Broadband Developments

Greg Ness wrote a post over at Seeking Alpha on Infrastructure 2.0 or Dynamic Enterprise.

Over the last three decades the network has grown to a point of exhaustion for many enterprises, with critical projects being slowed by the demands of manual IT labor, from core network services like DNS/DHCP and IPAM (IP address management) to the new dynamic processing power potentials unleashed by virtualization and cloud computing. A report last fall by Computerworld showed large enterprises already experiencing diseconomies of scale (rising per unit IP address management costs as IP addresses are added), before even more endpoint and system movement and change is enabled by new initiatives designed to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

When you combine rising (manual labor) costs on a per IP address basis with the ongoing expansion of the network (more IP addresses) within the context of a global recession you have the makings of a wake up call for vendors and CIOs: a wake up call driven by rising operations expenses, increasing outages and fixed or even declining budgets as networks become more operationally significant.

Those who embrace the power of automation will crowd out those who fail to see the implications of new demands.

As the Infrastructure 2.0 meme spreads, there are four companies that are destined to lead: Cisco, F5 Networks, Microsoft (MSFT) and Infoblox (my employer). Within a couple weeks Cisco and Infoblox will share a stage at the San Jose Fairmont to talk about the biggest revolution in networking since TCP/IP. In a few months Cisco, F5 and Infoblox will address FIRE attendees on the dynamic infrastructure revolution. I mention Microsoft because it is the leader in endpoint operating systems and has been very vocal about its virtualization and cloud solutions.

Dynamic infrastructure will unleash new potentials in the network, from connectivity intelligence (dynamic links and reporting between networks, endpoints and applications) to the rise of IT automation on a scale that few have anticipated. It will unleash new consolidation potentials for virtualized data centers and various forms of cloud computing. It will enable networks to ultimately keep up with increasing change velocities and complexity without a concomitant rise in network management expenses and manual labor risks.

Further down the road there will be even more capabilities emerging from Infrastructure 2.0 as virtualization and cloud payoffs put more pressure on brittle Infrastructure 1.0 networks.

As networking vendors fight against stable or even declining enterprise IT budgets the automation of otherwise mundane, manual tasks that are driving up the expense of the network will stand out as the critical chasm between extinction and ongoing growth. The larger the payoff promised by dynamic systems and endpoints the greater the pressure on static networks managed by kludge and CIO shell games.

For static network hardware vendors, enterprises will simply stop upgrading their networks at their former pace because they won’t have the operations budgets to properly administer the new gear. And those CIO buyers will be squeezed by increasingly eroding business cases for their strategic network projects as peer companies continue to evolve and exploit the power of new initiatives. They will experience new initiative diseconomies as they throw more bodies at more changes and outages.

This “dynamic or dead” scenario will start with core network service automation, as Oltsik predicted and will enable breakthroughs in other areas, including IF-MAP and Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA ala Cisco) and Data Center 3.0. This is just the beginning.