As the Interop 2012 conference winds down here in Las Vegas, I got a distinct impression that the technology industry in the middle of a profound transformation. Cloud computing was the at the heart of discussions in a majority of keynotes and many of the breakout sessions. The focus is on the “how” of implementing cloud in the real world. I think we are getting past the “hype” phase of the cloud.
While every layer of the technology stack is getting disrupted by the cloud, the networking layer, in particular, got a tremendous attention at this event. It’s worth noting that nothing much has changed in the data center network designs in the past 15 years. While virtualization and cloud has changed compute and storage, the networking area is still stuck in the physical world. The virtualization of the network at the data center scale is the next frontier. The fancier term “Software Defined Networking” was bandied about liberally at various forums.
We are living in an exciting time in our industry. The enterprise is experiencing tremendous change brought about by mobile, social, and big data technologies that were mostly pioneered in the consumer space. Mobile and video traffic is growing exponentially. Machine to machine traffic is here to stay. The Internet of Things is going to drive a lot of this traffic growth. Employees want to bring their own devices and applications to work and integrate them into their work environments. The biggest impact of all this change is that IT organizations need to ensure the infrastructure, networks, and applications are flexible and are able to service the demand in a timely manner and cloud computing infrastructure, platforms, and applications are increasingly seen as a way to solve these challenges in a cost-effective manner.
I heard on one panel that 4 out of 5 Global 2000 companies plan to develop and implement some type of cloud strategy in the next year! Quite impressive.
There were some discussions about OpenStack, but it became clear to me that very few people really know much about OpenStack. I spent a lot of time educating people about this at the event. I gave five presentations at the Dell (my employer) mini theater providing an overview of OpenStack and also talking about the Dell OpenStack-Powered cloud solution.
Check out the presentation here:
We had an artist draw out the key points of my presentation. She did a great job. Check out this picture:
Dell OpenStack-Powered CLoud Solution
Check out some of the insights I tweeted about from InterOp (@kpemamaraju)
- Legacy networks are architected for one tenant, user type, and location and are manually configured. They can’t meet
#cloud needs - Performance testing is key in a
#cloud environment.#interop insights #cloud is not an isolated island. It still needs to connect with the rest of the business services and data center- Lessons learned for
#cloud service providers: Be transparent about what you are doing and how things work.#interop insights - OpenStack has a winning open
#cloud ecosystem: John Endgates, Rackspace at Panel discussion#interop #cloud lock-in occurs at the services layer behind the API’s. Compatibility of API’s is not enough for portability for hybrid cloud- Customers want
#cloud choices and the ability to move apps around is important. Portability is key - Panel discussion
#interop. Hybrid#cloud debate. Connecting multiple clouds is here to stay - Three roadblocks to “
#cloud easy” env: Inconsistent access, box-centric config, apps and network silos#interop insights - Marc of Ayava
#interop keynote: It comes down to two things. Users care about applications and devices. They want “cloud easy” - Marc Randall Avaya networking keynote
#interop: We spend 24/7 trouble shooting networking issues instead of focus on strategic opportunities - Zynga CTO
#interop keynote: Design your cloud to be accessed from different geographies, different mobile devices, different browsers - Zynga CTO
#interop keynote: Be flexible with your infrastructure. Tune it to your business, use both private and public. Understand your app - Zynga CTO keynote at
#interop: Infrastructure is cool again! - Zynga CTO
#interop keynote: we went from 20% private (zCloud) and 80% public in 2010 to 80% private and 20% public - Zynga CTO on stage at
#Interop: We built the world’s largest Hybrid#cloud - future of collaboration is
#social#mobile visual and virtual#interopkeynote - TCO of
#cloud datacenter is 50% lower than a traditional datacenter#interop keynote interop - intelligent network: programmability across all layers of the network
- enterprise megatrends:
#mobility#cloud collaboration pervasive video@padmashree keynote#interop - convergence of video and mobile will drive cloud computing
#cloud#intrerop keynote
