On that note, one of the things I wrote recently was a position piece on "Cloud Fabrics" or in other words the network infrastructure required to support a dynamic cloud environment. Here are the key elements:
1. Provide security to the resident applications, users and resources, including network access protection, user authentication, data in flight encryption, data at rest encryption, and logging;
2. Provide the data transport availability needed to ensure continuous packet delivery between the user and the cloud resource, through continuity capabilities such as link trunking and automatic failover;
3. As much as possible outside of the physical effects of distance-imposed latency, make a connection between users, applications and distance resources perform comparably to a traditional local connection through the use of data compression, acceleration, de-duplication, QoS and advanced routing capabilities; and
4. Provide transparency and control for the data traversing between users, applications and resources, through enabling management, monitoring and compliance capabilities that track data flows to the packet level, while also preserving the service-level context.
Let me know what you think of this "Cloud Fabric" concept. I feel there's a lot of this already encompassed within the Ethernet Fabric efforts in the industry, whether Brocade VDX , Juniper QFabric, Cisco Unified Fabric or Arista Cloud Networking, to name a few. But there are still missing on not-quite-integrated aspects of security, availability, acceleration/optimization, and especially management. It's an exciting work-in-progress to watch -- how the vendor solutions are evolving to meet emerging customer needs. I expect we'll continue to see more pieces of the puzzle from Spring industry events, more product announcements and the inevitable M&A activity. Enjoy the ride.
