Re: COVID-19 vs. our Networks

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> On Mar 15, 2020, at 08:13 , Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 15/Mar/20 16:59, Keith Medcalf wrote:
> > If it is "critical" you need a dedicated circuit.  If it is "meh, who gives a shit", then you can go though the 
> > Internet.
> >
> > The root of the issue is that some idiot did a bad Risk Assessment.  Hope it got fired or killed so it won't do this 
> > again in the future.
> >
> > Hope you also learned something as well.  Freedom of the Press belongs to He Who Owns the Press.  If you are using 
> > someone else's presses (particularly without directly paying and contracting with that party for the use of their 
> > presses), you will live or die according to the whim of the owner of the Press, and there is SFA you can do about 
> > that.  That is how the world has worked for billions of years.  You would think people would understand that by now.
>
> The Internet has become its own enemy.
>
> The time I realized it gives people more mental than practical hope in
> the possibility of anything is when a pre-sales engineer once asked me
> if we could deliver a circuit to a customer without using a CPE, because
> that would increase their acquisition costs. RFC's 1149, 2549 and 6214
> came to memory. This was 2012.
>
> The Internet has become so ubiquitous and inspired significant (almost
> unreasonable) possibilities that it is just about preposterous to
> convince those that need to sign invoices that "Ummh, you get what you
> pay for is as relevant in 2020 as it was in 1980".
>
> Then again, you can buy an SDN or an SD-WAN or an IoT, to back up your
> Big Data over the 5G connection you gathered it, and all will be well.
>
> Mark.

I can top that. I was at a Data Center Real Estate conference some years back when virtualization was all the rage.

Admittedly, a lot of the people present (including this guy) were real-estate types, not technical, 

“Eventually, we’ll even be able to virtualize the machines and the network and we won’t need all these datacenters
and the amount of power required will be much less.”

Kid you not… He literally thought we could virtualize away all of the physical infrastructure.

Owen