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 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)
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)
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)
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)