WAN Governance

A long way to New-Greenland

Professor Yves Coppens, the paleoanthropologist who co-discovered Lucy (a 3.2 million years old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974 at Hadar, Ethiopia), is a pretty good story teller. He once noticed that Greenland has a remarkable characteristic: it is the place where mankind finished its two or three million-year long trip around the globe.

"We" started our migration from our common African cradle up to Middle-east, Asia and Europe. Time, technology improvements (like mastering stone cutting and fire) as well as numerous climate changes recently allowed some of "us" to reach North America through the Bering land bridge. Some went south and populated the whole America down to Ushuaia; others followed reindeer herds up to the (now) frozen lands of north territories, Arctic islands and finally Greenland. It's only one thousand years ago that Icelanders and Norwegians closed the loop by colonizing Greenland, sharing it with the late Dorset culture inhabitants and the Thule culture arriving from the north.

IT people live in faster times than Lucy's: it took only 20 years to bring us from ENIAC computer to mainframes, another 20 years from mainframes to personal computers and still another 20 years to ubiquitous computing (from mobile phone and personal digital assistant to GPS receivers). It is still unclear where we will be in the next 20 years…

During the electronic (re)evolution, some moved toward developing applications: tired by machine-based language (believe it or not, many of us – including myself I'm afraid – started to work directly in Motorola, Zylog or Intel machine code…), they invented assembler and more sophisticated programming languages (all called by soft names such as Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, ADA, C…). They finally succeeded to make useful applications emerge out of their stacks of listing: Operating systems, spreadsheets, ERPs, databases, smartphones …

Others decided to invade telecommunication territories. After a preliminary excursion in telephony-land (where they eradicate all natives, respecting the tradition), they finally discovered their Eldorado: data networking (with all sorts of packet switching and transport protocols) and all its related usages – the Web and the Internet being the most emblematic ones.

And finally it is only now that new global management concepts like WAN Governance and Autonomic Networking which automatically align networks and applications, bridging cultures of these two tribes, allow us to join altogether in our own IT New-Greenland…

Illustration: the north of Kejser Franz Josef Fjord near Stensjö Bjerg – 2005 – Source: Uffe Wilken / Erik Christensen

QWERTY, DHIATENSOR and DSK

I recently (re)read some of Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful articles he published in the 80s and 90s (1980s, I mean). Gould (1941-2002) who was a paleontologist and educator at Harvard University made his largest contributions to science as the leading spokes-person for evolutionary theory. He wrote very imaginative and accessible monthly columns in Natural History magazine that have been gathered in an abundant bibliography of over 20 books with appealing titles, like the "Panda's Thumb" or the "Flamingo's Smile".

Gould used to write his texts on an old Smith-Corona typewriter (similar to the one above), and was then teased by one of his friends (Paul A. David, Clio and the economics of QWERTY – 1986) about the letters arrangement (named QWERTY for English typewriters). Gould's article is particularly rich, with provocative implications in many aspects of the IT business, from the uselessness of ROI studies to the power of marketing and necessity of being lucky.

Typewriters have been invented in the 70s and 80s (1870s, I mean) and it took a few decades to stabilize their technical organization as well as their user interface: the keyboard.

Many different keyboard organizations competed before it stabilized under the well-known aspect of the QWERTY suite. The reason for QWERTY supremacy is not that obvious: it is not linked to the rapidity of typing, as you might think at first. Would typewriter manufacturers maximize speed, they would have put the letters DHIATENSOR in the most accessible line (the middle one), as 70% of English words can be written from this small list of letters. On the contrary, QWERTY is the result of fine-tuning (by C.L. Sholes) to slow down typing speed! At this time the main problem was that, when writing too fast, typebars tend to hurt and block among themselves, provoking d ff jmleesd kkjjjjjg disasters… And this is why QWERTY was designed to make people's life more difficult!

Finally, QWERTY victoriously resisted to all further attacks, from the optimized DSK (Dvorak Simplified Keyboard) in the 30s (1930s…), the IBM Selectric and its famous "gulf ball" in the 60s and finally the computer industry in the 80s that produces the laptop computer I'm writing on at the moment.

Isn't the vision of millions (if not billions) of humans fighting with the apparently random organization of their keyboard at home, at school or at work, because of technical constraints that disappeared 80 years ago, a really stimulating and refreshing one ?

Reference: Stephen Jay Gould, the panda's thumb of technology, in Bully for Brontosaurus – 1991

Evidence on behalf of unified [VPN + Cloud] networking (3/3): verdict time

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While in a pure VPN architecture, it is often possible to manage the traffic from Datacenters in such a way that critical applications get guaranteed performances and recreational ones become harmless to the business (see for example Ipanema's virtual ip|engine concept), this becomes per definition impossible with Cloud computing: the goal here is to relocate application servers to centers that enterprises do not want to control anymore.

The level of virtualization is such that in most cases it would be illusory and counter-productive to try knowing the physical location of servers and databases. The rise of the unified [VPN + Cloud] network places now the branch office at the center of the game, each branch being a small independent hub for its own traffic, would it remain inside the private network or go to the Cloud.

Features to be implemented in the branch are then:

• Deep understanding of application traffic, including encrypted Web flows that usually support applications that are delivered in SaaS (Software as a Service) mode;
• Ability to adapt in real-time the resource allocation to the instantaneous demand, according to the business criticality and the technical requirements of each of the active applications;
• For multi-homed branches, dynamic network load-sharing to maximize application performance and availability (selection of the most appropriate access) in the one hand, and cost reduction (optimized resource usage) on the other hand.

Of course, all of this has to be performed in a fully automated manner, in order to relieve the technical teams from painful operational duty. Finally, the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of such a system must remain marginal compared to the cost of the application services it is in charge to guarantee the performance over the unified [VPN + Cloud] network.

In our mind, there is a way for enterprises to fulfill simultaneously all these conditions and get the performance guarantees they seek: the alliance of the WAN Governance approach and its top-down drive of application performance from a applications SLAs, with the ability of Autonomic Networking to use such objectives to automatically adapt to dynamic traffic demand and varying network conditions.

No doubt [VPN + Cloud] computing and Anything-as-a-Service will be increasingly important to the enterprise's performances. Let's bring them the unique verdict they deserve: lifelong performance guarantee!

Illustration: Paul Newman in Sydney Lumet's film "The Verdict", on 1982.