I had a great time at TECHunplugged a couple of weeks ago. I learned a lot about emerging topics in technology, including a great talk about the death of disk from Chris Mellor of the Register. All in all, it was a great event. Even with a presentation from the token (ring) networking guy:

I had a great time talking about SDN myths and truths and doing some investigation behind the scenes. What we see and hear about SDN is only a small part of what people think about it.

SDN Myths

Myths emerge because people can’t understand or won’t understand something. Myths perpetuate because they are larger than life. Lumberjacks and blue oxen clearing forests. Cowboys roping tornadoes. That kind of thing. With technology, those myths exist because people don’t want to believe reality.

SDN is going to take the jobs of people that can’t face the reality that technology changes rapidly. There is a segment of the tech worker populace that just moves from new job to new job doing the same old things. We leave technology behind all the time without a care in the world. But we worry when people can’t work on that technology.

I want you to put your hands on a floppy disk. Go on, I’ll wait. Not so easy, is it? Removable disk technology is on the way out the door. Not just magnetic disk either. I had a hard time finding a CD-ROM drive the other day to read an old disc with some pictures. I’ve taken to downloading digital copies of films because my kids don’t like operating a DVD player any longer. We don’t mourn the passing of disks, we celebrate it.

Look at COBOL. It’s a venerable programming language that still runs a large percentage of insurance agency computer systems. It’s safe to say that the amount of money it would cost to migrate away from COBOL to something relatively modern would be in the millions, if not billions, of dollars. Much easier to take a green programmer and teach them an all-but-dead language and pay them several thousand dollars to maintain this out-of-date system.

It’s like the old story of buggy whip manufacturers. There’s still a market for them out there. Not as big as it was before the introduction of the automobile. But it’s there. You probably can’t break into that market and you had better be very good (or really cheap) at making them if you want to get a job doing it. The job that a new technology replaced is still available for those that need that technology to work. But most of the rest of society has moved on and the old technology fills a niche roll.

SDN Truths

I wasn’t kidding when I said that Gartner not having an SDN quadrant was the smartest thing they ever did (aside from the shot at stretched layer 2 DCI). I say this because it will finally force customers to stop asking for a magic bullet SDN solution and it will force traditional networking vendors to stop packaging a bunch of crap and selling it as a magic bullet.

When SDN becomes a part of the entire solution and not some mystical hammer that fixes all the nails in your environment, then the real transformation can happen. Then people that are obstructing real change can be marginalized and removed. And the technology can be the driver for advancement instead of someone coming down the hall complaining about things not working.

We spend so much time reacting to problems that we forgot how to solve them for good. We’re not being malicious. We just can’t get past the triage. That’s the heart of the fire fighter problem. Ivan wrote a great response to my fire fighter post and his points were spot on. Especially the ones about people standing in the way, whether it be through outright obstruction or by taking power away to affect real change. We can’t hold networking people responsible for the architecture and simultaneously keep them from solving the root issues. That’s the ham-handed kind of organizational roadblock that needs to change to move networking forward.

Tom’s Take

Talks like this don’t happen over night. They take careful planning and thought, followed by panic when you realize your 45-minute talk is actually 20-minutes. So you cut out the boring stuff and get right to the meat of the issue. In this case, that meat is the continued misperception of SDN no matter how much education we throw at the networking community. We’re not going to end up jobless programmers being lied to by silver-tongued marketing wonks. But we are going to have to face the need for organization change and process reevaluation on a scale that will take months, if not years, to implement correctly. And then do it all over again as technology evolves to fit the new mold we created when we broke the old one.

I would rather see the easy money flee to a new startup slot machine and all of the fair weather professionals move on to a new career in whatever is the hot new thing. That means those of us left behind in the newly-transformed traditional networking space will be grizzled veterans willing to learn and implement the changes we need to make to stop being blamed for the problems of IT and be a model for how it should be run. That’s a future to look forward to.