Changing IT Demands on Network Infrastructure

What seems to have happened in the past six months or so is that I moved from pontificating on cloud computing and the changing role of the network to as a matter of fact executing on it a good bit The good news is that IT infrastructure spending is back on the table, people are rolling out networks, servers, and storage to support their business growth The bad news, for some people, is that in an increasing number of these engagements the 'care abouts' are changing.

Our jobs as systems engineers, network architects, or CTOs in the infrastructure world used to be easier than it is today. To evaluate a network vendor we would look at some of the following criteria:

In short, the world is changing a bit. The cutting edge clients are applying pressure to networking vendors to create new classes of capability, more operational focus, and a generation of products not just defined by speeds and feeds, now by the capability to be managed, by a machine.

Douglas Gourlay is the vice president of marketing at Arista Networks - the leading developer of 10Gb Ethernet switching platforms. In this role Gourlay is responsible for the global marketing and product management for Arista. Arista has recently won the ClearChoice award by NetworkWorld for top 10Gb Ethernet data center switch, and Best of Interop: Infrastructure and overall Best of Interop for the Arista 7500.

Prior to joining Arista Networks Gourlay was the vice president of Cisco's Data Center Solutions Group, where he defined and executed Cisco's global marketing strategy for data center, virtualization, and cloud computing.  This included the Nexus and Catalyst data center switches, application and server load-balancing, storage networking, blade switching, and wide-area application services product families. Pursuant to this agreement his leadership Cisco's data center segment grew from a nascent business to over $5B in annual revenue.

Since 1998 Gourlay has led and contributed to numerous hardware, software, and systems architecture developments across Cisco. He has served as senior director of product management for the Nexus Family of data center switches, director of product management for the Catalyst 6500 Series of LAN switches, and led product management for Cisco's Application Delivery product family. Gourlay has filed or holds more than 20 patents in networking technologies.