The early fall is a great time to be in New York. In September there is the US Open and in October there is the Interop conference. There is no doubt that Interop can provide a major assist to IT organizations that are grappling with the onslaught of new technologies and new products. There is also no doubt that anybody who is going to Interop should go with a plan for what they want to accomplish or else they can get overwhelmed. The goal of this newsletter is to help Interop attendees develop a plan for the networking sessions that they want to attend.
In many previous newsletters we have discussed how the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing are having a dramatic impact on networking. On Wednesday, Oct. 5 Jim will summarize this impact in the Interop session entitled “The Impact of Cloud Computing on Networking.” In addition to providing an overview of what he means by cloud networking, Jim will use this session to highlight the other sessions in the networking track at Interop that will expand on the key concepts that constitute cloud networking.
Virtualization and cloud computing are making significant new demands on the wide area network. For example, the WAN has to be able to cost effectively support the movement of large workloads between disparate data centers. While there is not an emerging technology that will replace MPLS any time soon, there are a number of technology and service enhancements that can improve the price-performance of the WAN and enable the WAN to respond to these new challenges. Many of these enhancements will be discussed in the session entitled Breakthroughs in the WAN. One of the focuses of this session is technology that IT organizations can use to dynamically balance traffic between the Internet and MPLS.
Other WAN-related enhancements will be highlighted in the session entitled “What are the Next Steps for WAN Optimization?” This session will feature two mini-debates. One of these debates focuses on whether or not the acceleration of inter-data center traffic requires a purpose build device. The other debate focuses on the pros and cons of a premise based WAN optimization solution vs. a public cloud based solution. This later debate is the precursor for an ongoing discussion of what traditional IT services such as optimization, VoIP, management and security the IT organization should provide itself as a premise-based solution and what services it should acquire from a public cloud computing provider. We expect that this discussion will pick up in intensity in 2012.
In the next newsletter we will continue to outline a plan what Interop sessions you should attend.
