CTO Straight Talk - Issue 3 - 58

BIG THINKING

Companies like Google and Amazon
pioneered agility for compute
infrastructure housed in their data
centers. They viewed a data center
as a single large computer that had
a logically centralized "orchestration
system" analogous to the operating
system of a single computer. This
centralized software permitted much
better infrastructure agility. It allowed
new, unanticipated applications to
run on the infrastructure quicker than
it was possible to do on traditional
IT infrastructure.

So how do you define agility?
Performance is an attribute that is
reasonably well-understood-for example,
megabits per second for networks, or
MIPS for a computer. Agility as applied
to infrastructure does not have such a
generally understood definition. We can
define it as the speed with which one
can get infrastructure to do something
that was not anticipated when the
infrastructure was put into operation-
for example, getting an infrastructure to
deliver an entirely new service. It should
be clear from the definition that making
infrastructure agile requires it to be
programmable in one manner or another.
Over the years, the networking industry
has done a phenomenal job in improving
performance and price-performance,
but it has done a relatively poor job in
improving network agility. Having seen
the benefits of agile infrastructure in data
centers, network operators have legitimate
reasons for asking how some of the same
principles of logically centralized software
could be applied to improving the agility

58

THE ExACT SAME
MISTAKE HAS
BEEN MADE ONCE
BEFORE, WITH
MANUFACTURING.
IF WE ARE WISE,
WE WON'T MAKE
THE SAME
MISTAKE IN
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY.

of networks. This is the key idea behind
software-defined networks, or SDN.

Where do you think the networking
industry went wrong in trying to
solve the agility problem?
The industry went wrong in calculating
that agility was the only problem that
needed to be solved. For example, the
buzz around SDN went so far as to
suggest that all wide-area distributed
networks built using specialized
computers called "routers" should
instead be built with general-purpose
computers. What this extreme view
ignores is that there is a trade-off
between agility and performance.
CTO Straight Talk - Issue 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 3
