Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Kenneth Duda, Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, Arista Networks
2015: Looking Ahead in the Networking Industry
2014
has been an incredible year in the networking industry. We've witnessed
a transformation from point products to network platforms, furthering
the movement toward software driven cloud networking. At Arista, we are
pleased to be a part of driving the pace of innovation for public,
private and hybrid clouds, big data, security and virtualization. Here's
what we see looking ahead to 2015:
- Accelerated uptake of building robust and resilient networks at layer 3 with overlays like VXLAN on
top of that will continue. Legacy networks will look even more like
relics of the past and continue to have scale, stability and
large-failure-domain issues in contrast to layer 3 spine/leaf designs
which inherently scale out, have minimal fault domains combined with
faster convergence.
- We will see continued success for open standards over
proprietary vendor lock-in technologies. Large open scale-out networks
will win because they bring freedom of choice, enable a best-of-breed strategy, and deliver the best value for money.
- We will continue to see a massive shift from established legacy vendors to an ecosystem of openness and programmability for mobile workloads in big data and virtualization.
- Moore's Law plus overlay architectures bring reduction in tiers in the network from 3+ tiers to two-tier Spine/Leaf and single-tier Spline, enabling
dramatically lower cost points for higher performance networks, similar
to how server virtualization reduced CapEx/OpEx in the server world.
- The network will provide workflow-aware telemetry that
goes beyond link counters by integrating with overlay controllers and
orchestrators, rather than falling into the "app trap" of imagining the
network should be in the business of special-casing each application.
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About the Author
Kenneth Duda, Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering
Kenneth
Duda is a pioneer in high-performance networking software and lead
architect of Arista Networks EOS, a stateful modular operating system
for all Arista Networks products. He is also the co-author of network
virtualization specifications including VXLAN with VMware and NVGRE with
Microsoft. From 2005 to 2008, Ken was also the Acting President of
Arista Networks. Prior
to joining Arista Networks, Ken was the CTO at There.com, where he
played a lead role in designing a real-time 3-D distributed system that
scaled to thousands of simultaneous users. Ken was also the first
employee of Granite Systems and led the software development effort for
the Catalyst 4000 product line after the acquisition by Cisco.
Ken has 3 simultaneous engineering degrees from MIT and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.