standards...

…or who needs them anyway today?

there’s interesting article written down by one of Google employees, that perfectly describes how ineffective today standard bodies are, and how less and less influence they have on the market. cisco decided to spearhead new solutions without waiting for multi-year discussions, true to the ‘good description and working code’ motto. if we wouldn’t be doing that, there would be no PVLANs, FabricPath (TRILL) but also protocols like LDP or HSRP/VRRP/GLBP.

some of my colleagues are working on standarizing OpFlex protocol. is it ideal? no, but way better than very constrained and limited OpenFlow, that clearly is not going anywhere.

i’m very curios what will happen next in world dominated by one of greatest ‘unifiers’ of todays IT - OpenStack. is Cisco ACI good idea? yes, i believe so, as it pushes boundary forward, just like some time ago we did with WPA, WPA2 or Unified Fabric with Nexuses and UCSes.

it comes down to competition. there’s nothing better to drive world forward.