Oct/096
Cautious Optimism, Irrational Exuberance, Full-Circle Come-a-bouts, and Economic Recovery
Everything seems to come full circle in IT...
Cautious optimism is a term I have been having many discussions lately with friends and analysts about - whether we are seeing true economic recovery or a bit of a 'W' and whether to make serious investments in planned growth or not. Candidly, in IT we have compressed capital spending for a while, so it could just be a bit of elasticity - although one major thing strikes me as different.
In the current world order many of the IT investments seem to be directly proportional to short-mid term ROI, sure everyone wants to build for 5-10 years, but they also want to see real business results, right now.
Mostly this means that new project types are getting priority and IT is finding creative and innovative ways of delivering near-term business value without, hopefully, taking their eye off the architectural ball. Ideally we can do both- deliver short-term value creation, while building towards a longer-term vision that enables IT to reinvent itself and infrastructure to transcend generational shifts. Sadly this is not always the case, some companies and people seem to want to either over-rotate on short-term. Sadder, others refuse to admit the world is changing. Even worse are those who keep their head in the sand and cannot move at all. Denying change happens is dooming almost any business to failure, embracing a fickle trend too quickly can be just as painful, and relying on past formulas from previous successes doesn't always work.
You may wonder where I am going with this. Over the past thirteen years I have seen a lot of things change and come full circle- Cut-Through Switching, Lossless L2 Networks, Ring Topologies, Hosting/Cloud/Insource/Outsource. Universal truth - things change and open and experienced minds that can capture this change tend to prevail.
Architectures have to change with the trend, the old way of doing things is not always the best- althought there are always viable lessons to be learned and due respect should be paid to past success.
Looking at networking, especially in the data center there are a lot of architectural changes in play. Obviously, the changes being driven to effect convergence between Ethernet and FibreChannel is a big one. The other is the collapsing of layers and efforts to simplify the topologies while increasing the scale of operations - I think in my next post or two I will have to explore these some more, what are your thoughts on other architectural changes in the data center network?
dg
Author: Douglas Gourlay
high-tech executive with interests in networking, virtualization, cloud computing, and IT/Tech government policy. VP of Marketing at Arista Networks - this blog reflects Doug's personal views and opinions and not necessarily those of Arista Networks.Additional comments powered by BackType
default gateway
- Vendor Math September 18, 2009
- Implications of Virtualization and Cloud August 19, 2009
- Virtualization's Impact on Networks August 6, 2009
- Brad Reese, PR's Worst Nightmare August 5, 2009
- Hello World, and Random Career Thoughts August 4, 2009
October 24th, 2009
Doug, I think a good IT person needs to know both when change is coming, and when it isn’t. When to jump is a classic issue. I remember joining a company that had just deployed 1st generation Kalpanas into the core of their network. What a disaster. But there was something to what all of those companies were doing. On the other hand, the annals of start-ups are littered with technologies that were not worth jumping to at all.
Clearly cloud is one that is here to stay, but the big lie is that it is new. Out there, many people call it by its true name: outsourcing.
October 25th, 2009
I guess the perennial question is – is the change worth jumping for, and is it here to stay. I know I was caught flat-footed a few times, othertimes I jumped too quickly. A few times I got it right (those were the rarest) but I learned from all of them…
October 25th, 2009
Doug,
Interesting post. While we would like to think that the new approaches would eclipse the old, there is usually a period of coexistence… this is, in fact, a good thing since, as you point out, “embracing a fickle trend too quickly can be just as painful”….
Thanks,
LeitM
P.S. Typo in the sentence (part reproduced below) – should it be “deliver” instead of “delivery”? Should it be “shifts” instead of “shift”?
delivery short-term value creation, while building towards a longer-term vision that enables IT to reinvent itself and infrastructure to transcend generational shift.
October 25th, 2009
good catch, thank you!!!! I get carried away typing sometimes and am my own WORST editor!
dg
October 28th, 2009
I’ll throw a crazy idea out. I think in 5 years, server virtualization will be seen as an architectural bottleneck instead of an architectural enabler.
November 4th, 2009
Hi Douglas,
I love a good architecture discussion…
From an architectural point of view I think that the DCB/CEE standards are absolutely key to the future. Yes we all know about FCoE (there would be no viable FCoE without DCB/CEE and in particular Priority Based Flow Control) but I think that the emerging DCB/CEE standards will create a unified fabric that will prove a new foundation for all kinds of new innovative technologies. We already hearing about the benefits of extending these features to the likes of iSCSI and the potential of UDP on a lossless fabric…… (assuming assigned a lossless lane).
Looks to me like data center networking is changing right now. Rack Area Networking is a topic that seems to be coming up in more and more conversations….. Thinking a little more outside of the box, PCI-SIG MR-IOV standards could potentially bring HUGE changes to Top of Rack interconnection architecture. This kind of stuff keeps me up at night, well not really but you know what I mean
Of course in 5 years time the pendulum might be swinging in the opposite direction
Nigel