Reaction: Networking Vendors are Only Good for the Free Lunch
I ran into an article over at the Register this week which painted the entire networking industry, from vendors to standards bodies, with a rather broad brush. While there are true bits and pieces in the piece, some balance seems to be in order. The article recaps a presentation by Peyton Koran at Electronic Arts (I suspect the Register spiced things up a little for effect); the line of argument seems to run something like this—
- Vendors are only paying attention to larger customers, and/or a large group of customers asking for the same thing; if you are not in either group, then you get no service from any vendor
- Vendors further bake secret sauce into their hardware, making it impossible to get what you want from your network without buying from them
- Standards bodies are too slow, and hence useless
- People are working around this, and getting to the inter-operable networks they really want, by moving to the cloud
- There is another way: just treat your networking gear like servers, and write your own protocols—after all you probably already have programmers on staff who know how to do this
Let’s think about these a little more deeply.
Vendors only Continue reading
The updated platform can infer business goals with no input from the user.
Financial benefits of network virtualization tied to OpEx savings ahead of CapEx.
Comcast Business recently launched an SD-WAN offering for distributed enterprises based on its new, virtualized ActiveCoresm platform, which leverages the agility of software-defined networking to enable better application performance, centralized network policy management and more effective cost controls. Comcast is the first cable company to introduce a carrier-grade, SD-WAN offering for multisite businesses, and is... 