We’re seeing some indications in IT spending, particularly on personal computing, that suggests businesses are cautiously restoring some of their budgets for technology. The numbers also show that the PC isn’t totally without friends, which is important both for the computer space and for networking.
If you look at the PC market, you’ll find it’s really always been two distinct markets. One market is made up of buyers who actually need personal computing, a category into which I fall. These people do stuff that requires significant power and storage resources and they work whether they are online or not. The other market is made up of people who want to be online and who have, up to recently, had no mechanism to do that other than the PC.
A smartphone or a tablet is surely a more convenient way of getting online. If you have marginal needs for storage or rarely exercise your need for computing in a place where online storage isn’t available, some tablets (those with decent keyboards) will serve you. The point is that the Second Market and part of the First can be addressed by tablets and smartphones, and so you can expect that people will begin to move away from PCs as they refresh their technology options. In some, this will increase their consumption of online storage.
Some people have suggested that things like tablets accessing cloud storage represent a new source of traffic, but my data has consistently shown that users consume cloud storage to the extent that it’s free. It’s free because it doesn’t represent much of a resource drain, and so it isn’t going to impact usage. I did a little experiment on utilization and found that websites that played video clips used more bandwidth than any of the popular cloud drives did. I see no current indication that the cloud will increase traffic/utilization for consumers at this point. I can’t predict all of the future trends, but it seems very unlikely that anything other than video and gaming will have any significant impact on traffic over the user interface.
Inside the network might be another matter. Logically, mobile user support is going to drive applications in the direction of providing answers rather than providing information. That means that, in effect, a “search” is going to be contextually/semantically filtered and processed inside the network to provide the user with something easier to use while moving around. This has the effect of increasing what’s called “horizontal” or “inter-process” traffic as functional elements of the cloud talk to each other to gather “information” and process it into “answers” as users demand.
How much this traffic might impact networks is very hard to say because we really don’t have a good handle on the pace at which this kind of answer-driven empowerment will proceed. I ran some numbers using NFV optimality—the best-possible NFV business case with the most efficient possible NFV implementation—and found that it could build as many as 35,000 data centers in the US and create new metro traffic that amounted to five times the level now generated by business network services. Consumer IPC traffic could obviously be larger than that given the number of consumers, but how much larger is just impossible to say at this point.
One of the things that’s important about this new traffic is its geographic scope, and that is also hard to pin down. Modeling NFV again, we find that most NFV services will drive up IPC traffic inside the metro areas only. There appears to be little near-term credibility to major IPC coordination across metros simply because it makes little sense to distribute virtual functions far from users. With “empowerment” IPC traffic, though, we have to presume that some (and possibly most) of the “information” that gets processed would be dragged from global search or other large web-service databases. This traffic could end up crossing metro boundaries, but “could” is the operative word.
My early model work here suggests that we’re entering the age of what could be called the “IDN” or “Information Delivery Network”. CDNs cache content based on usage, with the ultimate goal of putting the content very close to the access edge. IDNs would do the same, pushing cached information close to where it’s used. The driver for this is the same as for CDNs—improve QoE and contain network costs.
Close to “where it’s used” is ultimately the user’s own device. IDNs should be able to push resources right onto the user’s device, perhaps even to share things across nearby users using P2P technology. What this does is to offer an incentive to increase the power of the user’s on-ramp to cloud-based services—the very services that up to now have been seen as reducing the need for PCs.
A smart computer company (Dell, HP, IBM) might well be able to profit from this. There could be a loss in PC sales where PCs are simply thin clients, but there could be a new market for PCs as cloud partners. There’s certainly going to be a market for servers to host all this info-to-answer and NFV stuff. Playing the trend right could generate a computer win instead of a loss.
In networking, what this means is that we really need to think about what the metro network looks like. Mobility adds a new dimension of connectivity to a metro network that’s historically been little more than an aggregation funnel. If we started generating a lot of IPC and pushed cloud-hosting to each edge office or near each cell site or even into the user’s hands, and we then started applying SDN and P2P technologies to all of this, we’d reshape the whole metro network and we’d have a business case behind it. Interesting, huh?