At the Interop conference later this month in Vegas, Jim will moderate ten panels. The driving force behind most of these panels is our belief that virtualization and cloud computing fundamentally change everything. We are going to use the next few newsletters to elaborate on that belief and to invite you to attend as many of Jim’s sessions as possible.
At the Interop conference later this month in Vegas, Jim will moderate 10 panels. The driving force behind most of these panels is our belief that virtualization and cloud computing fundamentally change everything. We are going to use the next few newsletters to elaborate on that belief and to invite you to attend as many of Jim’s sessions as possible.
Security of virtualization, cloud computing divides IT
As an industry we have been talking about what could be done to make IT agile for as long as we can remember. After a while you have to come to the realization that we keep talking about making IT agile because it is not. Or at least it is not as agile as the business unit mangers want it to be. For example, it was not that long ago that a lot of our customers told us that it took them 60 to 90 days to get a new server into production once the need was identified and the acquisition was approved.
Two or three years ago, our customers began to tell us that they had improved their processes and could now get a new server into production in a week or two. A lot of IT organizations that we talk to and work with currently tell us that their business managers know that they can go to a company such as Rackspace and get computing resources turned up in a matter of minutes. We have also been told many times by our clients that in situations where they have not been able to demonstrate similar agility, that their company’s business managers acquire services directly to some third-party provider bypassing the IT organization.
The obvious rational response to this is for IT organizations to implement server virtualization. The good news is that the vast majority of IT organizations have already done this. The bad news is that server virtualization unto itself doesn’t solve the whole problem and in fact, it creates a new category of really difficult problems because it violates a number of fundamental assumptions on which networks have been built for the last 20 years. One of the many networking assumptions that server virtualization violates is that a server has a single identity. That means one MAC address, one IP address and one and only one world wide name. Another key assumption that server virtualization violates is the assumption that the network segmentation that is required for regulatory, security or political reasons is accomplished through the provisioning of physical hardware.
On Tuesday, April 27 from 2:45 to 5 pm Jim is moderating a deep-dive panel at Interop entitled “Why Networking Must Fundamentally Change.” There will be two groups of vendors on the panel. One is network centric and the other is network management centric. The network centric panelists come from Juniper, HP, Cisco, Arista, Dell and LSI. The session will begin with these panelists identifying the factors that are driving networks to fundamentally change and their suggested changes. There will be lots of time for questions from the audience. If you will be at Interop, you really should attend this session.
