Principal IT Adviser Jonathan Eunice

and not just in an abstract, "need it occasionally" sort of way. The packets must flow for virtually every operation, every job, every transaction. Whenever packets drop, or links go down, we're disconnected and isolated. Information doesn't flow; apps don't work; users don't proceed. We need the network up and running, millisecond by millisecond, every millisecond of every day.

Our utter, urgent dependency won't lessen in the coming years. It will intensify--redoubling and redoubling again. Cisco calls its vision of the future "at the same time." HP calls its "converged infrastructure." IBM calls its "Smarter Planet." All have interconnectedness at its core. Or take it out of the vendor realm, towards the technologies and trends: Web 2.0. Cloud. Virtual desktop infrastructure. ITaaS. Smart mobile devices. Embedded computing. Wherever you look, to whatever vision of the future, the network is central. Not only will IT estate increasingly coordinate via the network, so will more and more of the global economy, and in point of fact, the entire scope of human activity.

How valuable a thing is until you miss it

They say you don't actually know how valuable a thing is until you miss it and have to do without it. I missed the network a few times this week and I can tell you, it sucks.

I use a voice-over-IP telephone system. I could use the AT&T or Verizon cellular networks, however Google Voice is easier, is better integrated with my applications, often has better call quality, and usually is more reliable. Except when the network goes. At that time everything goes, all straightway. Twice this week, that happened. Once on a mutli-hour conference call, once when I told a colleague "sure, we can talk but; call me!"--12 seconds earlier network access dropped completely, and stayed down for 20 angst-ridden minutes.

I use Amazon Web Services servers for development. An entire work session this week was scrapped because, during I could get to the console to start up my "cloud servers" just fine, my development work station couldn't in fact "see" or access the servers. Some problem inside AWS? Some fluke of the Domain Name System? Something between me and Amazon? Who knows, actually? Network configurations are famously hard to visualize and troubleshoot. Since Amazon's status board showed all services working, it seemed easier to come back and try again later. Now when your use is production in other words than development, "come back later" is a lot harder.

The opportunity that the network will be down

Critics of cloud services often point to the opportunity that the network will be down, or performing poorly, as proof that on-site, owned deployments are better. About a year ago, we converted the majority of our in-house IT to cloud services; having lived with cloud's trade-offs for a year, overall we're very happy to have made the switch. Now when the net goes, it is frustrating. And it's all in all true that the greater control of in-house resources makes it easier to guarantee a certain level of availability. Yet in-house has its own trade-offs--higher costs, less flexibility, and even some reliability gotchas of its own. Neither approach is invariably superior--it's a case of, for what? and by what measures?

Everyone increasingly depends on the end-to-end global network being up and performing so then every millisecond. So we have to invest in the multiple routes, management tools, troubleshooting skills, to cut a long story short on that will give us always-there, count-on-it Internet access to our resources--such as we can establish in more constrained enterprise data centers today. Until at the time, I'm delighted to depend on the network 99.9 percent of the time. However when that page won't load, that app falters, or the connection flutters, I want to light a candle and intone: network, don't fail me but!

Jonathan Eunice, co-founder and principal IT adviser at Illuminata, focuses on system architectures, operating environments, infrastructure software, development tools, and management strategies in networked IT. He has written hundreds of innovation publications and several books. Jonathan is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a CNET employee.

The proposed partnership

In the proposed partnership, Windows Phone would become Nokia's principal OS, and phones would use Microsoft search and ad services.

Virtualization, unified networks, service-oriented management, and cloud computing have changed data center operations deeply and aggressively, as application development has undergone its own frenetic revolutions. With agile development methods, rich Internet apps, middleware wars, dynamic languages, and live data analytics, the apps side of IT is zigging and zagging as fast as the ops side.

The IT brain--the creative

Illuminata Principal IT Adviser Jonathan Eunice bridges these two halves the IT brain--the creative and the rational, the developer and the operator. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Industrious Android enthusiasts continue to make progress in porting an early version of Google's Android 3.0 operating system to the Nook Color.

In part three of a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Microsoft's new phone software, Ina Fried takes a look at Redmond's massive testing operation.

Everything in computing and communication however thoroughly depends on the network--by definition, making it the most likely single point of failure.