Post-CloudConnect thoughts: I want a new scale
As I sit here in the lobby of the Hyatt after attending CloudConnect this week and even speaking a bit I was listing to The Shins song 'New Slang' from the Garden State soundtrack [a good one btw, especially if you want to chill out,...
Will OpenFlow Solve the Financial Crisis?
According to some vendors, analysts, pundits and sponsored spokespeople, OpenFlow and SDNs in general are the second coming. According to the same crowd, their attributes include: Lowering network costs by orders of magnitude...
Why FCoE is Dead, But Not Buried Yet
Have you ever watched one of those spy films where someone gets fatally poisoned, but it hasn't hit them yet and they are acting like its any other day and not the last days of their life and you just want to tell them that they...
Can you build profitable public clouds out of enterprise tech?
If I were to play buzzword bingo today I'd really like to have the words Cloud, Fabric, OpenFlow, API, and Stack lined up - I would be sure to win in any vendor briefing in the first 42 seconds of the meeting. Let's face it, even if...
Minimum, Nominal, Average, or Max...
Recently I was interacting with some data center designers and architects and some other vendors when the topic of power draw came up. This is always a fun one, and an area where a lot of 'specsmanship' is being played nowadays as...
Changing IT Demands on Network Infrastructure
Last week I received an email from Julie Bort, editor of this site, asking me a very simple question, "Where have you been? Are you going to write again soon???"A good question! It made me pause and reflect for a second, where have...
The Riddles and Numbers In Networking
Just when I thought I had seen it all in the world of marketing math I recently witnessed another new low... Scary thought isn't it - I mean in the world of mis-representing the performance capabilities of a product the networking...
A bet on BBCs and VM Mobility
Last week a friend from work bet me I couldn't write an intelligible blog about 'BBCs.' As usual, without thinking too much, I took the bet. So a BBC- British Broadcasting Corporation? Nah, hard to write about customers and you...
Innovations - something I love in networking...
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...
Why Data Centers Must Fundamentally Change -- Part 2.2
The second change that is creating disruption in the data center is a result of how we solved for the space, cooling, and power issues highlighted in my previous post. The industry created denser servers, denser storage, and denser...
Why Data Centers Must Fundamentally Change -- Part 2.1
I started writing this section, and when John Peach from the UK commented to me, "Doug, this isn't a blog, it is a dissertation" I felt I needed to shorten it a bit to make it more consumer-friendly. Well, I didn't want to shorten...
Why Data Center Networks Must Fundamentally Change
At Interop I was on a panel hosted by the inimitable Jim Metzler titled, "Why Networks Must Fundamentally Change." Now, just judging the attendance alone I must say that there certainly seemed to be enough interest in this topic to...
Vendor Math
Math is a word that should never need any qualifiers, however, in our industry I have heard of Cabletron Math, Cisco Math, Vendor Math, etc. If the qualifier is needed it is because something is wrong. Math is an absolute.I don't...
Implications of Virtualization and Cloud
I am sitting here in my green chair at home listening to 'Desperado' by the Eagles and reading my friend Greg Ness' recent piece on Infrastructure 2.0. I've done a few panel discussions with Greg in the past, including a really fun...
Virtualization's Impact on Networks
I've often postulated that virtualization would require the network to change, dramatically. There are two main vectors to this argument, one technical, one business. Given I haven't done a decent Jimmy Ray Purser-esque technical...
Brad Reese, PR's Worst Nightmare
Let's face it, Brad is a controversial guy. Brad loves looking for the smoking gun, and if he found his true calling as a blogger a few years earlier than he did he would have been a founder of the Drudge Report.PR teams really...
Hello World, and Random Career Thoughts
I've had a lot of people ask me a lot of questions lately, and I am not certain by any means that I am the best source of advice, especially when it comes to careers- but for some reason many people ask me about theirs and what they...
