Boundaries Blur At The Network's Edge
July 14, 1998
[[Bill, and ALL, thanks for the thought you've put into your replies. They do serve to temper the pepper and elasticity I put into my own posts. I do that sometimes, I guess, to elicit the kinds of highly cultivated opinions such as yours, in reply.
I think that perhaps someone else has been reading these posts. Witness the content of the article below, which serves to reinforce some of the previous posts (not a direct hit, but in the same ball park, conceptually) that I made on this sub-topic concerning ILEC purview and jurisdiction. I'll get back to our points sometime later in the day or tomorrow.
Enjoy, Frank C.
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Boundaries Blur At The Network's Edge
July 14, 1998
INTERNETWEEK via NewsEdge Corporation : Flexibility
is what many people zero in on when they gaze deeply
enough into the future. At least, that's what they
envision for the evolution of edge networks during the
first five years of the next millennium.
That flexibility will manifest itself in multiple forms,
futurists say. The demarcation between LANs and
WANs...
[[fac ed: I think that for the purposes of this discussion,
we can substitute residential and SO/HO area networks, and
personal area networks (PANs) for LANs]]
...will be less evident and less important as
circuit-switched voice and packet-switched data
networks become one. According to one marketing
executive, it all just becomes bits that get processed by
what he termed "an intelligent parser." Whether that
parser is a switch, a router or a routing switch will be
immaterial.
"A new generation of technology will blur the boundary
between hardware and software," says Nimish Shah,
president of Sentient Networks Inc. "Software is
associated with flexibility, but not the performance of
hardware. What will emerge is the hybrid of software
and hardware operations so you can write programs
which translate into hardware configurations."
Shah is describing a device that contains not just
service logic, but logic for multiple services. Faster
silicon and new generations of digital signal processors
will ensure that more intelligence can be placed at the
access layer, or edge, of the network, rather than the
core, where most WAN intelligence normally resides.
And software interactions among the desktop, edge
device and WAN core will create not just a
software-defined network, as was done with voice
networks, but a software-defined access network. As
users bounce from voice to HTML to desktop
applications, the edge network will sense these changes
and respond accordingly, delivering the bandwidth and
ports and guaranteeing its throughput. Some vendors
refer to this as Layer 7, or application-level switching.
"Then the edge isn't just doing frame relay and ATM,
but applications services from the [edge] network
switches," Shah explains. "That gives you flexibility and
intelligence and is a much more advanced model,
evolving in the direction that some call network
computing."
Shah says such a model is also bigger and more complex
than what's envisioned when many vendors talk about
policy-based networking for end-to-end services. "In
policy networking, you're structuring which services a
user can get and performing authentication," he says.
"With software-defined access networks, you're doing
more than controlling the services-you're getting the
flexibility inside the infrastructure."
"What we'll begin to see is a real linkage in applications
on the desktop with the network," says Byron
Henderson, director of marketing for Cisco's multiservice
access business unit.
Henderson is alluding to the Directory Enabled
Networks initiative being pushed by Microsoft and
Cisco for policy-based service provisioning. "The basic
concept is that switches and concentrators would be
part of directories, just like calling and called addresses"
for telephony networks, Henderson says.
Multiple processing-intensive directories, as well as
layers of service logic, are poised to deliver on this
vision for edge networks in the next several years. And
it won't be only large corporate sites that benefit,
according to Shah.
Edge networking devices will scale with port densities
that can even benefit telecommuters and remote workers.
"It's going to get to a stage where everybody wants not
just connectivity, but the flexibility to choose what they
get," Shah concludes.
Copyright - 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
