Broadband Developments

There is a great post going on over at F5 devcentral by Lori MacVittie.  She calls it  How VM sprawl will drive the urgency of the network evolution.

The bottom line is the the network infrastructure is capable of being smarter.  The opportunity (for companies) is to create or enable the “Dynamic Enterprise.”.   Like Web 2.0 did for web sites and web apps, Infrastructure 2.0 will do for networks - addressable, discovery, intelligence, and policy will be at the center of the Infrastructure 2.0 equation.  The network needs to be smarter and automated to new functionality and benefits.

Lori writes:  “VM sprawl is predicted to be one of the outcomes of early adoption and excitement over virtualization. Just as IT struggled to manage the explosion of PCs and servers across the enterprise, it is predicted that now it will need to find a way to manage the explosion of virtual machines as they pop up all over the enterprise with surprising alacrity.

Part of the difficulty in managing new technology is the rogue deployment of X. Whether that’s physical or virtual servers is irrelevant, the challenges associated with managing what are essentially unmanaged applications and servers deployed outside normal organizational processes are the same.

One of the reasons these rogue deployments are so difficult to manage is that they are, effectively, invisible to the management systems and IT staff tasked with controlling them. They simply come into existence in what appears to be a whim, taking over network resources such as IP addresses and ports. This spontaneous existence is problematic, because those network resources may be needed for other, business critical uses.”