Predicting What Will Be Big in 2012 – Part 2

2nd March 2012 by Greg Ferro

Following from my predictions on what WILL NOT be big in 2012 and then [Predicting What Will Be Big in 2012 – Part 1](http://etherealmind.com/?p=6168) here is Part 2 of my predictions for 2012.

Hard Skills, Cloud Operations and Software Defined Networking

The “Cloud” that’s is much discussed is really the awaited arrival of Network Management. Although Network Management has been sold since the mid-nineties, none of it actually worked all that well and we still configure network with the CLI for everything. Really, we should be using the CLI for some things and server based tools for others.

The technology of the Cloud remains exactly the same as what we already use but running large numbers of the IT systems at scale and keeping operating costs low means that all companies must develop a new and unique focus on IT operations. What is possible in smaller IT operations is the hand crafting of operations. Short sighted and short term management of corporate IT operations have led to the view that we should always do it manually since it’s too hard to automate, computer operations. What must happen now is that Network Management must provide new ways of reducing the make-work of operations.

In a real sense, the buzz around OpenFlow is really a recognition that automation and software is the future of lowering the cost of operating our networks, and improving reliability by developing repeatable processes for common configuration tasks. We shouldn’t be manually configuring switch ports after twenty years of product development.

Make-Work moving into Good Work

Today, we perform a lot of tasks that aren’t truly valuable. Adding VLANs, configuring switch ports, configuring firewall rules are all repetitive tasks that could be better performed with our own technology. Instead of “make-work” we should be looking for ways to completely automate many tasks and move to performing “good work”.

For firewalls, you should consider operational platforms like Cisco Security Manager to automate firewall MAC[1], and look Juniper Junos automation tools for router configuration. Even Cisco has a number of XML based configuration tools that don’t get serious attention (even though Cisco continues to promote the view that it is a software company)

If you are thinking longer term then it’s time to evaluate NETCONF as a standard for configuration and look for network configuration management tools that have a standard base. Although NETCONF might be superseded by OPENFLOW/SDN, it’s probably too big a change to get momentum in the next five years.

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Predicting What Will Be Big in 2012 – Part 1

26th February 2012 by Greg Ferro

What is big next year ?

Following from my predictions on what WILL NOT be big in 2012, finally, my predictions for 2012. Not early, but hey, the future never arrives on time anyway.

Data Centres

Although it’s called “cloud” most of the time, Data Centres have been mostly ignored for the last decade and most companies have truly obsolete infrastructure in place – all the way from power units, air conditioners, networks and servers, it’s all designed like Year 2000.

Using ten-year old switch infrastructure like the Cisco Catalyst 6500, obsolete load balancers 1 and manual device configuration isn’t going to carry the new systems requirements in the next decade. Even the introduction of blade servers was a hardware optimisation at best, and a vendor lock in at worst. All those custom backplanes don’t look so great when you want those new SSD storage caching cards in your servers

The virtualization push for operating systems is kicking Microsoft’s butt as the OS is no longer infrastructure, it’s an application that runs on the virtualization server. And the current networks no longer have enough performance to handle increased server density that this creates.

This is a universal truth for all data centres: last year your company has X servers, this year, virtualization means you can have X times two using more or less the same servers as last years. Networks and storage doubles but that not the server team’s problem.

Of course, the last decades under investment is this decades boom category. Virtualization drives just about everything now and is led by VMware, but that boom happened last year is now is in the mature phase. This year, VMware will do just fine, but will have less impact since it has competition from Microsoft, Citrix and some of the open source hypervisors. Importantly, EMC is tightening control over VMware and this will cause many customers to second source their virtualisation. EMC is not a supplier with a good reputation for sharing and caring about their customers, their shareholders matter much more (and all that means for customers).

To add a twist to this, you would think that building big data centres is new – it’s isn’t. The difference about some of the biggest data centres companies like Google and Yahoo can make cheap marketing and technical review out of talking about their data centres but secrecy and obscurity about data centres remains a vital part of the security for many companies.

Sometimes it seems like data centres were never invented until 2010.

Network Year after a Decade of Waiting

This year, the really big networking thing (out of many) is 10Gb Ethernet. Some companies, notably Arista, have claimed that the last two years are the year of 10GbE and probably are claiming it again this year — surprise. The is primarily driven by virtualization which is driving new server hardware that can handle more than a gigabit of bandwidth . High density servers, either as chassis like Cisco UCS or HP C-Class, or as bigger fixed format units like Dell’s PowerEdge 7xx/8xx/9xx means less physical servers which means less switches. The three tier or two tier data centre is finished and it’s now about flatter Ethernet networks with a new class of performance in low latency, greater throughput and more reliability.

The final phase will be the arrival of 10GBaseT “LAN on Motherboard” chipsets that will herald the dumb arrival of Cat6 copper cabling. Really, people, it’s time to give up on copper cabling – but the time you have and replaced your Category 5, upgraded to Category 6 and tested it’s easier and better to run a fibre optic cable, even a patch lead would be cheaper.

A secondary, but likely much larger market is Service Providers who will upgrade their backbone and distribution networks to use 10GbE to handle wireless and wired Internet growth. Also note, that Ethernet will continue to be the only Layer 2 protocol in the whole world. ATM/Frame Relay will continue to quietly rot in carrier comms room and they will ignore upgrading it for another year. (So what about lousy customer service and slow performance, just run MPLS over it and no one will notice. )

Merchant Silicon Drives Network Configuration Management in 2012

After years of reducing actual R&D spending, most of the established networking vendors aren’t truly capable of developing new chips anymore. It’s not an innovation, it’s a celebration of short term financial planning. You can accept the gloss from the vendors “that’s it’s not good business” to develop chips, but really it’s a failure of investment in R&D for short term profits.

The static nature of the networking business of the past ten years means that reusing existing chipsets (with upgrades or tweaks) with slightly better software or rebadging products from other companies has been the way forward instead of innovative and ground breaking silicon. While Intel shrank CPU fab size down to 45nm or less, networking chipsets continued at 200nm or 120nm processes until the innovation cycle forced new designs.

Even Cisco’s much marketed Nexus silicon is apparently running years late on expected delivery and the features that aren’t that far ahead compared to the merchant silicon.

It takes years to design and build silicon chips and decades to build teams that can do it reliably. I wonder if network vendors took short term profits in the last few years and many of those design teams transferred to contract companies in India, Taiwan, China and Indonesia which led to the decline and delays in new products. These same companies were subsequently picked up as contractors by merchant silicon makers who have done much better with the same resources, and producing higher quality chips than Cisco, HP or Juniper. That’s certainly what it looks like.

The market transition driven by virtualization has caught most networking vendors by surprise. For “innovation”” they have turned to off the shelf solutions from Broadcom, Fulcrum/Intel and other silicon foundries to power their current generation products with their existing software platforms and using their marketing capability to resell these products to their existing customers. The merchant silicon is the name of the chip families that provide true Ethernet capability and the old vendors simply glue these chips to a motherboard. The networking business now looks like Intel in the server marketplace and this will grow dramatically this year.

Is this a good thing or bad ?

In the sense that networking companies have failed to innovate and allowed other companies to make the market in switching silicon is poor business practice. A vertically integrated is inherently stronger (as Apple can demonstrate) but since networking vendors have only software on which to differentiate their products, customers are finally seeing user focussed features arrive on their switches and routers. In the past, the CLI and remote management features were rushed out the door and “fixed later”.

Of course, vendors will put a positive spin on using merchant silicon. Claims that “it’s let them focus on core business”, “lower production costs are good for customers”, “why build when it’s already available”are quite specious in my view. It’s just marketing spin on a bad situation.

Since software is the only thing that Cisco, Juniper and HP can use to differentiate their products, I’m looking forward to better features. To see that process in action, go and research Arista Networks. The only value they can add to their products is their EOS software platform which focusses on cool network operations capabilities. And networking stuff.

And it’s the features for network management that matter mainly so that we can have better software tools to configure and manage the network configuration. This feeds directly into the “Cloud” proposition since the whole purpose of the Cloud is to automate operational tasks. Many have tried over the last ten years, but the software APIs that are in SNMP are not rich or capable of anything more than performance and availability monitoring.

The EtherealMind View

As a result, I expect network vendors to make a big deal about their software platforms this year. Expect to see lots of announcements on XML APIs, support for cloud platforms like OpenStack, tight integration with NETCONF/YANG for configuration management, and the final recognition that SNMP isn’t part of the future. You’ll see lots of announcements about network management and operations lifecycle tools.

Also look for vendors attempting to build proprietary systems (likely called platforms by marketing knobs) in an attempt to lock customers in and/or lock competitors out. Any new technology tends to closed systems before customers force it into the open.

Make sure you pay attention to the fact that Merchant Silicon could drive a new wave of proprietary software solutions. We don’t need that in 2012.

It’s surprising how many large companies still have Alteon (now Radware) load balancers from 2005 and earlier in the core of their networks. ↩

Predicting What Will Not Be Big in 2012

1st February 2012 by Greg Ferro

My Predictions for 2012

Lets be clear that, at a fundamental level, everything in the Networking Industry will be the same as last year. Ethernet frames will still look like Ethernet frames, even when FibreChannel is inside them, and IP Packets (thirty year old technology) will still have IPv4 headers, except very occasionally they will IPv6 headers (fifteen year old technology) but they will still be packets. And they will still get routed, load balanced and tunnelled using the same technologies from the last decade eg. MPLS, GRE, DWDM, etc etc.

Switches will switch, Routers will still route, Firewalls will still be hard to use and IT security will continue to fail everybody. The Internet will be more normal than it was this year.

BUT, like every year, there are things that won’t take off. No matter how hard vendors flog that dead horse, or how much it seems obvious to someone ( who probably has little to no practical experience as a network engineer …. like a journalist ) there are products that will not happen.

2012 IS STILL NOT the year of any of the following:

IPv6
Cloud
Videoconferencing ( for the eleventh year in a row)
Corporate IP Telephony
Carriers

NOT Cloud

2012 won’t be the year of the Cloud. The biggest pain point will be legal ownership and jurisdiction problems because, who owns your data ? Today, the US Government is taking rights to all data it can reach, or the cyber criminals are just taking it. These issues of ownership, security, reliability, portability etc etc are now blocking corporate adoption and that’s where the big money for clouds are.

The US Presidential campaign has politicians making excessive or silly statement about the Internet, apparently to gain funding and support from large corporate interests. This is causing serious concerns as to who owns your data – US courts seem readily willing to sequester data on inconsistent terms which leads to corporate uncertainty for cloud data hosting. And issues such as US domiciled companies becoming legally bound to supply data regardless of physical jurisdiction is likely to fragment and slow cloud adoption.

However. It’s the only thing that’s a bit different from last year so it will give us something to talk about. And companies who do cloud things continue to buy all the people who are outspoken and make lots of noise on social media, therefore lots of smoke about cloud and very little fire. The relatively small amounts of infrastructure cash spent on Clouds looks new because it’s different cash budget but not because it is new cash. All the new cash is being spent at Apple on iPhones and iPad’s.

Cloud is a long-term trend that will happen slowly and suffer a lot of setbacks due to immaturity and practical issues. The technology issues are just fine — well, once they can stabilise into a trusted resource or a recognisable service anyway. In the mean time, cloud companies need to do a lot of marketing and they will make a lot of noise because they have motivation to spend money on making that noise.

Sing along, won’t you ?

Not IPv6

IPv6 will happen in China, Pacific Rim and East Asia. It won’t happen anywhere else because there are enough IPv4 addresses around that companies will use the current downturn/recession as an excuse to do nothing.

At the same time, engineers will continue to find holes in vendors software and this wil undermine confidence that IPv6 is “ready”.

Note also that the use of IPv6 MPLS tunnels over IPv4 networks will also relieve the pressure to upgrade. Some companies will finally put their MPLS tunnelling networks to good use for the first time.

Not Videoconferencing ( for the eleventh year in a row)

It’s an absolute certainty that many pundits, and Cisco, will proclaim that 2012 is the year of videoconferencing once again. I know this because this has been claimed every year since 2001 when the first videoconferencing units arrived. A decade later and still no one really cares. Oh sure, there are plenty of specialist use cases where a few units will be used for this or that but face to face video is still years away from adoption.

Perhaps the clearest indicator of the market not caring is FaceTime on the iPhone – if users, as a whole, large group, wanted to use videoconferencing then FaceTime would be the canary in that coal mine. The lack of interest in FaceTime, or any other variants Skype/Android etc, is clear evidence that no one really cares. And calling Grandma so they can see the Grandkids doesn’t count.

And also, that bandwidth caps on mobile phones and lack of bandwidth generally is the greatest limitation that video must overcome. That’s five to ten years away.

Not Corporate IP Telephony

The year of the IP telephony was back in 2005 or 2006. Today it’s all about mobile phones and the idea of a corporate PBX is quaint and old-fashioned. Now that most countries have phone plans that mean voice calls are effectively free (notably, not the United States), companies are not bothering with desk phones for many job roles. They are still popular with desk bound tasks such as accounting, call centres, and operational roles but for most roles that move it’s all about mobile phones. The breakdown of the modern workplace for home working, mobile working etc means that IP telephony is just a tick box in lowering costs and no longer a competitive advantage.

Note: A call centre is a niche use case for telephones. Don’t whine that call centres are serious money blah blah because they are not. Any company that can avoid spending money on call centres in any form will do that because it is an unprofitable and resource intensive business that unpredictable and low barrier to competition – Google, Amazon, Facebook don’t have any for good reasons……

Carriers

Carriers are likely to continue to be hated all over the world as they continue to extort money from their captive customers. While carriers spend their time fooling around with value added services such as mobile TV, streaming video, app stores, music stores and other “customer led market inflections” they aren’t focussing on delivering more bandwidth which is what customers really want.

Why ? Because it’s much more fun to pretend that shiny toys might turn into a revenue stream and pretend to be one of the cool kids. Somehow, everyone forgets that carriers only make money from bandwidth. That’s the ONLY thing that carriers should be focussing on. Everything else is a waste of management time and shareholders cash.

That won’t change this year because bandwidth is not sexy. But really, carriers should be making more bandwidth to make more money. And doing nothing else.

The EtherealMind View

So these are the things that I think will NOT be big this year. I’ll be back in a few days for what I think will be big in 2012.