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Guest Blog - Will the Computer be the Network?
When we started the Nortel Enterprise Blog, one of the goals was to develop a forum for ideas from the larger Nortel Enterprise Community. Now that the blog is running and achieving some level of following, I thought it was time to introduce the first guest posting.
This post comes from Brad Black. Brad is Leader Security Solutions Engineering in our Enterprise Solutions Engineering group. Brad is a CISPP certified security professional and focuses on a variety of security issues from VoIP to data centers. He also has extensive experience in architecting campus, WAN, and data center solutions for Nortel customers.
From Brad:
Many years ago, one of Sun Microsystems' original employees, John Gage coined the phrase, "The Network is the Computer". This served as a powerful vision for Sun throughout the 90's and beyond. It always struck me as not quite right - Isn't the network the network and the computer the computer? Each had a specific job and when combined in the right way, over IP/Ethernet networks of course, computers and networking became an integral part of business, personal and cultural life.
A key part of what Sun was emphasizing was how you could distribute application components throughout the network. This powerful concept has evolved over the years into web services and service-oriented architecture.
Today, as I talk to customers about their vision of application delivery, a key trend with most larger enterprises is data center consolidation and virtualization. Some companies are further along than others, but the benefits of machine virtualization in terms of reducing wasted resources are very compelling. With many application servers running at just 10-15% average utilization, buying, deploying, managing, powering and cooling hundreds of servers just doesn't make sense. And when you move to a virtual machine environment, provisioning new virtual servers, backup/restore and disaster recovery get a lot easier too.
In some environments we see tens of virtual machines running on a single physical server. And this is not just about server virtualization. Client virtual computing is also taking hold such that the data center houses both application server VMs and end-user workstation VMs accessed via remote desktop protocols. With client virtual computing, you gain a number of security and application management benefits and decouple the end-user device from the IT infrastructure.
I can see the point in the near future where the entire data center can collapse into a pair of high end servers. You would really only need one except for availability considerations. Think about it - multiple application tiers (web front ends, application servers and databases) and client VMs all running together on one super-server. In this scenario - the network too moves "inside" the server providing VLAN isolation, routing, stateful firewalling, intrusion detection and even server load-balancing for VMs. The networking and security functions are not optional here - think about how to detect and contain a compromised VM hosting an attack on another VM on the same server.
When this model is taken to an extreme the computer is the network. Backed-off slightly, the computer is the data center. But I doubt that we'll see such a complete implementation of this vision. In the case of server virtualization, we still need another complete data center that is geographically separated to reduce the risk associated with fires, floods and other localized events. And we need a "real" network to connect those sites. Beyond that, network latency can still stand in the way of a true "global" data center for distributed international enterprises. In the case of client computing, virtualization is applicable to some information and knowledge worker applications but not others requiring mobility and off-network use. Phil needs to hammer out blog entries at 30,000 feet and the package tracking application needs to reach out to the delivery truck. And even the thinnest of clients will need a network to reach the data center.
In the end, hyper-connectivity is making the world a smaller place, connecting more people, applications and even things together and networks are getting bigger, not smaller. Even as machine virtualization takes hold and presents new challenges for those building networks and applications I still would say, "the network is the network".
