Harley Stowell

Who Will Lead the Infrastructure 2.0 Boom?

Greg,

another great piece with deeper amplification on the challenges of moving from 1.0 to 2.0.

The approach we have taken is focused on virtualizing infrastructure technologies by developing a system that abstracts infrastructure services (SOA). At the core common language policies (business policies) define the relationship between network users and applications, "who needs access to what". Once policies are created, automated configuration directives are generated to configure infrastructure services (which are known to the system) to support the policy across an array of required services (routing, VPN, VLAN, NAC, QoS, etc). This core functionality automates the labor intensive processes ranging from business requirement (policy) to network configuration enabling dynamic infrastructure responses to changing requirements.

"It is easier to create a server and move it with virtualization, yet the network required the same manual configuration tasks to keep up. The lesson: system automation needs to be accompanied by network automation; or dynamic systems require dynamic networks. That is essentially the case for Infrastructure 2.0."

The quote above is particularly relevant. We are developing a Virtual Center Agent (VMware) that "listens" for changes in virtual machine environments and automatically re-configures infrastructure services based on policy as changes to VMs are made, providing a solution to the problems outlined above. An example of a step toward 2.0.

Clearly the path to 2.0 is complex in terms of problem sets and technology echo systems as you outline. But with standards proliferating and system architectures opening, I am an optimist that your vision will become a reality hopefully sooner rather than later.

Regards,

Harley

PS. Thanks for directing me to Infoblox we have a good conversation underway.