Both Steve and Jim have spent decades focused on networking. That being said, we recognize that the typical business manager doesn’t really care about Ethernet or MPLS or de-duplication. What they care about is a handful of applications that they use to run their business. That is why we write so often about application delivery in general and how the WAN impacts application delivery in particular. With that in mind, we are going to use this newsletter to identify some of the new changes that are impacting an IT organization’s ability to ensure acceptable application delivery over a WAN. We are also going to point out that we believe that how we talk about application delivery needs to fundamentally change.
Both Steve and Jim have spent decades focused on networking. That being said, we recognize that the typical business manager doesn’t really care about Ethernet or MPLS or de-duplication. What they care about is a handful of applications that they use to run their business. That is why we write so often about application delivery in general and how the WAN impacts application delivery in particular. With that in mind, we are going to use this newsletter to identify some of the new changes that are impacting an IT organization’s ability to ensure acceptable application delivery over a WAN. We are also going to point out that we believe that how we talk about application delivery needs to fundamentally change.
Jim just authored the 2010 edition of the Application Delivery Handbook.
This is the fourth edition of the handbook. However, it feels like the first edition. That is because although some of the application delivery challenges that IT organizations have experienced for years (such as optimizing how TCP performs over a WAN) are still important challenges today, IT organizations are facing a new generation of challenges. For example, some of the traditional application delivery challenges have morphed. Surprisingly, ensuring acceptable VoIP quality over the WAN is still a very important challenge today. That challenge, however, has morphed into the broader challenge of ensuring the quality of other real time applications such as video and telepresence.
Another traditional challenge that has morphed is security. It was not that long ago that hackers were lone individuals with deep personality issues. A classic example of that persona is Kevin Mitnick. Jim used to be responsible for DEC’s data network and Mitnick hacked DEC in a major way. As a result, Jim still refers to Mitnick using a 12 letter word for what Oedipus was. That being said, we have seen the introduction of a new generation of cyber hackers. In addition to the Mitnicks of the world, we now have organized crime and rogue nations. We have some tools to fight off this new wave of hackers, but it is less of a slam dunk than optimizing TCP and ensuring VoIP quality.
Then we come to virtualization and cloud computing. As the handbook points out in detail, these two trends exacerbate some of the traditional challenges for which we have solutions, and also create a new generation of really difficult technical challenges for which we have few, if any, solutions. One new technical challenge is the need to support the movement of virtual machines between servers in disparate data centers. Some of these new challenges, however, have more to do with organizational politics than with technology. A good example is the fight over who manages the vSwitch that sits inside a virtual server. Is it the sever organization or is it the network organization? More detail on the challenges associated with virtualization and cloud computing can be found in the 2010 Application Delivery Handbook.
So, given the new generation of challenges facing IT organizations we can clearly make the point that we are starting over again with application delivery. On the other hand we believe that we have reached a point where the phrase application delivery is beginning to lose its meaning. As we will explain in our next newsletter, although application delivery is still a critical concept, we need to evolve our thinking to focus less on application delivery and more on service delivery.
