Innovations - something I love in networking...
Make my life simpler!
By Douglas Gourlay on Wed, 07/21/10 - 2:32am.Sadly I do not think there has been a lot of innovation in networking in recent memory that has really helped the networking professional to be more effective and efficient in their job. I would actually endeavor to say that in the past years many of the new capabilities and features have actually made the job of maintaining a network harder, not easier.
How is this possible? I mean in the hey-day growth cycle of networking in the mid 1990's the main features and capabilities that we differentiated on and implemented has names/acronyms/abbreviations such as- EIGRP, EtherChannel, VTP, PVRST+, etc. I mean, these are household names right... ;) Maybe not at some dinner tables, but at a lunch counter in the Mandalay Bay convention center during Interop? Definitely.
Actually I think it was the Dot.Com meltdown of 2001 that tore some of the larger incumbents away from the techno-centric development and started them focusing on market adjacencies in order to diversify their businesses to protect against future market fluctuations and corrections. It is true that a well diversified business can weather more storms than a single-vectored one.
Mostly though I mourn the loss of innovation - where are the features and capabilities that focus on network operations? While we developed QoS where is a mechanism to ensure consistent classification policy? While voice was being developed on the 'network platform' how do we ensure call admission control/
Actually it is time, it is time for a new wave of innovations that do focus on the network operator, ones that simplify operations, keep the network stable, rapidly heal when fault or failure is detected, focus on MTTR as much as MTBF, and enable automation and management by machine/software, not just by CLI.
Reflecting on the past you can see that focused operational innovations made the network giants of today successful, is it absurd to think that continued innovations in this space would continue to create competitive advantage? Is it wrong for customers to want a simpler infrastructure, an open platform, extensible management APIs, and a stable operating system.
Thoughtful design has been lacking, and as always "we don't know what we don't know." So it begs the question, "what should we be building?" What does the networking industry need to do that will make operational jobs easier? Fifteen years ago it was a fast converging routing protocol that supported IP, IPX, and Appletalk concurrently. It was a mechanism of distributing and auto-pruning VLANs across a L2 switched infrastructure. It was a method of bonding multiple Ethernet interfaces into one logical port that failed over faster and didn't block most of the capacity.
If the technologies that caused the creation of a network hegemony were operational focused, and today we are integrating storage, Ethernet, IP, low-latency, high-throughput, HPC, cluster, video, voice, and market data traffic all over a common infrastructure - what do we need to build for you to make your jobs easier? What are the top things you really wish a network vendor did now?
dg
- About Default Gateway
Douglas Gourlay is the vice president of marketing at Arista Networks - the leading developer of 10Gb Ethernet switching platforms. In this role Gourlay is responsible for the global marketing and product management for Arista. Arista has recently won the ClearChoice award by NetworkWorld for top 10Gb Ethernet data center switch, and Best of Interop: Infrastructure and overall Best of Interop for the Arista 7500.
Prior to joining Arista Networks Gourlay was the vice president of Cisco’s Data Center Solutions Group, where he defined and executed Cisco’s global marketing strategy for data center, virtualization, and cloud computing. This included the Nexus and Catalyst data center switches, application and server load-balancing, storage networking, blade switching, and wide-area application services product families. Under his leadership Cisco’s data center segment grew from a nascent business to over $5B in annual revenue.
Since 1998 Gourlay has led and contributed to numerous hardware, software, and systems architecture developments across Cisco. He has served as senior director of product management for the Nexus Family of data center switches, director of product management for the Catalyst 6500 Series of LAN switches, and led product management for Cisco’s Application Delivery product family. Gourlay has filed or holds more than 20 patents in networking technologies.
Prior to his work at Cisco, Gourlay was an industry consultant and served as a US Army Infantry Officer. Gourlay is an avid pilot and can often be found tinkering on his Cirrus at Palo Alto Airport.
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