As enterprises scale their networks to new heights they are already seeing the evidence of the stresses and strains between static infrastructure and more dynamic endpoint requirements. A recent Computerworld Research Report on core network services already shows larger networks paying a higher price (per IP address) for management. Back in grad school we called that a diseconomy of scale; today in the networked world I think it would be one of the four horsemen of infrastructure1.0 obsolescence. Those who cannot adapt will lose.

Virtsec as Metaphor for the New Age Earlier this year VMware announced VMsafe at VMworld in Cannes. Yet at the recent VMworld conference mere months later the virtsec buzz was noticeably absent. The inability of the VMsafe partners to deliver on the promise of virtualization security was a major buzz killer and I think it may be yet another harbinger of things to come for all network infrastructure players. This issue is infinitely larger than virtsec.

I suspect that the VMsafe gap between expectations and reality drove production virtualization into small hypervisor VLAN pockets, limiting the payoff of production virtualization and I think impacting VMware’s data center growth expectations. That gap was based on the technical limitations of Infrastructure1.0, more than any other factor. It also didn’t help the 1.0 players grow their markets by addressing these new demands. The result was as slowdown in production virtualization, a huge potential catalyst for IT, with new economies of scale and potential.

The appliances that have been deployed across the last thirty years simply were not architected to look inside servers (for other servers) or dynamically keep up with fluid meshes of hypervisors powering servers on and off on demand and moving them around with mouse clicks.

Enterprises already incurring diseconomies of scale today will face sheer terror when trying to manage and secure the dynamic environments of tomorrow. Rising management costs will further compromise the economics of static network infrastructure.

The virtsec dilemma was clearly a case of static netsec meeting dynamic software capable of moving across security zones or changing states. There are more dilemmas on the way. Take the following chart and simply add cloud and virtualization in the upper right and kink the demands line up even higher: