It’s interesting that you mention Cisco, but don’t mention that cloud computing providers like Joyent are already taking of advantage of F5’s solutions to build a strong cloud computing infrastructure (Joyent’s Technical Specifications calls out F5’s BIG-IP).

Flexibility, scalability, and operational efficiency of both the infrastructure and the applications that it will deliver are paramount for helping cloud computing providers achieve their goals, which is why folks like Joyent are relying on F5 to build out their cloud computing infrastructure.

Cheers, Lori

The other question is, who will the big performance analytics players be in the cloud? How do you “blame the cloud” if you have only a virtual (limited) view of its infrastructure?

My view is that you should really be able to use whatever option you want, whether it be a solution by a single cloud provider or by chaining other providers’ offerings together (hardware, computing, storage, or the like).

I’m sure the networking professionals and vendors will be earning their pay as Cloud Computing makes us burn through IP addresses exponentially and all vendors will be looking to figure out the next y2k with IPs. IPv6 will help for a long while but then what? Another subject altogether.

I enjoyed the read. Thanks!

-Michael

Same old tech adage: Innovate or be left behind.

Thanks, Sinclair!

Best. alain http://www.mor.ph

At Vyatta, we see many of our customers wrestling with the issues surrounding these new deployment models. Many of them are engaging with Vyatta precisely because we aren’t bound to the old an-appliance-is-a-physical-box model and can accommodate the new requirements easily.

That said, the folks that say that cloud computing is overhyped are also right. While there is no doubt that cloud computing will gain over time, this is not going to be a 1-year transition of the market. This is a long-term trend and even then there are going to be plenty of reasons to “go physical, not virtual” for a long time.

At least a Vyatta, the thing we’re most excited about is the opportunity to address both models. Customers can choose which is preferable for them, sometimes on an application-by-application basis, and Vyatta can deliver a solution that with consistent features across multiple deployment models.

Having spent a decade building networking gear before starting 3tera, IMHO networking vendors face more than an economic shift in selling to cloud operators. Cloud computing will have very different requirements than traditional customers. Cloud is about scale and homogeneous resources, while traditional data center purchasing decisions have been based more on features. Thus cloud computing favors large, high performance, switches with relatively few features. Force 10 has been at the forefront of pushing both port density and performance, so Joyent’s choice of Force 10 over their far larger competitors exemplifies exactly what you’re writing about.

Virtualization changed the velocity the servers could be rolled out, moving provisioning from a physical task to a configuration task. As such the speed of the change was cut significantly, ‘months to minutes’ was one slogan I remember.

Clouds will be the evolution of this virtualization- virtualizing not only the devices but their location, and potentially even the presentation layer so I can achieve the Nirvana-esque goal of Any Content/Application on Any Device, Any Where.

There are some types of devices and functions that don’t virtualize very well yet- those being ones that require something ’special’ in hardware. Like SSL Offload processors or IPSEC VPN termination, Deep Packet Inspection, etc. x86s are always getting faster and sure we can throw cycles at these workloads but if specific processor types perform the job more efficiently because they are purpose-built for it then I would go with the efficient choice.

dg

@BR: I tend to agree that Netscreen and others ate Checkpoint’s lunch when they failed to adapt their pricing strategy, which ultimately led them to license many of their products to others. But now that the software/hardware pendulum is swinging back (in on-demand platforms, at least,) that slowness may be an advantage for companies that resisted the move towards equipment.

@Jason: You’d know better than I. I’m lumping “pure” clouds like yours and “cloud on cloud” environments like Heroku here because in neither case does the cloud buyer have to provision, say, a load-balancer. And while folks like Cisco have definitely honed their carrier sales skills, I think we’ll see less sale of specialized networking equipment to enterprises in the coming years, particularly in the small- and mid-tier markets.

All of the big networking companies have midrange products, but IMHO we’ll see Cisco selling Linksys at the low end, and a Nexus at the high end, and less in the middle.

As for Force10, that’s sort of my point — Joyent can make a technology, rather than marketshare or support, decision because it’s in the business of operations. Most enterprises go with what’s safe/known/predictable. So an incumbent vendor has more to compete against when selling into a cloud. I would argue that most enterprises aren’t evaluating their networking equipment based on “ease of programmability.”

@Aaron: I think the clouds will buy programmability (as Jason of Joyent pointed out above,) which is generally a higher-end feature (your Netgear isn’t that tweakable ;-))

But in general, I think the future of new entrants in cloud computing is specialization — clouds just for HIPPA, or PCI; clouds just for a certain geography or legislation; clouds just for specific app stacks (like Engineyard for Rails); Clouds with a specific pricing model (per-transaction, per-month, per-seat); and clouds with APIs to back-end verticals (travel, auction, media delivery, etc.) Probably something for another post.

The simplicity of owning a 16-32GB usb stick to move files around cannot be ignored.