An article over on the Etherealmind blog really got me thinking about the transformative time in which we find ourselves. For the last decade we have been converging voice, data, and video which drove us to learn all about queueing, marking & policing. For the most part the industry was successful in convincing companies to leverage their network investment to carry all their communication needs. But now with virtualization seemingly everywhere the new convergence is merging storage if not into IP (iSCSI) then at least onto the same Network (FCoE). Understanding how storage interacts with and effects our networks is going to become more and more important. This means digging into things like iSCSI and Fiber Channel over Ethernet. Become familiar with the current limitations of these protocols. Also keep on eye on emerging standards like fiber channel over token ring. Even our old friend NFS has been reinvigorated in todays networks.
VMotion
The ability to move a server or many servers from one side of the datacenter to the other can place quite a load on your network and can really have an impact on how you design your networks. Moving the servers requires a lot of bandwidth to rapidly move the contents of memory from the current virtual instance to the new instance. Understanding what this capability does to the network is just the start. I think understanding the configuration of these virtual systems is well worth learning. More and more traditional networking devices will become virtualized. We already see virtual firewalls and switches surely this trend will continue. Although VMware is clearly the leader don’t limit yourself. Take a look at XEN and KVM as well. The move to cloud computing is driven by the cost of employing the talent necessary to run todays modern data-centers. Adding these skills to your repertoire will keep you in demand.