When I talk to network experts, they're often keen to remind me (probably because my own life revolves around the data center) that network is network and the data center is the data center. However, maybe it's not that black and white. I'm listening to Craig Partridge at HP Discover. Craig runs the platform consulting business, but was discussing the strategic direction of enterprise networking. Now this is an important topic. Why? Because Cloud, mobility, and Big Data are introducing unprecedented impacts and pace of change. In the midst of these changes, the network is finally emerging as the key enabler. But as “everything IT” becomes connected, how capable is any given enterprise's network to accommodate the weighty responsibility it now has, or will soon have?
The key question is: How will enterprises shift from connecting the dots to providing a truly flexible connectivity fabric that understands and enables new business imperatives? There needs to be an actionable approach for aligning network strategy to embrace new challenges as they arise.
Today's network is typically underutilized and overly dependent on the human interface, whereas compute and storage aren't so dependent, and are able to provision at speed. If anything the network is a roadblock to speedier provisioning while unable to meet the needs of dynamic service delivery. Also, networks are designed for predictable demand and configuration requirements, and somewhat oblivious to the application. They're just forwarding packets in the best way they can. So the network finds itself at an inflection point for the future, for the modern computing era.
The future enterprise network's functional virtualization will virtualize the physical network appliances and elements, and software-defined networking will allow the network to be orchestrated directly by the application. Competition is often the driver of innovation. (HP's own IT shop runs on an open ecosystem and open standards.) As the innovation cycle moves more rapidly, tomorrow's network will be the key enabler in the infrastructure trinity of network, storage and compute. If you like, this is business-aligned connectivity, where the uber-influences of Big Data, mobility and Cloud are interconnected, probably in a wireless setting that unifies wired and wireless network policies, yet allows for the policy to get more granular in terms of access. With a unified policy, monitoring of devices becomes simpler in looking for anomalies, and aspects of mobile device management can be adopted within the wider network. Craig talked about the strategy of adopting open standards; allowing programmatic access to infrastructure; and architecting networks as software-defined, allowing applications to directly control the network via an API model.
Interesting stuff, and perhaps not so much the internet of things as the interconnect of things.
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