Whenever I stop to reflect on the last year’s events, I’m struck by the ground we covered, by the little evolutions and revolutions that propelled our industry forward into another year. It’s time to take a look at 2009.
Whenever I stop to reflect on the last year’s events, I’m struck by the ground we covered, by the little evolutions and revolutions that propelled our industry forward into another year. It’s time to take a look at 2009.
At the end of 2008, two things were clear. Networking vendors were going to have to jump on the data center networking trend, and they were going to have to do so in a hostile economic environment.
Nortel couldn’t hang on. It tried. In November 2008, the company was still talking about getting through the dark time with a reorganization and possibly spinning off a business unit or two. Perhaps that was just talk, or just wishful thinking. In January, Nortel filed for bankruptcy, and we spent much of 2009 sadly watching the death spasms of one of the biggest names in networking. In the end, pieces of Nortel were in the hands of Ericsson, Avaya and Ciena.
Other vendors stayed afloat. Many vendors lined up for government assistance in the form of economic stimulus funds for broadband. One big name in networking got “assistance” in the form of acquisition.
Cisco attempted to actually expand its position during the economic turmoil, which is not unusual for the company. But you have to wonder if it went too far this time. When it unveiled its Unified Computing System and its blade servers, Cisco went toe to toe with the biggest brands in the computer industry – on their home turf.
One thing we will have to watch this year is the scalability of the Internet. Is it hitting up against certain limits? There were some inklings of that this year, as we discovered that video and online gaming were burning massive amounts of Internet bandwidth.
Speaking of bandwidth, is it safe to talk about Terabit Ethernet yet? Or should we do 400G Ethernet first? And is gigabit wireless technology coming in 2010?
10 Gigabit Ethernet continued to make its way down into computers of all sizes, with the introduction of 10GBase-T in LAN-on-motherboard technology, and the acceptance of 10G Ethernet in general had ramifications for the way networks are built.
In short, it was a pretty interesting year for network architecture, and the changes we saw are bound to make 2010 a very interesting year as well. Have a great holiday, and we’ll see you next year.
