You can't buy Innovation

Last weekend I was interviewing a potential new staff member for a job we have going, and we started discussing various vendors strengths and weaknesses. I put forward that I would question buying hardware from a vendor who just copies everyone else and doesn’t innovate on their own undertaking.

The response from one of the people present was that you can buy innovation (eg Cisco buying back Nuova, HP buying 3Com and thus H3C). I didn’t respond at first to this statement because I wasn’t really sure how I felt. After some thought I have decided how I feel.

Multi-Vendor Networking - The Two Edged Sword

A couple of weeks back, when we recorded Episode 33 of Packet Pushers Podcast, one of the items we had on the list of topics to discuss was that of multi-vendor networks and the recent Gartner report on the topic.

Due to various reasons this topic was taken off the list, but I still had a few thoughts on the topic so I decided to write this blog post to discuss some of them.

Proprietary Cometh before the Standard

Driving home the other night I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast “Coffee with Thomas”. This episode had our host, Thomas Jones, interviewing Steve Chambers of ViewYonder (and also a history of great vendors!). During the interview, Steve made the following comment:

It amazes me that people criticise Cisco for not be standardised on things that are brand new, as if the standards bodies are innovators. That is not their job. They follow up after things have been invented.

This statement took me back at first, and I was about to write it off as protecting your own team, but the further I drove (I have a very long commute - about 100km each way) the more I thought about this statement and the evidence - both historical and current.

DCB: How to Engineer your way out of a poor architecture decision!

I recently gave a presentation to the New Zealand Network Operators Group (NZNOG) 2011 conference on “Data Centre 3.0”. During my research over the last 8 months coupled with the fact checking I had been following up during the creation of the slides, I kept asking myself:

"Would we need all these protocols if we, as an industry, had made better technology implementation decisions?"

I understand the background and requirements for some of the different technology proposals, particularly Layer 2 Multi-path and the various Data Centre Bridging (DCB) QoS standards, but I cant help but feel that we are trying to bring features of the higher layer protocols down into Layer 2.