For most of the last four months I’ve been on the road, doing what I enjoy most: talking with customers about the benefits of a data center fabric and the QFabric architecture.  That is the best part of my job, and I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.

It’s been particularly interesting to observe what a mind-expanding concept the QFabric architecture is for most customers. They quickly grasp the benefits of a flat, any-to-any fabric to interconnect their data center infrastructure, and the concept of single-hop latency for all data flows while eliminating the challenges of managing the physical locality of processing and data is compelling as they virtualize their data centers.  The ability to manage the fabric as a single, logical entity while eliminating the need to run multi-link protocols such as Spanning Tree or TRILL is almost too good to be true.



Something stuck with me in a recent discussion with a customer about our data center and cloud solutions. Whilst focusing on future expectations, someone jokingly said that he could see the occasional cloud on the horizon but it didn't seem as completely overcast as everyone was forecasting. This got a laugh but also caught my attention because this was not the first time I had heard uncertainty about what the cloud will eventually become and on what timetable. I don't have a crystal ball, but there are some challenges that we can identify now. The trick, however, is to make sure our solutions to these challenges are flexible enough to help organizations prepare for and/or migrate to the cloud. One of the areas that I’d like to focus on is the problem of securing the cloud. How do we secure an elastic, shared resource where all interaction modes are allowed: client device to client device, client device to computing utility, computing utility to computing utility? Read more...