A nice break for caffeine replenishment, and we’re into the next set of sessions. This one is already filling up, and the reason is fairly obvious: everyone wants to know just how cloud computing is going to hit their network. I’ve seen models and heard theories but I think that I, along with everyone in the room, would like to hear some facts to go along with all the theories.
Jim Metzler starts off saying that network performance monitoring is hard now, and will be an order of magnitude harder with cloud computing. This is especially true with public clouds, and that’s made more difficult because there are so many different definitions of cloud computing.
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Ahh, mobile devices for enterprise applications. I came in a little late on this one, but got here in time to hear Craig Mathias say that the iPhone isn’t going away as a platform. Since I like my iPhone a lot, I’m hooked. This is already a great session.
We hear about different operating systems (including a pitch for us to try Ubuntu — I’ve got to load that onto one of my spare laptops when I get back home), and different hardware platforms. He then goes on to say that one of the models we’ve been using for mobile computing — the “take it all with you” model — is inherently broken. We’ll be hearing about alternatives for the rest of the session.
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Here we are at the first session of the morning, talking about an ever-so cheerful subject, mobile security. A quick survey of the room shows that everyone has either an iPhone or a Blackberry, and that most of us are using them for business.
The speakers take us through the major trends in computing and security and there’s really nothing surprising here, but it’s interesting to hear new confirmation of the things I’ve written about for the last couple of years. The biggest issues they cover are that mobility and social networking are increasing, that rapidly-evolving threats using social networking are increasing, and that regulatory compliance is an ever-greater driver of security spending.
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Sitting in the media center looking out over the Interop New York exhibit floor, it’s apparent that there are a lot of folks here looking for answers to their business and technology questions. I haven’t spent the entire day on the floor (you can see my conference posts for evidence of that) but I do have a few impressions after walking around and talking to people for a while.
First, while there is a mobile networking section of the exhibit floor, it’s not as large as I would have imagined. That’s not because there aren’t mobile apps and services here, but because mobility is increasingly a function within larger applications and technologies — a feature rather than a category. That’s an interesting evolution, with some fairly significant ramifications for companies. It’s also a sign, I think, that “mobile” is become the accepted way of doing business rather than an exception to the rule. As one of the speakers pointed out today, “Business is becoming some thing you do, rather than someplace you go.”
Next, security remains huge. A piece of that is companies trying to figure out how to secure all those mobile users, but there are other things at work, too.
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OK, so here’s a “high class” problem. I’ve been jumping around the conference a bit and decided I really wanted to look in on this session. I got there, and it was too crowded for me to stay. I mean, every seat was filled and people were standing two-deep around half the room. People were still coming in when I left, too.
I’d love to tell you what the panel was discussing, but I can absolutely tell you that people are serious about cloud computing at Interop. We can debate questions like the one asked in the session title, and we can even ask whether cloud computing is “real”, but regardless of our answer the attendees are certain: cloud computing is real, and they want to know more about it.
In a very real way, this ties back to the first couple of speeches in the keynote this morning. Cloud computing is an extension of virtualization, and a serious continuation of the software-as-a-service model. It’s new enough that many of its applications have hit consumers first, but the enterprise customers are coming because the model just makes too much sense.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t significant questions to be answered, especially around security and regulatory compliance issues. The key, though, is that there is enough entry to force the questions to be answered, and answered sooner rather than later. This won’t be the last time we see standing-room only crowds for cloud sessions at Interop, and I see things only getting stronger from here.
We’re moving from wireless technology to social networking, and especially it’s use as a business tool. This is a topic that’s complicated in an entirely different way than the wireless networking of the last couple of sessions.
The first thing we’re talking about is how to figure out what constitutes a good tool and a good fit for a social network.
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OK so in the last post we were making sense of wireless broadband. Now, we’re going to look at where the future is taking us in a bunch of different wireless technologies. We’re going to hear about WiFi futures, multi-channel mesh, antennas for MIMO handsets, and software-defined radios. Should be an interesting session…
We start with a look at the 802.11 universe today. One of the interesting things here is looking at the speed increases in 802.11 over time. As a side note, it’s mentioned that “4G” is a purely marketing term right now, since the ITU hasn’t yet released a definition for the term. That’s a good thing to remember when you’re looking at service providers’ claims for technology.
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It’s always interesting looking at the conference program for Interop, because it’s a pretty good reading of where the networking industries are — and where they’re likely to be in coming years.
I’m sitting in on a session right now that’s a seriously technical discussion of wireless broadband technologies and how standards are happening. We’re also getting a look at the applications likely for existing and future technologies. One of the interesting thing for me is the interest in working within the 60 GHz unlicensed band. The downside to this band is that it won’t go through walls (or much of anything else), and the range can be limited by exotic things like rain and moisture in the atmosphere. The upside is that it can carry (at least for short distances) very high bandwidth — up to a gigabit per second.
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Like many of my colleagues working in the information security industry, cloud computing related security is an active subject that gets my attention. A popular idea that I hear often is that cloud computing is actually more secure for many customer than what they do themselves, because cloud computing providers can use better equipment and technologies. One analogy is to think of the relationship between the backyard electric generators (for those who do it themselves) and the electric power grid. But then again, I still remember the Y2K scare and those truck loads of fuel tanks piled up behind my company’s buildings in case the power grid went down. It is better to be prepared for the unexpected.
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At the dawn of the information era, computing cost a lot. So much, in fact, that only governments and the military could afford it, for things like codebreaking and artillery calculations. Computers were expensive, and humans were cheap. So we shared our toys, queueing up for a few precious hours on a computer.
As IT innovation moved from government to industry in the latter half of the twentieth century, the cost of computing dropped. Since computers think faster than humans type, we were able to share these mainframes, working on cheap terminals at the edge. Many an IT curmudgeon decries cloud computing as simply a new name for timesharing, claiming they’ve seen it all before.
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Nov 19th, 2009 |
Curt Franklin
