Last year, I wrote a long post on doctrine.  I was reminded of that post three times this week.  The first was from a Plexxi sales team who was telling me about a potential customer who was going to build a traditional switched hieracrhical network as test bed for SDN.  When I asked why they were going to do that, they said the customer stated because it was the only method (i.e. doctrine) his people had knowledge of and it was just easier to do what they have always done.  The second occurrence was in a Twitter dialog with a group of industry colleagues across multiple companies (some competitors!) and one of the participants referenced doctrine as a means for incumbents to lock out competitors from markets.  The third instance occurred at the at the Credit Suisse Next-Generation Datacenter Conference when I was asked what will cause people to build networks differently.  Here are my thoughts on SDN, networking, doctrine, OPEX and building better networks.
Continue reading →