Greg Ness

A recent and rather ambitious outlook on Cisco at Motley Fool entitled “Cisco and the Golden Age of the Internet“ talks about the rise in internet traffic and the growth potential it holds for companies like Cisco.  While the article does mention competitive pressures (from the likes of IBM, HP, DELL and JNPR), it underestimates the impact of disruptive technologies on the burgeoning networking equipment space. The network has finally become recognized for its importance in the post-PC era, as analysts and executives have come to grips with the impact of the hyper growth in IP addresses, streaming content, and the growing penetration of internet connectivity into broader arrays of once standalone devices and appliances. Networks are larger and more complex today than they were perhaps ever intended to be, when Dan Lynch and other networking pioneers were creating ea... (more)

HP Takes a Shot at the Hardware-Centric Network

HP is positioning itself to do the same thing to the network (hardware) industry as VMware did to the server (hardware) industry. The idea of an automated network capable of responding to the demands of cloud has taken a step forward with HP’s OpenFlow announcement.  Time will tell how serious HP ultimately is about SDN, [...] ... (more)

Amazon and the Enterprise IT Monoculture Myth

I didn’t know whether I should chuckle cynically or slow clap the recent hubris of an Amazon executive, quoted in InformationWeek, with a tech prediction set to be fulfilled in a mere ten years: Amazon: Era Of Data Centers Ending: "The era in which most big companies operate their own data centers is coming to a close. Instead they’ll turn, slowly but surely, to the cloud. That’s the bold prediction Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of product marketing, sales, and product management, made Thursday at Amazon’s Web Service Summit 2012 in New York." Selipsky is perhaps really just talkin... (more)

SDN May Drive a New Data Center Development Cycle

Commoditization of network hardware will increase data center power demands by enabling new levels of elasticity in IT infrastructure. This is a follow-on blog post on HP’s OpenFlow announcement (HP Takes a Shot at the Hardware-Centric Network) as it relates to the impact that OpenFlow and the subsequent commoditization of network hardware could have on overall [...] ... (more)

The Hybrid Cloud is the Future of IT Infrastructure

Last summer a CIO for a high profile ecommerce company told me that the smartest way to play the cloud was to rent the spike. I just read the same thing from Zynga’s Infrastructure CTO Allan Leinwand in Inside Zynga’s Big Move To Private Cloud by InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock: “We own the base, rent the spike. We want a hybrid operation. We love knowing that shock absorber is there.” – Allan Leinwand In 2008 when we formed the Infrastructure 2.0 working group, many of the most influential voices were trumpeting a new (8th) layer in the OSI stack as a solution to the critical ... (more)