For months the infrastructure 2.0 blog has talked about the automation of IT from a network perspective, including the automation of the network itself.  While few may question the need for network automation most businesses today still run their networks like they ran their “supply chains” decades ago, before the network.

 

This great irony is about to change.  Here’s why:

 

As virtualization entered the data center it became an accidental standard bearer for network automation.  The power of virtualization helped to drive a cultural (including x as a service) shift in expectations, just as Nicholas Carr was declaring war on traditional “old world” IT with the help of Google, Amazon and a host of other cloud (and not so cloud) players.

 

IT directors watched operations pros create VMs in seconds while network teams could take hours (or days) to simply move an existing server.  One visionary IT exec told me that an outside firm had calculated that moving a server cost his company almost as much as buying a new one.  This was a very large network, but nonetheless increasing complexity was driving increasing cost and a need for more efficient strategic orchestration across ever larger pools of endpoints.

 

Years ago networks were the drivers of massive change.  Today they often symbolize a resistance to change.

 

This is no doubt part of the appeal of cloud computing, and why Carr’s promise of IT as a plug and play utility is so compelling.  Enterprise IT has not kept up with innovations it has, ironically, helped to enable.  And the foundation for many IT departments is that inflexible, manually configured, kludge network.

 

The Ultimatum

 

Those who bet on the continuation of manual labor, processes, scripts, checklists and spreadsheets (to manage their network) will lose as they continue to be saddled with rising network management costs, inflexibility and the mounting pressure of IT consumerization.  Those who embrace automation will likely have a strategic advantage… if they automate the right processes.

 

We’re now watching packs of IT vendors form to deliver containers of integrated solutions, pitting former partners against one another, partly in an effort to standardize the silos.  I think this marks a mere transitional phase between the static network and the dynamic network.

 

The first pack to break from the complex, static network model into infrastructure 2.0 will likely win, as it will be able to demonstrate substantial opex reduction with increased IT agility.  The other camp will be force to discount their goods in order to make up for the OPEX slaughter their customers will face.

 

The opportunity for substantial reductions in opex with heightened flexibility is simply too compelling to be passed by, for users and vendors.

 

A recent article by Larry Dignan about how IT has fallen behind the Tech Curve laments how slow and cumbersome enterprise IT has become relative to consumerized technologies. Larry covered a session at the recent Gartner Symposium and was advised by Gartner analysts that IT pros want the world to proceed in an orderly fashion and are weighed down by the legacy of previous choices.  That’s a fair statement.

 

Gartner’s solution, or at least that posed by analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin is for IT to simply let users buy their own gear:

 

“Now Gartner has been on this user-provided IT pitch for a while now-the research firm equates the company laptop to the company car in the 1970s-and the prediction hasn’t exactly become the norm. However, the move to let employees bring their own gear increasingly makes sense. Why? Employees are already bringing what they want to work anyway. Exhibit A: The iPhone. Exhibit B: Google. Exhibit C: Facebook. You get the idea.”

                        Larry Dignan – How Did IT Fall…, Tech Republic October 2009

 

This notion –to simply let users make their own consumerized choices as a cure to the “crotchety” world of IT- misses the core of the problem; that is, the lack of the necessary network automation, integration and real-time visibility. IT won’t keep up unless the culture of manual labor, scripts and spreadsheets changes.

 

The “consumerize or fail” strategy is also fraught with risk to enterprise-centric market caps and IT careers.  I think it is more likely for creeping consumerization to force enterprise IT shops into another wave of network solution investments that enable consumer equivalent automation and control.

 

While Cisco, VMware, F5 and others have taken the lead in articulating the need for network evolution, IBM earlier joined the conversation with a “dynamic infrastructure” campaign which also included a Juniper partnership.

 

Gartner may call it real time infrastructure, others call it infrastructure 2.0 or dynamic infrastructure; but the point is that today’s network infrastructure is expensive to manage, error-prone and inflexible.  That is the core of the gap between IT order and the fluid world of consumer tech innovation.

 

Virtualization brought flexibility to within the VLAN, but for the most it stays confined there thanks to the messy collision between static networks and dynamic systems and increasingly dense VLANs.  It was enterprise IT’s first opportunity to catch up yet the network wasn’t ready or engaged.

 

For example, in some environments it costs almost as much to move a server as it does to buy a new one.  That was one of the drivers of virtualization-lite, immediate capex reduction by allowing systems teams to manage, move spin up, etc new servers in minutes and at a fraction of the cost. 

 

Yet that capex bonanza comes with an opex component:  higher rates of change and increased density within ever-increasing populations of VLANs ends up creating more complexity (think more pre-automation opex).  Now according to Nemertes research, virtualization drivers are shifting to flexibility (versus capex).

 

Virtualization only postponed the reckoning by enabling admins to manage more server pool within VLANs.  The old world challenges still wait at the border of the VLAN.  And that where be where new fortunes are made or lost, depending upon how vendors and IT departments invest in coming years. 

 

If enterprise IT is re-architected then consumerization at worst is only a cultural threat.  If it remains a bastion of manual labor consumerization may be just one more albatross to be acknowledged at yet another industry conference.

 

Rather than merely accepting the consumerization of enterprise IT or the “eventuality” of public clouds, why not focus much needed attention back at the network, which was once and should perhaps again be the driving force for IT and business innovation?

 

I am a senior director at Infoblox.  You can follow my rants in real time at www.twitter.com/archimedius.

As infrastructure 2.0 is turned on it will represent an irreversible transformation in the way IT services are delivered.  The timing of product releases, investments and deployments could make all the difference for a range of companies and organizations. 

 

Those who could be impacted include the cloud vendors (including Google, Amazon, Rackspace and Savvis), the virtualization vendors (VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix) and the network equipment vendors (including Cisco, HP, Juniper, F5, Brocade and Extreme Networks).

 

This evolution of the enterprise network begins with the automation of core network services (unified real-time visibility and management of the physical and virtual network) and continues with the introduction of cloud switches, new levels of visibility across virtual and physical infrastructure and the adoption of IF-MAP, a vendor-neutral standard which enables network-attached objects to communicate with each other in real time.

 

The following is a list of milestones circulating between some of us following the emergence of infrastructure 2.0.  Within these milestones are waves of data center solution and practice impacts.   This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but rather a high level guide to the types of innovations in process and in the future:

 

Infrastructure 2.0 Milestones

1) Automation of Core Network Services

2) Introduction of Cloud Switches

3) Integration of Cloud Switches with CNS Automation

4) Introduction of the IF-MAP Standard

5) Deployment of Dynamic Mesh Architectures

6) Policy Automation Overlay on Unified Meshes

7) Unified IT Management / Automation

 

The first 6 milestones set the stage for milestone 7, the establishment of a unified, dynamic IT mesh which would allow a multitude of diverse systems to be managed holistically and by policies (versus scripts, configurations, committees, spreadsheets, etc).  That unification, with the previous deployment of new classes of network (cloud) switches (like Cisco’s UCS and Arista Networks Cloud Networking Platform) could set the stage for massive reductions in IT service costs (especially for large data centers), including power consumption and labor expense.

 

You can read more about these developments at www.infra20.com in coming weeks.

 

The mesh would mean substantial opex savings as a result of capex investments, a formula that could drive a new network equipment spending cycle and set the stage for another age of innovation.

 

The switch could be fast and profound, enabled by the return of economic stability, ongoing daily fluctuations in energy expenses (peak vs off-peak variances) and the emergence of new classes of cloud solutions enabling IT services driven by policy automation versus extensive manual labor.

 

The Telegraph and the Pony Express

 

Let’s go back in time to find a precedent for a similar shift.  The demand for transcontinental communications initially required entrepreneurs to throw bodies (horses, riders and stations) at the problem.  As soon as technology evolved the horses and riders quickly became a colorful part of US history.

 

Pony Express horses had a range of about 20 miles and that drove how far apart the stations had to be, how much could be carried, how far each rider could travel and the length of time required for transport.  Before the telegraph it was the fastest transcontinental parcel trip.  Yet each trip required plenty of horses and stops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo of St Louis Pony Express statue courtesy of Wikipedia

 

For the period the Pony Express was an incredible feat.  It came to symbolize the taming of the frontier and the old west in the United States. Yet it lasted only two days after the completion of the transcontinental telegraph (according to Wikipedia):

 

The Pony Express announced its closure on October 26, 1861, two days after the transcontinental telegraph reached Salt Lake City and connected Omaha, Nebraska and Sacramento, California. 

 

Interestingly enough, early telegraph stations were also built about 20 miles apart, yet that foundation quickly changed the landscape of communications (again, from Wikipedia):

 

Prior to the electrical telegraph, all but very small amounts of information could be moved only a few miles per hour, as fast as a human or animal could travel. The telegraph freed communication from the constraints of geography.^[39] It isolated the message (information) from the physical movement of objects or the process.^[40] 

 

Virtualization has already signaled the beginning of the end of the Pony Express of processes, spreadsheets, committees and laborers required to assign and track servers, endpoints and to secure and prioritize traffic flowing through the network.  It decoupled applications from specific hardware (location) and automated movement/change within VLAN containers.

 

The telegraph meant new levels of mobility for communications as well as reduced costs.  It seems likely that the rise of the telegraph was a key contributor to the decline of the Pony Express.

 

Back to Today’s Shift

 

Recent Nemertes research on virtualization drivers is already showing a shift from capex to flexibility, and VM density is becoming a problem in larger environments.  The emergence of flexibility as a driver as well as new cloud switches signal that the infrastructure 2.0 evolution is already underway.

 

Like the Pony Express, the horses and riders thrown at the transportation problem were of limited value to telegraph operators using new technology.

The job of telegraph operator replaced Pony Express rider as demands shifted, and new kinds of infrastructure were required.  The shift ultimately came down to speed and economics, the key drivers behind infrastructure 2.0, the foundation for just-in-time IT services. 

 

You can follow my rants in real time at www.twitter.com/archimedius.  You can follow the infrastructure 2.0 conversation at www.infra20.com.

 

Disclosure: Long VMW, SVVS

In a matter of decades we watched the data network eliminate “middlemen” and arcane practices that had been around for centuries, only to see these practices re-emerge at the core of the network.  Understanding this irony is pivotal to understanding what is about to take place within the network and its effect on the evolution of IT.

 

World history is filled with examples of the triumph of mobility and economy, and the similar triumph of automation over manual labor.  The IT industry is no different.  The fortunes of network equipment vendors will ride on how well they address a critical shift in thinking that has been accelerated by the rise of virtualization.

 

When virtualization entered the data center it marked the beginning of the end of (manual) labor intensive IT tasks.  By decoupling application from dedicated hardware virtualization enabled a cottage industry of solutions dedicated to automation and change management.   It also reinforced a profound shift in thinking that was already underway.

 

Cisco’s Chris Hoff mentioned this on a recent webcast when referring to prescient Carnegie Mellon research from 2001:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rise of VMware, Citrix and Microsoft’s virtualization solutions presented both a cultural metaphor and a technological capability in plain view of IT pros and line of business leaders: automation of systems saved money and made IT more responsive.  Networks managed by scripts and spreadsheets will seem slower and costlier as virtualization spreads. 

 

Recently VMware’s Mark Thiele articulated a bold new data center vision that really looked like a model for driving the cloud computing market skyward.  It showed how applications could migrate from one location to another, regardless of distance and in pursuit of even temporary advantages/savings or in avoidance of impending disasters. 

 

The data center mesh Thiele predicted promises incredible economies and efficiencies and the ability to respond quickly and opportunistically to localized developments.

 

Cisco’s Hoff appears on the same page as he explores the implications of the big shift in thinking:

 

 

 

 

 

 

One’s natural inclination is then to ask: If this is so powerful then why aren’t most IT departments doing it?  Hoff a few days later discusses the technical hurdles to true VMotion in The Emotion of VMotion:

 

Don’t get me wrong, I think VMotion is fantastic and the options it can ultimately delivery intensely useful, but we’re hamstrung by what is really the requirement to forklift — network design, network architecture and the laws of physics.  In many cases we’re fascinated by VM Mobility, but a lot of that romanticization plays on emotion rather than utilization.  – Chris Hoff- Rational Survivability Sep 2009 

 

Between Thiele and Hoff you have a model for how cloud computing can work as a standalone business (with meshes of small data centers); and a crisp explanation for why the dynamic mesh hasn’t yet happened.  You can also see the return of the network as a strategic enabler of IT’s evolution.   As Cisco’s James Urquhart blogged late last year, the network is the final frontier for cloud computing.

 

Stateful VMotion (or portability) is the most elegant solution to addressing the declining cloud economics of density and complexity.  For that reason alone it is likely that the tech hurdles will be addressed sooner rather than later.  

 

Unlike standards-based efforts that can play out like an ongoing game of Prisoner’s dilemma, the gold spike scenario means that whoever achieves greater range and mobility first will have a significant competitive advantage.

The pony express, for example, lasted two days after the completion of the transcontinental telegraph.

 

While some network equipment vendors watch, others will be replacing manual tasks and processes with policies and mouse clicks.  History will repeat itself once again.

 

I am a senior director at Infoblox.  You can follow my rants at www.twitter.com/archimedius.

As Cisco, HP, Juniper, F5, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others circle the data center field of battle, one strategic ridge of high ground is in network automation, or the ability to move (or adjust/provision) IT assets at the push of a button without the need for extensive manual intervention.   That manual intervention accounts for a sizable portion of the costs, risks and compromises of today’s static networks.

 

Several of these companies have already made notable announcements in 2009, yet none have yet to let the virtualization genie out of the VLAN bottle completely.  When they do, watch out for a new wave of IT innovation.

 

Last week I listened in to four experts talk about Virtualization and the Future of the Network.  After Nemertes’ co-founder Andreas Antonopoulos shared recent findings on the shift in virtualization drivers (from capex savings to flexibility), VMware’s Mark Thiele shared his perspective on how far flexibility could go and the potentially powerful economics of an evolved network.

 

Thiele’s Vision

 

Instead of isolated data centers around the world Thiele illustrated a dynamic and resilient mesh of processing power capable of quickly adjusting to developments as they occur.  That mesh could avoid disasters by simply shifting its applications and processing cycles from one location to another in real time.  It could also shift for other reasons, including localized cost increases or brownouts or a sudden change in a cloud providers terms of service or service level agreement.   

 

Thiele makes his point on slide 13 as a hypothetical tsunami prepares to strike the Southern California coastline, applications and servers move in advance of its wake to optimized locations:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine the sheer amount of resources (people, time, expense, etc.) that it would take with today’s static network infrastructure to move servers from one side of a continent to another or even to change cloud providers.  Then add a little risk, a few angry users and a mountain of tasks and procedures to ensure that networks stay secure and available. 

 

That’s why infrastructure 2.0 is Virtualization’s Golden Spike; it enables a new level of scale, find ability and flexibility driven by powerful economics. 

 

Thiele has shown that the evolution of IT may very well depend on the evolution of the network.  Those players with the experience and technology to deliver on the promise are likely to win, despite offshore competition from low end players or category crossers convinced that the tired “speeds and feeds” mantra will carry them into new markets.

 

The development of dynamic linkages between physical and virtual infrastructure will unleash incredible innovation and automation.  The outcome is inevitable; it makes too much sense.

Disaster avoidance is one of several infrastructure 2.0 payoff scenarios, which include: 1) VMotion between data centers (for avoidance, recovery, economy, regulatory developments, etc); 2) changing cloud providers to adjust to short term service/price adjustments; 3) IT integration from M&A; 4) using disaster recovery assets to provide incremental capacity; and 5) implementing real disaster recovery in smaller data center environments.

 

The first network vendor to deliver on this promise gains a significant advantage: the ability to sell gear that dramatically shrinks IT opex and enables massive flexibility and scale for a fraction of the upfront expense.  This vision is the equivalent of supply chain for IT and represents a new era of computing potentials enabled by an even more strategic network.

 

If you’re still scratching your head wondering how a case can be made for additional investments in network gear and innovation in a tough economic environment, check out one of Thiele’s other slides on data center costs. He shows how two Tier 2 data centers empowered by infrastructure 2.0 can be build for less than half the cost of a single “Fort Knox” type data center.

 

 

 

Yes, the network is back again thanks to the potentials of virtualization and the new steam locomotive of IT, the portable virtual machine.  Market caps of the networking players are bound to fluctuate as one or another reaches higher ground and competitors face increasingly uphill battles.

 

While some network vendors may see problems with virtualization, those who see the opportunity and can gain the high ground might experience a new era of growth.

 

Mark Thiele has articulated the payoff from his vantage point of running data centers for a living… for the leader in virtualization.  He is also a founder of www.datacenterpulse.org.

 

I am a senior director at Infoblox.  You can follow my rants in real time at www.twitter.com/archimedius.

A special thanks to the speakers and attendees at today’s webinar on Virtualization and the Future of the Network: Nemertes Andreas Antonopoulos, Cisco’s Chris Hoff, VMware’s Mark Thiele and Richard Kagan from Infoblox.

 

 

You can view the slides here. 

 

Works best with IE 6 or higher.  Of course, you may want to watch the on demand webinar which will be posted in about a week.

It only makes sense that the steam locomotive existed before the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.  One breakthrough created the need for another.  The power of the VM (virtual machine) introduced unprecedented mobility and flexibility, albeit within the confines of a VLAN container.  That mobility and flexibility has created new demands for larger, unified and intelligent network infrastructures or infrastructure 2.0.

 

An Historical Perspective on Network Innovation

 

The steam engine, the locomotive and the rail are perfect examples of synergistic developments.  Greater speed and mobility pushed the limits of infrastructure and created a compelling case for longer stretches of track.  More cities became connected by rail lines over time, and soon even towns sprang up “in the middle of nowhere” along the tracks.

 

The increasing reach of the railroad opened up massive opportunities for development and trade and helped to forge national identities.

 

The Golden Spike Ceremony: 1869

Thanks to Wikipedia for the photo.

Virtualization’s virtual machine is pushing the limits of today’s static networks just as the steam locomotive drove the construction of iron rails to connect the coasts.

Perhaps today, like those who think that virtualization ends with the VLAN, there were some who didn’t understand the need for a rail system to connect both coasts.

 

Full VMotion is Virtualization’s Golden Spike

 

Yet the questions we ask today regarding our static, manually managed networks need to be answered before we can fulfill the full potential of VMotion.  Many of the questions may ultimately be answered by the newly formed infrastructure 2.0 working group. 

 

Addressing and automation are core issues; solving them will deliver new potentials in security, application delivery and disaster avoidance/recovery and create entirely new IT business models and applications.  They will also help to minimize the impact of the necessary complexity that VMware’s Thiele talks about in his latest blog:

 

The network is a great example of “hidden” complexity. Today the average network administrator can plug in a switch to another switch and then plug devices into the new switch and expect that in most cases the network will work. Imagine if before he could get the server to talk to the switch he had to create a new address from scratch or spell out the switch port in the server’s network interface card. The fact is networks have been hiding complexity for years, but they still have a long way to go. When you can log into a console and use your mouse pointer to drag a server into a network or resource pool and have the appropriate network security and routing policies applied, you’ll be getting close to IT nirvana. Although you might disappoint the hardcore network administrator who was hoping to spend some late nights and weekends tweaking the environment.

Mark Thiele, VMware, “Complexity in IT Systems…” Sep 17, 2009

 

 

Ironically, Bob Grossman, who is considered to be one of the fathers of cloud computing, kicked off the infrastructure 2.0 working group with a preso highlighting a train at the Russian/Chinese border undergoing a manual gauge change.  Talk about a “tin spike” connecting the two systems; each train is lifted by a team of laborers so that the undercarriage can be adjusted for a different sized track.

 

Bob has been building clouds (multi-site grids of computing power) for decades. 

 

Bob Grossman Briefing the Infrastructure 2.0 Work Group

 

Yet rail systems are incredibly linear, especially in those days.  Today’s networks are more like pulsing meshes.  So if a VM takes off from one VLAN for another determining its location (security, delivery, management policies require foreknowledge of the VM’s location) is strategic to a stateful trip.  If you can preserve the state (security, etc) of the VM while it moves great distances you deliver the golden spike, full VMotion.

 

That spike is strategic to the fortunes of networking vendors, cloud providers and enterprises because it enables new levels of flexibility, scale, automation and security across data centers, transforming the economics of IT, in the same way that the Transcontinental Railroad helped to unify a nation and create new towns and cities, and grow established ones. 

 

Railroads were a critical fabric for the industrial revolution and the global emergence of nationalism.  Networks are the critical and often overlooked fabric for the most powerful form of cloud computing the next stage of the computer revolution, sometimes called the intercloud.

When this golden spike is driven into the network it will enable a new generation of cloud operating systems layered on top of sophisticated cloud positioning systems with real-time intelligence on systems, location, policy, etc.  We’ll see hyper-efficient and intelligent networks that are as fast and up-to-date as individual hypervisor and VLAN tools today. 

 

From President Kennedy’s undelivered speech intended to be delivered at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh yet in vain.”

 

You can follow my rants and reads at: www.twitter.com/Archimedius.   I am a Senior Director at Infoblox.

Lori wasn’t able to represent F5 Networks at the first Infrastructure 2.0 Working Group but has been perhaps the most prolific contributor with some incredible thoughts on how networks must evolve.  Erik Giesa from F5 was on the Future in Review panel on I2.0 that inspired the formation of the Working Group.  So F5, Lori and Erik have been infrastructure 2.0 thought leaders.

 

Lori is one of the Young Turks of Infrastructure 2.0 because of her series of great posts too lengthy to list in its entirety. We’ve highlighted a few:

 

 

Infrastructure 2.0: The Diseconomy of Scale Virus (Nov 24, 2008)

 

Making Infrastructure 2.0 reality may require new standards (Oct 22, 2008)

 

How VM Sprawl will Drive the Urgency of the Network Evolution (December 19, 2008)

 

VM Density as the New Measure of IT Efficiency (Aug 24, 2009)

 

Cloud makes Servers Obsolete (July 31, 2009)

 

You can follow Lori at www.twitter.com/lmacvittie and here.  She is a regular contributor to www.infra20.com.

One week to go.  Nemertes co-founder Andreas Antonopoulos leads an expert-packed webinar on virtualization and the strategic importance of the network.  Speakers: Mark Thiele from VMware, Chris Hoff from Cisco and Richard Kagan from Infoblox.

 

Register Here for this online live webinar 8AM Pacific, September 23, 2009.

My recent podcast on infrastructure 2.0 with John Willis reminded me of some recent banter about my use of the term “Cambrian explosion” to talk about where IT is headed when infrastructure 2.0 becomes a reality.  In short, today we have a classic preconditions scenario when automated systems are connected with automated networks.  Synergy is putting it mildly.

 

Let’s Digress

 

Today virtualization is contained within ever increasing, scattered VLAN empires that some are calling clouds.  If anything these clouds are mere vapor pockets trapped in shower stalls.  If you’re new to this discussion you can catch up here.

 

When the barriers that trap VMs convert into intelligent, permeable membranes it will unleash a new era of IT innovation built upon a new level of connectivity intelligence between endpoints, systems and networks.  Think of it as a kind of supply chain for connected IT tasks.

 

Today that supply chain is a collection of “middlemen” using decades-old practices, from scripts and spreadsheets to checklists and committees to keep networks available, secure and up-to-date.  Kind of takes you back to the days before the network, huh?

 

We saw the rise and impact of just-in-time manufacturing.  We’re about to see just-in-time IT, a term recently used by Arista’s Gourlay.  Those who embrace automation will win yet again.

 

Cambrian Age

 

You can read an overview of the Cambrian explosion at Wikipedia, but I’ll pull what I think is the most relevant quote:

Whatever triggered the early Cambrian diversification opened up an exceptionally wide range of previously-unavailable ecological niches. When these were all occupied, there was little room for such wide-ranging diversifications to occur again, because there was strong competition in all niches and incumbents usually had the advantage. If there had continued to be a wide range of empty niches, clades would be able to continue diversifying and become disparate enough for us to recognise them as different phyla; when niches are filled, lineages will continue to resemble one another long after they diverge, as there is limited opportunity for them to change their life-styles and forms.^[91]

There is a similar one-time explosion in the evolution of land plants: after a cryptic history beginning about 450 million years ago, land plants underwent a uniquely rapid adaptive radiation during the Devonian period, about 400 million years ago.^[10]

 

 

Cisco blogger James Urquhart once commented how virtualization will open up a broad range of IT models, similar to the complexity of the shipping industry with warehouses of various sizes, distribution centers and a variety of transport mechanisms (trucks, vans, ships, railroad cars, planes, etc).  We’re already flustered with cloud definitions, and most models have yet to fully embrace the network.

 

I think it was Irving Wladawsky-Berger who made the reference at Always On many months ago that resonated with Urquhart’s prescient observation.  I linked to a recent piece, yet he has talked about this notion for awhile.

 

Infrastructure 2.0 Young Turk Mark Thiele (from VMware) made a comment recently about how automation should not eliminate complexity but rather hide it from users so that they can focus on critical elements.  That hasn’t happened, especially in the world of DNS, DHCP and IP address management for starters.

 

What could it look like?

 

So then what happens when IT is freed from the shackles of manual scripting and configuration and change approval committees, and IT pros can focus on policy (security/access, application delivery, network, expense, etc)?  Tools evolve leveraging the new infrastructure that enables new potentials, similar to what occurred when desktop OSs evolved (from CLI to GUI for example); users expanded and created markets for more tools for more processes.

 

The dynamic, persistent link between application, network and system becomes the foundation for a cloud OS, which in turn transforms the network equipment industry by reducing opex and justifying new levels of capex, new levels of investment in infrastructure 2.0 gear.  That in turn creates new markets for new applications which are not truly network nor system; they are likely virtualization or cloud applications offered by those who saw this coming and planned for the explosion.

 

The worlds of various hardware vendors, from Cisco to Juniper to HP are in collision, creating vast new opportunities and niches within a vastly larger category.  Sounds like a potential Cambrian-style development to me.  IT makes for a catchy blog title at a minimum.