Solution is a state not a path

Networking is going through a identity crisis. Is it a special device or just a program on a commodity machine? The crux of the problem lies in a shift in the problem space where networkers spent all their time. The solution to a networking problem today is not the best path but the best state. In the early years this branch was taken by networkers because in those finding the best path in a graph was the solution to getting the applications (in those days printing, later email) to work. But today, a simple struts application has more action elements (routes) than a BGP table on internet. In other words, there are more paths a browser can take after it has landed on the web server than it had to take getting to the web server.

When state mangement and control is the problem, the solution is software. The paths are discovered and known what matters now is the learning on which ones for which application. This is what is causing the identity crisis for networkers which then manifests itself as SDN, Programmable Networks etc. Also the reason why the largest networking company flips flops between we are going to focus on networking to we want to be an IT company. Hope it does not do what freeport did - a copper company acquiring a O&G company.

State Description Language

After almost a decade after WSDL - the service interface description language - was introduced, I think it is time for industry to create a state description language. Just like WSDL enabled communication of interface between the two points engaged in a conversation (or any other MEP), we need two infrastructure components inside a data center to communicate their state among one another. The end goal is autonomic data center where a component "learns" about the fellow components and reflects and adjusts its own state.

Application integration is easy today. Everybody has an API on which default information (useless) can be communicated. But to use this new found connection we need to develop languages that enable communication about data, state, intention etc. The whole movement to cloud has commoditized compute, storage to a point where $5/month can buy me more IT infrastructure than my university had when I was studying engineering...

Biggest Bottleneck in Bigdata is the human

Today's WSJ carries an article on Bigdata being the brain behind hiring in companies. There are lots of Bigdata articles all around and each one points to a new bottleneck for the industry to overcome. There is one bottleneck that no one discusses. It is the ultimate consumer of Bigdata - the human. If we have trouble getting computers to deal with Bigdata, imagine presenting the analysis to a human. We are simply not wired to consume all this analysis. That is where visualization steps in.

So what is visualization of Bigdata? It is the rendering of insight in a data analysis using images, animations, selective disclosures, progressive disclosures or charts/figures/clouds/bubbles etc. The challenge here is not in rendering these visual elements, but in mapping these elements to the data that is sourced across the internet, parsed by multiple parsers, collated/curated and correlated with multiple streams and displayed on a canvas that is hosted in yet another place. Then there is the debate of HTML5 vs native too.

Visualization of Bigdata is a field actively targeted by research community and there is a strong business case for it as well: it solves the biggest bottleneck in the bigdata ecosystem i.e. the human.

IM is the Best Overlay Network

Under the moniker of Software Defined Network or SDN a flurry of new technical proposals are vying to become the next standards. The business case for them is very sound i.e service providers after failing in their first attempt in late 90s and early 2000s are now confident that there is a way to monetize services which run inside datacenters. The problem is of course the scale at which they need to operate requires that services run across traditional boundaries set up by networking. To cross these boundaries they are devicing clever ways of getting bits across a policy boundary using overlays (envelopes inside other envelopes). The debate is lately on which layer's envelope shall I use. Layer-2 or Layer-3.  Ok, so at the end of day what is needed is a mechanism that abstracts the underlying network and presents it to the applications over sockets in a programmer friendly fashion .

What the networking guys need to do is to look at how this problem was solved in application world over a decade ago. Hint: Use HTTP for control plane, XML for management plane and whatever you want for data plane. The best overlay network in the world continues to be IM (instant messaging)

SDN vs SdN

May be they should have define software Driven network  as application driven network so as not to confuse it with software defined network (openflow and the rest...).  The former is all about network applications using the open APIs on the network to provision, reserve and optimize the path that the application data takes. The open API could be network as a service. The ultimate goal of this initiative is programmable network.

The latter is a rearchitecture of the switch with focus on virtualization of the hardware forwarding plane. A multi device network operating system and bunch of controllers that use use the NOS to configure the devices. The ultimate goal of this initiative is operational excellence.

Innovation is its own Business Case

"What is the business case for this innovation?" Heard that?

Innovation or lack of it is the reason for 2.x% GDP growth in the developed world and we still hear this call for justification. Fed funds rate is 0-0.25% and yet we have to justify NPV of a project. Everybody from company president to the country president is asking (no begging) for innovation, but we need to prove ROI for a project. The chinese did not need a business case to build so called "Ghost cities". They consume 40% of copper production in the world without business case. They are the equivalent of Apple in the world today with surplus cash to buy out several greek deficits. They even placed their machine on the Top 500.

Innovation is its own business case. You cannot calculate the ROI of innovation because you cannot measure the return. So think of the "I" in ROI as your ability to finance (means) and risk tolerance.

SDN

When J Hamilton said network gets in the way, I believe he was asking for a economical solution kind of like the way x86 based servers replace risc processors. The x86 world did not bring complexity, unknown paradigm with unknown cost and difficult to estimate performance. Software Defined Networking a.k.a SDN is apparently doing just that. What started as simple protocol to read/write/replace entries into a switch's forwarding table now has attracted a code bloat and frameworks which promise a network which does substantially what is already done with VMWare's vswitch.

The original call to simplify the network listed a few use cases as drivers which can be categorized as 1) Workload placement (includes all shapes/forms of vm mobility, code mobility etc.) and 2) big data processing. The first challenge attracted solution such as overlays and tunnels which can extend a vm's notion of its layer-2 domain within and across datacenters. What we need now is a standardized way of doing this not a new framework which disassembles a network devices data, control and management plane and places one or more of those on general purpose CPU. We had already done some of this in the olden day with Infiniband's subnet manager and come to the conclusion that it does not scale for dynamic workloads. The second challenge is still in the process of becoming a challenge. With all the hype behind bigadata, an average cluster running bigdata analysis is under 40 nodes. Even Hadoop does not scale beyond 4K nodes.

What the datacenter really wants is a cheap network switch that cost no more than $10/GByte of traffic in motion. $10/GB is the same metric used to guage the efficacy of storage service. It should not cost more than $10 for a gigabyte of data in store or in motion (on the wire) and in the future in memory on the compute side.

Hadoop - Still full of potential

Japan's K-Computer has 705K cores stayed on top of the Top 500 supercomputer list. Now that is scale! I am reacquainting myself to Hadoop to which I was introduced in 2006 and find it is still using stateful nodes maxes out around 3-4K and does not use network storage. Security is an after thought and it is not yet suitable for its killer application interactive behavioral processing or the future killer application real-time stock data processing. If I were to add cloud related requirement of multi-tenancy, virtualization, billing etc etc. you see how underdeveloped this system is and how big its potential is.

BigData = HPC 2.0 and Network 2.0 and reduces healthcare costs

Mckinsey report on big data . http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/pdfs/MGI_big_data_full_report.pdf Excerpt from this.. For instance, if US health care could use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, we estimate that the potential value from data in the sector could be more than $300 billion in value every year, two-thirds of which would be in the form of reducing national health care expenditures by about 8 percent May be the republican candidates should study big data ; they are far easier to remember than three agencies...

Cloud Storage

I ran into the letter to stockholders for AMZN. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9OTA4ODB8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1

It does not read like a letter that a retailer sends out to its stockholder. It reads more like a conversation between two technologists. AMZN realizes that if it only gets to store/manage 2% of the 500 Billion Gigabytes of data that exists in the world, it could earn at the rate of $1.2M/Petabyte/year enough to more than double ths stock price from its current (often considered lofty) levels.

NIST Cloud Standards

NIST released its cloud computing standards July 5th. Besides the standard definition around delivery models and characteristics "What" of the cloud, what stands out to me as the most important element of cloud computing is the definition and standardization of the roles in cloud computing. More specifically, the definition of the role "Cloud Auditor". With increasing deployment of clouds, this role becomes about as important if not more as the "Cloud Broker" role.

25 Pts of Execution for US Gov

It seems besides the markets (through QE-2), the Feds are also in the business of propping up cloud computing and IT in general. Here is their new plan - 25 points to reform Govt IT

Here is something that might be of interest to folks "800 DCs to be closed by 2015 as part of Cloud First Policy"

I have been saying for a while now Cloud is about saving $$. It is not about selling more stuff into a account. In fact the overall DC TAM is expected to decrease after Cloud Computing has done its thing. CIOs want it to decrease by at least 30% and vendors want to make sure the remaining 70% includes their wares.

Cloud Computing SOU

Interesting findings from Zenoss study on CC. Flexibility is now the leading driver for virtualization ahead of capex savings. Even though 90% of startups are working on products with a value prop that is a variation on "Managing VM Sprawl", only 26% of customer have deployed a tool to manage virtual infrastructure. So apparently, the customer is not driven to virtualization based on capex or opex savings. What gives?

Actually this is kind of good news. The whole cloud thing was hijacked by "Opex Savings" value prop i.e. management automation etc. around late 2008. The original cloud vision of internet as a platform (like OS today) was put on the back burner. May be we should get back to the roots of the cloud.

Framework for Network Svcs Deployment

If we refer to the bubble years as the "siliconization" of the network services, then today we are experiencing "containerization" of the nework services i.e. all network services need to be ported to a container that abstracts the oddities of the underlying platform and manages all non-configurable parameters. In addition, it offers the run-time for the control plane of the network services and leverages PCI architecture's VF to leverage HW acceleration.

Should this architecture win in the market place, it will have a profound impact on the networking industry.

HTML 5 Demo

The site http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ shows what media made specific for a browser will look like. It uses HTML5. HTML 5 has every thing (but double buffering) that a media designer wants. 3D engine for rendering, texture mapping, color correction, sequencing, audio and video support.

Changing Traffic Pattern on Internet

The absolute traffic on internet is rising but the nature of the traffic is changing. Another way to look at this is 77% of traffic on internet is social networking related and supported by advertising based business models.If you are a proxy device for the web and support FTP, DNS, and HTTP then this data point should get you thinking.

Content as a Service

IDC says the industry spent $16B in 2009 on public clouds. The spending includes HW and SW.


Besides the fact that they don't have a network spend category, what stands out is the increase in relative spending in the App Dev category. Increase in tooling related spending can means that atleast until 2014, IaaS continues to be the dominant service model. End user spending on tooling suggests an increasing ecosystem of cloud enabling tools that enable hosting and interconnections on various available IaaS clouds. Another stand out is decrease in application spending. If we are to believe the three service models I/P/SaaS then we should be seeing an increase in application spending (also PaaS should decrease the tooling costs).

Another interesting data point is incremental spending is still leaning in favor of traditional IT. If in 5 years we are still spendig 2/3rd of incremental dollars on traditional IT, that is not good news for Cloud Apps.





Yet another point which was not surprising at all is increase in storage spending. It may also hint at a cloud that is vastly different from ones which we read about in trade rags. Instead of applications on the cloud, we could just be moving to media in the cloud. Instead of end of enterprise IT as we know it, we may be heading to end of entertainment as we know it.

VM Density

Cloud economics are most sensitive to VM density and less to automated virtual infrastructure management. If the VM density decreases as self-service portals are introduced or SLAs enforced, it will undermine the cloud economics.

The way to increase the VM density is to offload functionality from the VM that creates headroom or "idleness" in CPU, memory and IO. Creating virtual versions of network services as VAs is exactly what you don't want. Having a footprint on the virtual server backed up with HW acceleration outside the VI is what will increase the density. In other words, virtualization of network services is not a P2V activity but more a distributed computing exercise

Datacenter - Network as a Service

SOA is not a product, but an architecture and the prescribed approach is now finding its way (quite violently sometimes) into the network. Let us start with the framework. We need to create a point of indirection between a network device (the service provider) and the end station (service consumer). That point of indirection is the repository where network devices register their service and its scope. The same repository should support a querying mechanism that returns a service description to the initiator of the query. We need a stack on the initiator which understands the description (i.e. no human involved) and can initiate a peering relationship with the service provider whose service description was returned as response to the query. We also need the repository to differentiate between a cataloged service (inventory) and a service instance (presence). We also need the repository to be available at a well known address because the network device is factory configured to find its repository. Finally, we need a service that creates this repository service should one not exist (when the first network box is deployed for example).

The next question is what is the protocol of communication that will support a conversation between the end station, repository and peers that are present. This is where folks gets in own way. For cataloging, we don't need presence information and for presence we do not need to be cataloged. One requires a session oriented protocol while the other requires a simple request/response. Both these protocols exist in inustry.

Where further work is required is description of the service and that is where the crux of the whole architecture lies. Here we need to take care that we don't fall into the trap of describing our CLI as XML.

Java CE (Cloud Edition)

Virtualization and its live migration is becoming an innovation blocker. Recall that the original problem that we are trying to solve is "How does an application get access to resources on demand?" In other words, how do we get an operating system that scales to an entire datacenter. Even with virtualization my application is contrained to an operating system.

What we need is a language run-time like JVM that talks to a hypervisor directly. What we need is a hypervisor that abstracts resource for an application at a level that the application understands i.e. tables, databases, files, serversockets and clientsockets, IO etc.

JeOS (Just enough OS) is a slow-start in a wrong direction. What we need is JNOS (Just No OS!).