Cautious optimism is a term I have been using in many discussions lately with friends and analysts. It enters the conversation generally when we’re on the topic of whether we are seeing true economic recovery or a bit of a ‘W’ and whether to make serious investments in planned growth or not.
Candidly, in IT we have compressed capital spending for a while, so it could just be a bit of elasticity – although one major thing strikes me as different.
In the current world order many of the IT investments seem to be directly proportional to short-mid term ROI, sure everyone wants to build for 5-10 years, but they also want to see real business results, right now.
Mostly this means that new project types are getting priority and IT is finding creative and innovative ways of delivering near-term business value without, hopefully, taking their eye off the architectural ball. Ideally we can do both- deliver short-term value creation, while building towards a longer-term vision that enables IT to reinvent itself and infrastructure to transcend generational shifts.
Sadly this is not always the case, some companies and people seem to want to either over-rotate on short-term. Sadder still, others refuse to admit the world is changing. Even worse are those who keep their head in the sand and cannot move at all.
Denying change happens is dooming almost any business to failure, embracing a fickle trend too quickly can be just as painful, and relying on past formulas from previous successes doesn’t always work.
You may wonder where I am going with this…
Over the past thirteen years I have seen a lot of things change and come full circle- Cut-Through Switching, Lossless L2 Networks, Ring Topologies, Hosting/Cloud/Insource/Outsource. Universal truth – things change and open and experienced minds that can capture this change tend to prevail.
Architectures have to change with the trend, the old way of doing things is not always the best- although there are always viable lessons to be learned and due respect should be paid to past success.
Looking at networking, especially in the data center there are a lot of architectural changes in play. Obviously, the changes being driven to effect convergence between Ethernet and FibreChannel is a big one. The other is the collapsing of layers and efforts to simplify the topologies while increasing the scale of operations
- I think in my next post or two I will have to explore these some more, what are your thoughts on other architectural changes in the data center network?
