I have been watching some of the change indicators of among other things Internet traffic. Yes, I believe trends in those traffic patterns can give an idea of the “health” situation of the global network traffic. Adding some more “trends” from different sources like conferences “chasing” the new hypes, like one of my favorites, the CLOUD, whatever that might be when used in every conference heading across the wide industry “touching” a computer.. To me cloud is very physical and very connected, enough said 😉
So what am I about this time? Well I have been looking at the trends of compute in DC´s (data centers) and also tracking where the big players in the DC space marked their products. It is interesting to see who want to play where and to be honest it scares me how some players, have fallen asleep, or even worse thought they where “protected”, I do not understand them and for sure I am surprised that they do not make some small adjustments?
Looking at the development off more and more affordable very advanced network gear it seems to me that some of the old “compute” technologies again can be used to give even better performance on all sides of the services offered “on” the cloud infrastructure. An indication on this trend are the marketing efforts on interconnect within the DC´s, and the hunt for the “right” mix of tenants to be able to offer the full TV guide 😉
I for one like tools like http://ping.eu/traceroute/ to be able to understand the paths and ownerships of the “content” in the “CLOUD”. There should be more users out there taking an interest in the paths of the networks and how to reach the “content”.
Looking back in history when the networks did not perform like the customers expected, changes where made to make them happy in the best economical way possible. The technical first best solution was not always the chosen one. Either way most solutions ended up with “pushing” content as close to users as possible. I wonder if we now are aiming at using the network in a more advanced setup with distributed “compute” centers. It might of course be me again but the traffic stats on official Internet sites tells me something and the routing/peering maps of the world gives even more insight. Maybe there is hope for the real infrastructure owners as soon as they also look further then their billing machines 🙂
We need in my opinion the big, but just as well the well working distributed setups. To meet these demands…someone need to start looking back in history and understand how it can be done moving forward..the tools are now much better..
regards
bj