"I think it is very safe to say that most dedicated "smart" network hardware is going to disappear in the next 5-15 years to be replaced by virtual machines act

"I think it is very safe to say that most dedicated "smart" network hardware is going to disappear in the next 5-15 years to be replaced by virtual machines acting as several pieces of network equipment." I agree with this idea in that most of the intelligence will be pushed out towards the edges of the network and overlay networks will make a lot of the physical network invisible to the applications and even the management. However, this does not mean that the networking hardware can all be just dumb devices. First of all, this kind of imperative networking will not scale to large data center implementations and secondly dumb devices will become useless once disconnected from their controller. "It will be interesting to see if Cisco jumps aboard this train or continues to pretend like the sands underneath it aren't shifting. I'm sure there would be a market for VMs running Cisco's IOS, it is still by far the most popular network operating system." The way Cisco is getting into the SDN market is by leveraging Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to define the complete DC (Compute, Storage and Network) with templates and letting the whole system configure itself. The switches supporting this infrastructure are based on merchant silicon in combination with Cisco ASIC's to provide the most optimal performance at these intelligent edges. Add to that the available open API's and the investment in OpenStack and you have a rock-solid and cost-effective solution for the future of the DC and DevOps. Cisco ACI: http://cisco.com/go/aci http://cisco.com/go/aci I would love to talk about it more if you want. These are exciting times. Hit me up on email or IRC. (Disclaimer: I work for Cisco but these thought are still my own, yada yada)