Daily Network Monitor

I had them all with me tonight – Information Week, CIO, Redmond, eWeek and Network World. Not surprisingly, the world of technology continues to be a world of contradictions and that’s a good thing. Ever since we all witnessed the battles on the airwaves 10 years ago between Cisco (promoting the paperless office) and Xerox and Canon promoting the highest, fastest volume outputs of paper and we in technology took a side that contradicted a colleagues comment or belief – continuing our debates over coffee, beer and long inescapable air flights.

Enter the time machine and here we are 10 + years later and a world of new contradictions.

The jury is still out on SOA. Proponents argue that a distributed, nimble set of web services that replace large monolithic systems is the future. Proponents claim the economies of scale, re-use and distributed network friendly design poses huge benefits for adopters. Yet, the early poll and interview results are uncovering hosts of problems that are frustrating the heck out of CIO and subordinates. Application performance, application reliability and security are all questions and issues in need of a solution.

The jury is in on Virtualization and the ruling looks like guilty for all. We (I) am committed to virtualization like no ones business. Yet, I am reading tonight that the early adopters have already begun to uncover the pitfalls and it would be best to look to third party management companies when deploying a virtualized environment. I cannot say this is a contradiction in pure form but it fits my blog so give me a little break here.

Last, the story that made my night. MIT on Thursday morning will unveil a new working forum whose goal is to expand Kerberos to wireless technologies. Isn’t Kerberos dead? I guess Kerberos really does have 3 heads, I mean lives.

I’m sure we won’t be accused of pump and dump by tipping our hat with some admiration at Cisco’s earnings report yesterday in which they reported a 41% increase in earnings. Accoridng to CEO John Chambers the results came in better than expected. I say, good for Cisco. They are providing the infrastructure that runs networks and somehow avoiding commoditization. Last week I was at their Networkers event in France, and it was packed with people who had paid hundreds maybe thousands of Euro to attend sessions all about Cisco gear and protocols.

In addition, CNN reports that Cisco’s good news brought increases in the value the stock of such firms as Intel, Juniper, and HP.

Cisco over the next five years plans to radically change how it sells and delivers router and switch software, in part by making that software more virtualized and modular.

Cisco’s intention is to decouple IOS software from the hardware it sells, which could let users add enhancements such as security or VoIP more quickly, without having to reinstall IOS images on routers and switches. The vendor also plans to virtualize many of its network services and applications, which currently are tied to hardware-specific modules or appliances.

This shift would make network gear operate more like a virtualized server, running multiple operating systems and applications on top of a VMware-like layer, as opposed to a router with a closed operating system, in which applications are run on hardware-based blades and modules. Ultimately, these changes will make it less expensive to deploy and manage services that run on top of IP networks, such as security, VoIP and management features, Cisco says.

High-level details of the road map were delivered in a session at Cisco’s C-Scape analyst conference last week in San Jose by Cliff Metzler, senior vice president of the company’s Network Management Technology Group.

Read the whole story here.