space” of manual processes where a great portion of IT costs, delays and risks remain.

The layer 2-3 drivers (around physical and logical addressing, connectivity, path determination) are all under increasing pressures due to the rapid increase in network-connected devices and increasing change, due to the nature of those devices including virtual machines.  I wrote about the three horsemen in February 2009: 1) notebook computers; 2) virtualization and 3) cloud computing. 

Yet the problem is even bigger than the success of netbook computers, and extends into manufacturing and medical devices, ATMs and even SCADA devices never connected to the network.  The case for connectivity is so strong that the network teams will continue to face increasing pressure over the foreseeable future.  

Cisco’s CTO recently predicted 1 trillion devices connected to the network by 2013.

Years ago the phone companies ultimately automated their equivalent of layer 2-3 pros (called telephone operators) because networks became so large and complex that they couldn’t throw enough bodies at the problem.  Today large enterprises are starting to feel the pressure, in terms of rising operating expenses, inflexibility and outages.

Two recent blogs caught my attention, both centered around the need for networks and IT to evolve from the “dumb network” idea.  Rick Kagan (from my employer Infoblox) recently blogged about his Interop panel on network evolution, and it wasn’t pretty:

The network is behind, way behind, when it comes to delivering the strategic benefits of cloud computing in terms of dynamic, flexible movement of workloads among computing centers.  And from what I saw at Interop, it’s about to get worse – potentially, much worse.  

Richard Kagan, GM, Infoblox Orchestration BU

 

Many of the vendors in the “Why Networking Must Fundamentally Change” felt like they wanted to hearken back to the glory days of mainframe computing:

Yes, that’s right:  At current course and speed, you’ll be able to get all of the cloud bursting and DR and resilience that you want, as long as you buy everything from one networking vendor and/or use cloud providers that also use the same networking vendor as you do.  It was other-wordly to be hearing this at, of all places, Interop.  There should have been a riot, but there wasn’t.  In fact, during the 1-1/2 hour discussion, not ONE of the networking vendors even uttered the word “cloud” – and no one seemed to care.

Richard Kagan, GM, Infoblox

Also on Richard’s panel was Doug Gourlay from Arista Networks.  His recent blog relayed essentially the same message, citing the breakdown in scale for the enterprise data center:

Again, most network switching equipment was designed for campus e-mail distribution.  As such laptops come and go, and so do desktops.  Nobody wants to keep rigid control over what port a laptop plugs into so the LAN was designed to be as ‘plug and play’ as possible.  MAC address auto-learning and flooding, DHCP, speed and duplex auto-negotiation- these all combined to make it so I can plug my laptop in just about anywhere, get an address, and do my job.

In the data center, especially for the largest data centers in the world, this may not be the case anymore.  These features that made life simple, simply do not scale economically any more- as they force the network into a hierarchy that means significantly sub-linear price/performance.  In fact it is often cheaper on a per server basis to run a small network than a larger one: something no operator wants. 

            Doug Gourlay, VP Arista Networks

The lack of automation and rising unit management costs in larger IT environments takes us back to the case made by VMware years ago regarding rising server management costs as data centers grew.  Now networks are in the same opex quicksand: the more hardware you throw at a problem, the more expensive each element is to manually manage.

The key question is whether or not the power players of today will be able to force hegemony by “dumbing down” the network; or will there be another boom, this time at layers 2 and 3 in the OSI stack.

That is why I think the Infoblox (my employer) acquisition of network change and configuration management player Netcordia is particularly interesting.  Note: Both EMA and IDC have recently published their takes on the acquisition, and a Gartner report is also likely.

This acquisition will catch many in the industry by surprise. Most of the NCCM sector consolidation has happened at the hands of large management platform/suite vendors, such as IBM, BMC, EMC and HP.  But it would be a mistake to underestimate the potential of this combination merely on those grounds.  There is a degree of common purpose and synergy here which far surpasses what in some cases has been little more than a land grab to cover and control network management budgets.

EMA Impact Brief, 2010

Infoblox IP address management (or DDI) integrated with former Netcordia’s NetMRI is likely the first set of network solutions with the potential for closed loop automation between the address space and the network.  That connectivity intelligence creates at least the promise of intelligent bindings between devices, policies and networks, and sets the stage for the automation of that expensive, error-prone meat space at the center of IT’s power triangle, in between Cisco, Microsoft and VMware. 

Surround that network infrastructure automation engine with the connectivity power of IF-MAP and you now have the capacity to spark a revolution in the networking industry and set up a new capital investment refresh cycle that has more to do with the stresses of connectivity than the speeds and feeds of switches and routers.

That may explain why the upcoming Virtual Interop (May 20) is on Infrastructure 2.0.  If the networking industry doesn’t solve the rising management cost issue, someone like VMware might create another $20 billion market cap, this time from the mainframe-era fantasies of visionless networking players.

You can read more at the infrastructure 2.0 blog or follow my rants in real-time at www.twitter.com/archimedius.

 

Summary: The acquisition of Netcordia extends Infoblox leadership in the IPAM and DNS and DHCP appliance category into the billion dollar NCCM category.  It is a bold move that sets the stage for network automation by supplementing existing DDI and NCCM solutions with complementary layer 2 and 3 data for more visibility, control and closed loop processes.

Just as the rise of the enterprise web (“webified” enterprise applications) and the branch office boom fueled a layer 4-7 revolution in networking, we’re about to witness an even more spectacular boom at layers 2 and 3.  This boom will be driven by the three horsemen of: 1) network-attached devices, 2) virtualization and, 3) the rise of cloud computing.

In the same way that the web delivery of enterprise apps designed for LANs created network problems which set the stage for the rise of the application front end and the WAN appliance market; the sheer connectivity, load, partitioning and dynamism demands of the three horsemen will force a sizable investment cycle in solutions that automate manual layer 2 and 3 tasks.

The combination of the networked endpoint explosion with virtualization and cloud is a trifecta for layer 2 and 3 vendors, or at least those who get the synergistic power of solutions which can integrate data and control between both layers.  Pure play NCCM and IPAM vendors will find themselves falling further and further behind as new capabilities, including IF-MAP create intelligent data linkages between greater populations of management, infrastructure and policy automation features.

The new network is all about real-time: real-time visibility; real-time control (over an even greater surface area of the network); real time linkages between outcome and action.  We’re talking about the kinds of tools that can have a strategic impact on the ability of the network to flex, partition and adapt to faster paces of change with minimal economic impact.

That’s why I’m particularly excited about the recently announced Infoblox (my employer) acquisition of Netcordia.  It represents the pairings of two market leaders in two distinct (network management IPAM DNS DHCP) fast growth markets.

While the latest Interop “Why Networking Must Change” panel was packed with large company spokespeople leading the charge backwards to today’s version of a classic mainframe model and market (lock-in with limited choices) at least a few companies (including Infoblox and Best of Interop winner Arista Networks) stood up to lead the infrastructure 2.0 revolution.

Innovation is merely a land grab to some vendors, an opportunity to increase billing and stifle innovation; yet to others it is an opportunity to turn billion dollar markets into multi-billion dollar markets.

Infoblox has now voted with its feet by acquiring Netcordia and has put into play a host of possible new IPAM DNS DHCP and network change and configuration capabilities into each of their individual product lines.  The result will be even more robust and powerful visibility, control and automation solutions (in each market) as Infoblox continues to shrink the amount of manual effort and processes to operate a network. People will start talking about compliance automation.

Imagine a network pro discovering something as common as an unmanaged IP address in a network and then having the capability to immediately isolate it.  That same pro can gain visibility into both the critical address space as well as physical and virtual devices attached to the network and can take proper action based on role. 

Network infrastructure automation is a requirement for network automation which is the requirement for the accelerated spread of virtualization in the data center.  Without network infrastructure automation, CIOs will indeed by stuck returning to mainframe era lock-in and choices.

The only alternative to mainframe-era lock-in is network automation, or infrastructure 2.0, including the ability for virtual machines to move from one physical location to another while maintaining security, application and delivery policies.  That capability along can unleash the power of virtualization beyond the VLAN barrier now confining larger virtualized deployments.

Here is a link to the announcement: Infoblox Acquires Netcordia

I’m a vice president at Infoblox.  You can follow my rants in real-time at www.twitter.com/Archimedius

Is the Network Ready for Cloud Computing?

Wednesday May 12; 8:45 – 9:15AM

While virtualization has automated systems, the network has continued to be operated, delivered like a flashback to 70s era management practices.
Last year here at FIRE we heard from leaders in networking and virtualization about how enterprise networks were wholly unprepared to deliver on the promise of cloud computing or IT automation.  There were too many manual constraints.  That’s right, the network automating the business had done a poor job of automating itself, and the result was growing gaps between new demands (more IP addresses, more change, more new initiatives) and policies and practices that have been around for decades. 
 
With more and more devices (and kinds of devices) connecting to networks these gaps today have significant ramifications for the growth of the IT economy as well as the amount of electricity demanded by IT to service that economy. 
 
So this year we have a panel of thought leaders in cloud, networking and virtualization to give us an update on what has changed and what still needs to change, for enterprise networks to catch up with the rest of IT and the promise of private cloud computing.  FIRE advisor Dan Lynch formed the infrastructure 2.0 Working Group last fall to address these issues.

Moderator: Greg Ness, VP Infoblox

Panelists:

Glenn Dasmalchi, Chief of Staff, Office of CTO, Cisco Systems

Richard McDougall, Chief Performance Architect, VMware

Lew Tucker, former Cloud CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems

Mark Thiele, VP Data Center Strategy, ServiceMesh

Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Windows Azure, Microsoft

Richard Kagan, EVP/GM, Orchestration Business Unit, Infoblox

Register here for this exclusive technology conference May 11-14, 2010
at Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, CA

In the meat space of confusion and contradiction caused by the collision between virtualization and the typical 70s-era management of today’s networks the future direction of IT will be determined.  Tremendous value is likely to be created in the automation of the network, as factories and supply chains were similarly automated over the last few decades, thanks ironically to the network.

That’s why I think the future of the networking industry and the market valuations of today’s leaders and upstarts will be shaped by how well (and how fast) they can adapt to the new cloud paradigm promise; and unleash the full power of virtualization now unleashed in pockets within the data center by leaders VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

The Problem

Google, Amazon and other cloud service providers combined with these virtualization leaders are introducing new levels of system automation (change) that are putting greater distance between the power of system automation and the kludge of specialized, risky manual labor and practices required to keep networks available and secure.

Virtualization, for example, allows an IT pro to create and move a virtual server in seconds while many large enterprises may take days to simply provision a server.  In the short term virtual networks are created (VLANs) that allow for tactical flexibility; all virtual machines share a network connection.  While this scenario works for small businesses and VLANs populated with a reasonable amount of similar applications, it eventually breaks down as VLANs get congested.

Without adequate network connectivity, flexibility and intelligence, VLANs eventually run their course and create hardships between system and network teams who are stuck arbitrating changes at two very different paces.  The benefits of virtualization, however impressive initially, are eroded as VLANs get overpopulated.

This problem will be initially felt at “best in class” virtualization shops who will be the first to test the limits, driven by the powerful initial business case for virtualizing racks of legacy servers taking up increasing management resources as more are added.  The VLAN delays the inevitable until network automation can deliver equivalent tools for network teams.

It’s not enough that networks will soon be connecting more than 1 trillion devices, they’ll also have to get deeper visibility and control when it comes to these fluid virtualized environments which are growing at a fast clip.  According to Yahoo VMware has a P/E (as of April 16, 2010) of 114. 

In a recent interview VMware CEO Paul Maritz talked about the rise of clouds as a “long term journey” and the need to better move resources/workloads between enterprise environments and service provider infrastructures.  That will require network infrastructure automation on a level which none of the networking or virtualization leaders can provide today.

“The term “Infrastructure 2.0” refers to an evolution of network infrastructure towards dynamic automation. In Infrastructure 2.0, network architecture emerges from the dynamic orchestration of IT elements– servers, storage, switches, firewalls etc. Instead of a fixed architecture where each component has a specific place and fixed scale, Infrastructure 2.0 is loosely coupled and dynamically adjusts to changes in demand.”

- Andreas Antonopoulos, SVP, Nemertes Research, “Dynamic Core Infrastructure Services”

 

And whoever delivers on the promise of automated network infrastructure capable of keeping up with fluid and increasingly populated virtual infrastructure will establish a business case that will drive another wave of capex expansion.

Without network automation, system automation is trapped into pockets that ultimately become so dense that they break down.  As more virtual machines are easily created and moved networks fall further behind and have less visibility into what they’re connecting.  That is, they become less capable of performing their key functions (security, application delivery, connectivity, etc.).

As Cisco, HP, F5, VMware and others start attacking these key challenges stemming from this collision between the dynamic, automated systems of virtualization and static, manually-managed networks I thought it would be useful to group key infrastructure 2.0 links and upcoming events.

Catching Up on the Infrastructure 2.0 Conversation

In December 2008 I collected links to some excellent posts on infrastructure 2.0 and consolidated them into a single blog entitled Infrastructure 2.0.  It has links to a series of blogs and podcasts created during the early days of the infrastructure 2.0 conversation, including great content by Lori MacVittie, Chris Hoff, Geva Perry and James Urquhart.

In the coming eight weeks there are a series of events that have are directly related to the infrastructure 2.0 movement:

At Interop on April 27^th there is a two hour panel on Why Networking Must Fundamentally Change moderated by Jim Metzler of Ashton Metzler.

Also at Interop on April 28^th there is a workshop on IF-MAP and IT Orchestration run by Infoblox GM Richard Kagan.  The movement toward IT automation has put IF-MAP in front and center relative to orchestration requirements and capabilities between otherwise disparate solutions.  You can also learn more at the Infoblox booth (#427).

In May I’ll be moderating an infrastructure 2.0 panel at Future in Review. The panel includes VMware Chief Performance Architect Richard McDougall, Cisco’s Technical Chief of Staff, Office of CTO Glenn Dasmalchi, former Sun CTO Cloud Lew Tucker, Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Windows Azure and Infoblox Orchestration GM Richard Kagan.

Future in Review will be May 11-14 at the Terranea Resort at Palos Verdes, California. 

On May 20^th, the Virtual Interop theme is: Infrastructure 2.0: Optimizing Your Infrastructure for the New Era of Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

 

Recent posts on infrastructure 2.0

Understanding Infrastructure 2.0 by CNET blogger James Urquhart

Server Den Asks Infoblox: What’s Infrastructure 2.0? by InformationWeek’s Alex Wolfe

Recommended Infrastructure 2.0 Blogs from December 2008 from Archimedius

Virtual Machine Density as the New Measure of IT Efficiency by Lori MacVittie at Infra20.com

Incomplete Thought: The Other Side Of Cloud – Where The (Wild) Infrastructure Things Are… by Chris Hoff at Rational Survivability

Lew’s Law and Network Automation from the infrastructure 2.0 blog

You can follow my (Twitter) rants in real-time at Archimedius.  I am a vice president at Infoblox

As I mentioned before, Cisco’s CTO predicted 1 trillion net connected devices by 2013 and I don’t think Padma was counting virtual machines.  With the rise of the three horsemen (netbooks, virtualization and cloud computing) it seems obvious that today’s enterprise networks are in need of a fundamental overhaul, starting with the automation of the tired, manually managed IPAM, DNS and DHCP infrastructure.

Note the following from a March 2010 article from TechTarget (Cloud Computing Network Primer):

Network automation necessary for cloud computing networks

Very little is static in a cloud environment. Instances of servers and networks are provisioned at the drop of a dime. Automated network processes are essential to provisioning these virtual resources. This means that the network architect must seek out automation tools that handle IP address management, configuration management and resource allocation. While these tools exist, they are constantly evolving, and networking teams may find themselves assembling a patchwork of solutions in addition to the offerings of their networking or data center portfolio vendors.

I think one of the biggest challenges to virtualization security, for example, is the collision between pockets of automated systems (VLANs) and static, manually managed networks.  At some point these pockets become less flexible (as they are populated with increasing numbers of VMs) and more granular network connectivity is required.  That connectivity (the essence of the DNS, DHCP and IPAM infrastructure) will have to be automated.

Coming Events

Interop- Why Networking Must Fundamentally Change-

April 27 – 2:45PM pacific

Interop- IF-MAP and IT Orchestration-

April 28 – 1:15PM pacific

Future in Review- Is the Network Ready for Cloud Computing?-

May 12 – 8:45AM pacific

Virtual Interop- Infrastructure 2.0- Optimizing Your Infrastructure for the New Era of Cloud Computing and Virtualization

May 20 -10AM eastern

Some of my favorite posts about infrastructure 2.0:

Understanding Infrastructure 2.0 by CNET blogger James Urquhart

Server Den Asks Infoblox: What’s Infrastructure 2.0? by InformationWeek’s Alex Wolfe

Recommended Infrastructure 2.0 Blogs from December 2008 from Archimedius

Virtual Machine Density as the New Measure of IT Efficiency by Lori MacVittie at Infra20.com

Incomplete Thought: The Other Side Of Cloud – Where The (Wild) Infrastructure Things Are… by Chris Hoff at Rational Survivability

Lew’s Law and Network Automation from the infrastructure 2.0 blog

You can follow my (Twitter) rants in real-time at Archimedius.  I am a vice president at Infoblox.  If you are attending any of the events I mentioned feel free to stop by and say “hello”.

According to Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior there will be 1 trillion net connected devices by 2013.  That count likely does not include virtual machines tucked away in growing populations of VLANs.  

That is perhaps today’s hidden epidemic.  A cloud CTO once told me that he was planning on using more than 10 million VMs within his environment by 2013.  Now that was one large environment but there could be hundreds of firms like his, trying to increase responsiveness and scale.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s a heck of a large IPAM spreadsheet.  Wonder how many steps to configure a server or a printer?  Several dozen.

Yes the meat space of the network is made up of layers of pros, processes, procedures and profound delays (relative to the VLAN world).

We are on the verge of a revolution in tools and processes that will eliminate decades of manual tasks and replace them with automation, role-based management and single “pane of glass” control over ever large swathes of functionality.

Welcome to the age of infrastructure 2.0.

You can follow my (Twitter) rants in real-time at Archimedius.  I am a vice president at Infoblox.  See you at Interop!