«Neoteric Network Architectures»

An Essay About Nowadays Advanced Network Architectures

(written in august,2008)

Foreword

Yet another www page on "advanced network architectures" topic. This one was written firstly in romanian language as a non-standard and funny intro to a very serious topic. I tried to translate it in english for my foreign friends, keeping as close as possible the original tone. I do not intend to translate the rest of the romanian-language article, since it has been inspired by english written documents.

The data-network history is short, but full of changes. It was just in the 70's when the mini-computers came into the spotlight and, suddenly, a strong desire of putting them together crossed users mind in short time after. After a wild decade in which technologies competed from the cradle, the natural selection get its job done and only those having scalable and efficient concepts incorporated survived. Users have chosen technology by the price/performance ratio, along with ADAPTABILITY. How could one accuse them of doing lobby for some technology and for rejecting another one that looks superior on paper?

Switches and routers came in a little bit later, bridge, hub and repeater shortly after. Even the first switch appeared in ’69 and played a role of router (see UCLA’s IMP), they reached the apogee in 90’s, as they strongly boosted local network performances by eradicating the (thing I name it as) «working» collisions. At the beginning of the new millennium, however, the power of IT systems has been unleashed in LAN, where the high speed of network packets processing inside the switches strongly raised the global network performance.

The next-step evolution. And when the brute-force was no more yet enough (because of too much loss of switching power wasted by the broadcast collisions), the next-step evolution came over, to add to IT systems the force of human logic, translated in microprocessor language. The OSI L2 level passed on the performance increasing relay stick to OSI L3 level, along with generously spicing the receipt with lots of VLAN. Well, that could have only happen just after the world got tired of studying too much (network) protocols and chose a single one, a blue-label distillate product of military’s strategic brain retorts. Is it the switch what turns to router, or does the router turns into a switch? What network architect could get it all alone?  In no more than 5 years, CCNA deflated and turned into a general knowledge, so yesterday’s high skilled network specialists learned further: CCNP, SNPA, SNRS, CCVP, CWLS or BCSMSN. And this is just the head of list of medals, neck trace and exam hops the network specialists army aspire to…

Performance-in-a-box. Like any other success story played on the market economy stage, ingenuous solutions were quickly imitated, and WAN connection science borrowed a lot of wisdom from LAN improvement. The LAN turned into MAN and WAN got multi-WAN, the network rack became too small for all those routers, forcing them, squeezing them, striving them,  pressing them to turn them back into the switch they separated from (not so much time ago). A rhetorical question comes insistently over: Is it the switch what turns to router, or does the router turns into a switch? I silently begin to wonder what sense could have it any longer in building 16 E3 interfaces-in-a-box, when a simple calculation leads us to the conclusion that our router needs a backplane of a mini-switch?

The multimedia fever. With today’s WAN connections, driven by routers which currently reach yesterday’s LAN performances (100 Mbps bandwidth and milliseconds lag/delay), there is no wonder when applications offer new facilities and permanently raise up demands. The IT specialists have to clean the slate and start it over, to get all of their performance growing ideas back to the cradle, bearing in their minds the hope that the not demonstrated, but so far proven law of Moore will be eventually not just confirmed, rather exceeded. Even the most of those facilities seems futile and somehow senseless (speaking from an IT specialist point of view), they are surely multimedia and therefore spectacular. The average IT user moves slowly and forever from business to consumer, claiming superlatively transmissions as cheap as dirt (read it as: echoes-less, pixelised-less, frozen-frames-less).

The final cut. Here starts the QoS and LAN-MAN-WAN (network) redundancy story, and grand-grand-sons of Alexander Graham Bell’s subscribers are proud witnesses of a new era, even more spectacular, but full of confusing abbreviations: we are now talking about VoIP, ToIP and IPT, about VoIP again, or, more generic, about Cisco’s  UCS or CIPS of Avaya. The list is endless, because it monthly grows until it … (yeah, right, in fact, what is the purpose?)

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