For months the infrastructure 2.0 blog has talked about the automation of IT from a network perspective, including the automation of the network itself. While few may question the need for network automation most businesses today still run their networks like they ran their “supply chains” decades ago, before the network.

This great irony is about to change. Here’s why:

A recent article by Larry Dignan about how IT has fallen behind the Tech Curve laments how slow and cumbersome enterprise IT has become relative to consumerized technologies. Larry covered a session at the recent Gartner Symposium and was advised by Gartner analysts that IT pros want the world to proceed in an orderly fashion and are weighed down by the legacy of previous choices. That’s a fair statement.

Gartner’s solution, or at least that posed by analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin is for IT to simply let users buy their own gear:

As infrastructure 2.0 is turned on it will represent an irreversible transformation in the way IT services are delivered. The timing of product releases, investments and deployments could make all the difference for a range of companies and organizations.

Those who could be impacted include the cloud vendors (including Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Rackspace (RAX) and Savvis (SVVS)), the virtualization vendors (VMware (VMW), Microsoft (MSFT), and Citrix (CTXS)) and the network equipment vendors (including Cisco (CSCO), HP (HPQ), Juniper (JNPR), F5 (FFIV), Brocade (BRCD) and Extreme Networks (EXTR)).

As Cisco (CSCO), HP (HPQ), Juniper (JNPR), F5 (FFIV), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and others circle the data center field of battle, one strategic ridge of high ground is in network automation, or the ability to move (or adjust/provision) IT assets at the push of a button without the need for extensive manual intervention. That manual intervention accounts for a sizable portion of the costs, risks and compromises of today’s static networks.

Several of these companies have already made notable announcements in 2009, yet none have yet let the virtualization genie out of the VLAN bottle completely. When they do, watch out for a new wave of IT innovation.

My recent podcast on infrastructure 2.0 with John Willis reminded me of some recent banter about my use of the term “Cambrian explosion” to talk about where IT is headed when infrastructure 2.0 becomes a reality. In short, today we have a classic preconditions scenario; that is, when automated systems are connected with automated networks. Synergy is putting it mildly.

The nature and extent of how automation is enabled and by whom could have a substantial impact on which vendors have the most leverage with customers and partners.

Whenever there are technology disruptions there is a period of time when smaller upstart companies and established giants are at a kind of parity. The premium on technology and speed is momentarily higher than the premium on stability, safety and size. Enterprises invest in upstarts (or even larger players) during this period because they can deliver sizable strategic advantages.

Today virtualization is creating new demands for yet another disruption. Perhaps the first shots in this revolution were fired last week at an all day working session of networking legends and “Young Turks” at the SRI Infrastructure 2.0 meeting. Time will tell, but the level of interest and discussion was exhilarating and timely. Vint Cerf, Bob Grossman and Dan Lynch did an incredible job setting up the session with the help of SRI.

"With vEOS, Arista and VMware customers will now be able to more easily manage their growing converged networking infrastructure and enable easier mobility of virtual machines," said Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks. "Arista’s vEOS is fully compatible and capable of co-existing with the VMware vSphere™ 4 vNetwork Distributed Switch while providing consistent administrative experience to both the network and virtualization operator."

Many of today’s large enterprise networks are burning cash and are overly dependent upon layers of manual processes managed by legions of clerks to stay available and secure. Networks were created this way from the start; they were architected to work just like the environments they were about to transform.

From those early days until today, they have replaced populations of “middle men” and paperwork with streaming electrons racing between larger populations of endpoints. They drove incredible IT innovation and productivity gains.

“Dow hired EDS to build such a network more than three years ago but booted EDS from the job recently after the contractor conceded it couldn't implement the deal for the agreed upon price, according to analysts familiar with the situation. Dow originally tapped EDS under a seven-year, $1.4 billion deal announced in December 2000.”

- Paul McDougall, InformationWeek, August 3, 2004

This weekend, Chris O’Brien (San Jose Mercury News) referred to an "identity crisis" at Google (GOOG), which immediately reminded us of a litany of technology companies which have ended up dabbling in too many markets for their own good. Breadth ultimately undermined synergy. It isn’t hard to see where Chris is coming from when it comes to the multitude of Google's grand visions and their implications.

Google is a great company. One of the greatest. It is unlikely to fall victim to the myopic adventures that have eroded market caps at other companies, yet one has to wonder just how far Google can stretch its domination of online advertising into online applications, telephony and even cloud computing. How much distance is there between its grand visions and what it can deliver competitively, free of massive (ad revenue) subsidies?

Thin Margins, Change and Differentiation

“Among the Internet's last players in the home-delivery sector, Webvan has seen the dot-com shakeout trim the ranks. Companies like ShopLink.com and Streamline.com have folded, and online convenience store Kozmo pulled the plug on its operations Wednesday.”

There has been plenty of confusion about what cloud computing is thanks to a multitude of ways in which virtualization and IT services can be deployed and marketed. This has contributed to a vast array of papers and articles and blogs defining cloud computing.

Underneath the haze of “everything becomes cloud because cloud is a hot topic” confusion, a new term is rising on the horizon; and its pretty interesting. There are no doubt others using the term “intercloud”, but I think Cisco (CSCO) has really stepped up the discussion.

Cloud computing has become the hottest, fluffiest and highest profile meme since the dotcom era. The most successful cloud players include in their ranks a bookseller and an advertising/search behemoth. Software companies are making cloud announcements of all kinds.

We owe most of this repositioning to none other than author Nicholas Carr, who has managed to craft a collection of services, technologies and ideas into the Next Big Thing. Yet between the grand vision and a growing collection of visionaries there are plenty of gaps and confusion.

A few months ago I blogged about the Three Horsemen of the Coming Network Revolution. One of those “horsemen” was the netbook computer. Now Microsoft (MSFT) wants to rename it. Maybe it has something to do with the impact of the netbook on the hard drive PC market and the powerful relationship with robust, pre-loaded operating systems and software.

The netbook could decouple that relationship, hence the silly idea of a name change and a recent JavaOne Conference headline: “Ellison: Java-based Netbooks on Sun’s Horizon.” Netbooks could disrupt the playing field by transforming how endpoints interact with the cloud versus the hard drive.

Cloud computing and virtualization are promising more dynamic systems with unprecedented cost savings; and network industry leaders are promising more dynamic networks capable of keeping up with the increased rate of change (with these systems). In order for the benefits to be delivered as promised IT will need to evolve from silos into multifunctional teams, and vendors will need to concomitantly embrace their partners like never before. This process is already underway.

I recently addressed the three biggest barriers to cloud: security, network capacity and network management. These barriers will likely be addressed via new and cloud-strategic partnerships of various kinds as the silos of legacy IT converge into pre-configured containers blending multiple vendor offerings that can be scaled up and out to maximize flexibility and cost savings.

These Barriers are Both Threats and Opportunities to Tech Players

I recently posted about the Dizzying Economics of Cloud Computing when it occurred to me that the technological barriers must be equally mystifying for many. So I thought I would initiate a discussion about the barriers to the adoption of cloud computing by the enterprise.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Virtualization could easily be called the most critical enabler of cloud computing. After all, it decouples applications from hardware, freeing up companies from being tied to specialized hardware and enabling new mobility potentials for processing power. Those potentials could allow servers to be spun up and moved on demand from one data center to another, dramatically reducing the electricity requirements for IT services.

This potential has no doubt fueled interest in companies like VMware (VMW), Microsoft (MSFT) and Citrix (CTXS), just as cloud computing has generated renewed interest in Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN). Cisco (CSCO), Juniper (JNPR), IBM and even Sun (JAVA) are all racing to form "cloud clubs" that will position them at an advantage over competitors trying to sell piecemeal into the coming unified fabrics of processors.

A few weeks ago I talked about the coming cloud computing war by discussing the formation of multi-vendor cloud-driven alliances and their implications for the IT industry. Now that Cisco (CSCO) has announced its unified computing initiative which includes Nehalem blade servers and IBM is now in discussions with Sun Microsystems (JAVA), I think it's time to take a step back and explore the implications of these alliances for enterprise IT pros.

The idea of club cloud, or the delivery of a complete IT solution decoupled from proprietary hardware and personnel, is an interesting one. The last several decades of computing have been marked by a series of feudalistic battles over standards, lock-in and footprint, especially in the enterprise space. The rising tide of complexity and out of control management costs drove many firms to either outsource IT or hire legions of consultants and technology partners.

Whether you’re a small business considering cloud services or an enterprise contemplating public or private cloud services, it pays to understand some of the technical challenges and players likely to have a significant impact on the availability, security and costs of those services. Cloud computing is a game changer, and it may also pay to know who could win or lose as IT services are decoupled from specialized hardware in specific locations.

Don’t let the endless list of companies proclaiming cloud leadership confuse you that the world has already embraced cloud; there is a vast difference between using cloud services to deliver software as a service and delivering cloud IT services in a multi-tenant public environment. There is also a sizable gap between cloud announcements, cloud revenue and enterprise-ready cloud services.