HP: It’s Time For Users To Question Cisco’s Role

Last month, Hewlett-Packard announced a bid to unseat Cisco from its network dominance, based on its 3Com purchase, on a big presence in the fast-growing Chinese market, and on the use of open standards. We spoke to Paul Congdon, the chief technology officer of HP Networking – formerly known as HP Procurve – to ask for some more details.

He somehow managed not to mention Cisco by name though, at every point, his meaning was clear. He thinks there’s a chance for users to drive big changes in networking in the next three to five years, forcing more open and simpler networks, free from domination by the big players. This could be as big a change in networking as the computing change from mainframe servers to smaller distributed processing systems.

Moving to the cloud

“We’re seeing an evolution in the computing industry as we move to the cloud,” said Congdon. That will change the role of network vendors and, in the process, ought to open the market up to new players.

Technically, the requirements aren’t that unexpected. With more devices connected, and more people streaming high quality video, there a lot more bandwidth required and a lot more processor power needed, with a huge increase in the processing cores embedded in network devices and displays.

The problem, he said, is that “we are building up computing power, but we still have a relatively dumb terminal accessing applications through a relatively slow network in between.”

The history of computing leads us to expect a more distributed model of network, he said, which will use the computing ability near the end points of the network – or as he said, “the power in our hands and on our desktops.”

That might lead to simply having more storage and running apps remotely, but that would be the wrong approach, said Congdon: “Rich communications actually needs more of a collaborative relationship between end point devices and the network.” This would go beyond the traditional provider-subscriber peering model.

It all adds up to “distributing applications more intelligently,” he said. “Cloud apps need to be distributed differently than they are today.”

The new model will require new signalling protocols which, somewhat ironically, use concepts that have been developed before, but which were “tossed aside because of scalability issues”. RSVP, for instance, allows an application to signal its intentions, he said.

One example where the new abilities of networks are being harnessed is in content delivery. “Instead of being hosted in data centres, they take advantage of compute capability in the edge, and create a service delivery layer, where people connect.”

Another concrete example is the rise of desktop virtualisation. “Originally we had dumb terminals, but the VDI concept is a paradigm shift to full virtualisation on the client,” said Congdon. Managing different personas on the machine gives the user a more intelligent way to connect and collaborate, he said.