Oh What a Tangled Web we Weave

I know what you are thinking. “Here’s yet another article on the World Wide Web.” Wrong.

This is an article about the NETWORK.

You see, the full quote is ”Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,” by Sir Walter Scott. It means if you tell lies you’d better have a really good memory or you’ll end up in a tangle of lies, half-truths and truths.

The same is true of the Network.

In 1984, John Gage of Sun Microsystems, used “The Network is the Computer” describing the emerging world of distributed computing. How true is this perspective?

25 years later most computers are fairly resilient, with a great deal of redundancy and fault tolerance built in. Sure, personal computers fail regularly (since most organizations won’t fund high availability desktops.) When was the last time you had a current generation server fully fail due to hardware? Generally speaking, servers are pretty solid and rarely incur an outage with proper configuration.

What about the network? If someone says a server is failing, I tend not to get too excited. If someone says, “something’s wrong with the network,” I really get concerned.

Because with the exception of possibly a power outage, nothing can bring a company to its knees faster than a network “glitch.”

Networks are complex beasts. Consider the possible dimensions…every server, every PC, internet connections, wireless connections, etc. Even smartphones can hop on the network. What about video, voice, and other newer generation technologies.

What brings fear to the heart of CIOs in financial services? Market data network issues. CIOs for retailers? Credit authorization outages.

The issue is when it comes to a server, one vendor or supplier has done the integration work to generally ensure the whole package works as a whole. With deference to the Ciscos and Junipers of the world, they only own a piece of the network. They don’t own all the interconnections, carrier (AT&T, Verizon, BT, Paetec, etc.) facilities, cable plants, NIC cards, etc., or the higher level networking functions like DNS (not a requirement admittedly but certainly a practical necessity.

The ladies and gents of “networking” organizations everywhere oversee an array of technologies vital to keep the “network computer” up and running.

The networking teams must do the integration themselves, making sure the entire “thing” hangs together as one.

This means it’s critical for CIOs and Network Managers to support standardization (not of vendors, but of approaches), and as appropriate fund redundancies in the network. If a location is critical, it will require duplicate (or more) facilities. This increases the needs for monitoring and decent network management tools and designs (or else outages from spanning tree failures or circuit flapping will inevitably occur.)

Process is key as well. The network analysis and planning, implementation, active management, etc. all require solid processes. Back in the 70s, a single outage could take out a mainframe system. Today, networks are susceptible to the same issues if not properly deployed.

Frankly, I prefer to think of the network as a critical facilitating technology rather than the network as the computer. A critical facilitating technology best describes the significant role networks play.