Networking

In last week's Plexxi Pulse, I referenced a blog post by W.R. Koss - Scale Out Networking and Solving Big Problems Matter. Commenting on the network's ability to scale to meet the higher utilization of today's compute resources, Koss writes:

". . . I believe some smart people will find a way to put this amount of capacity into the network and the practices of the past will not be the practices of the future. If you like solving big problems, I just described your then and there career endeavor. I would as well state that this type of network capacity growth changes the fundamentals of how networks are built - hence it could usher in a new set of leaders for networking."

The network

While Koss is pointing to one specific aspect of the network, I think he as well speaks to a more fundamental issue.

The current networking model was not built for today's data center - and is the primary cause of many problems in these environments today. If ever a innovation segment needed some glass breaking, networking is it. As server and storage technologies have transformed themselves, networking has stood for all that. The networking technologies we depend on today solved some very important problems - just not today's problems. In our effort to retrofit them for today, we've made them overly complex and inefficient. And they remain ill-equipped to meet the current and future needs of the data center and cloud computing.