Virtualization Can Leave Your Head Spinning In The Clouds

We're pushing forward full speed now with building our first cloud computing offering at Hosted Solutions. I'll have to admit that this is one of the most exciting projects I've worked on in my career. You hear a lot of talk about virtualization from a server and storage perspective but we're taking it all the way out to the switching infrastructure, the firewalls, and the load balancers. In other words, we're trying to virtualize what we offer as a business in the dedicated environment space. I can't go into too much detail yet because obviously much of this is intellectual property and we want it to be a surprise when we launch the offering.

What I can say is that I think you're about to see the level of complexity for computing skyrocket. There are certainly many advantages for virtualization and there are certainly risks. I won't go into all the risks that everyone else writes about. What I will talk about is the skill set required to support it.

We really started hammering away on the designs this week. We started with the virtualized firewalls (Juniper ISG 2000s) and worked down to the switching layer (Cisco Nexus). When going through each layer, you have to fasten your seat belt and pay close attention because if you don't you'll get lost in the cloud.....literally.

You have physical devices connected to physical cabling using physical interfaces. That's what the Network Engineer in the past had to be an expert in. You had to know how to route traffic from one physical device to another physical device through physical interfaces over physical medium. This of course is an over-simplified explanation but bear with me for a minute.

Now, in addition to all of that you have complete infrastructures built once you get inside of those physical devices. Take the firewall example. Within a single physical device now, you're talking virtual interfaces, virtual routers and virtual firewalls. You could literally go from one customer's virtual firewall to their virtual routing environment through their virtual interfaces into another customer's routing environment and then through their virtual firewall....all within the same physical device. And all of this before you talk about the virtual load balancing and virtual switching environments. Trust me, you can get lost.

We've got some very talented and experienced Network Engineers on my team. We've probably got close to 90 years of combined networking experience among my team and there were several times this week where we really did lose the traffic as it worked it's way through the design. Needless to say, this was just on paper.

I say all this to say that as we march towards the world of virtualization and tout all of the many business and technological benefits, people have to understand this is not for the faint of heart and you will have to re hone your skills to survive. It will take a considerable investment of your personal time if you are going to be successful in the network of the future. This isn't simply adding a new model router or switch to your environment. It's a new paradigm and it will be challenging. Those that take that challenge will be rewarded for it.

The barriers to entry for new Network Engineers will be great because not only will they need to learn everything we already know about the physical networking world, they will have to learn the virtual world too. This will undoubtedly increase the value of Network Engineers (read "I'm glad I am one") because it will take much longer for people to get up to speed in the networking arena. Should be a fun ride. I can tell you that the the technology itself is fun but you must have an extremely strong foundation to understand it. Otherwise, you will get lost in the clouds and never find your way out!