more thoughts on networking vendors' Grid opportunity

Cisco is not the only networking vendor making forays into areas that have typically been understood as "systems management." Networking is not just about 'pipes' and 'plumbing' anymore, it's much smarter than that. While Cisco's "application-oriented networking" product line launch yesterday is a great example -- it's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we're going to be hearing about from the networking vendors for the foreseeable future.

As we try to understand networking vendors' role in the Grid computing evolution, in particular, we have to start thinking of the network more anatomically and less like hardware. According to Dr. Franco Travostino, Consulting Engineer and Dir. in the Adv. Tech/CTO Office at Nortel:

"It's not just a matter of creating bigger pipes and expecting that we're going to have greater bandwidth. That will be one key ingredient, but not the only one. In addition to needing to blast as much data as possible, equally important there is the aspect of control of the network, so you can gain virtualized control and access to the network and do, for example, time of the day reservations if you need to - or be able to change the security properties, or the routing properties, or the service discovery properties. It's not about brute force and how many bits per second you can send - but also about how to finesse the network experience. We want to remove all sorts of GUI-driven and operator-driven elements so that the network can be controlled by software, and there are specific feedback loops going on between network and software, without operators involved. We want an addressing schema capable to support hitless joins in a virtual organization without collisions and impact from intervening network address translation boxes or firewalls. So there are very important features above and beyond the basic capability of sending a lot of data through a pipe."

What it is really coming down to is that we are going to have to start thinking of the network more like neurons in a biological sense and less like pipes in a plumbing sense.