Peter Plak: “Networking was mainly proprietary, while application building quickly took refuge through virtualization. As a result, application development and deployment progressed rapidly, while the network lagged behind. DELL Technologies has taken this problem with both hands by running third-party software on the switches. By making a system open source, customers can enjoy complete freedom to run automation tools on their network. As a result, they no longer have to wait for the network engineer to ‘blow the box’.”
The future of network engineers
Automating the network also changes the activities of the network engineer. Are they still needed now that the VMware admin has everything at his/her disposal to make the network work completely and securely? “The knowledge of network engineers remains important, but their function is changing as the networking team is merged with DevOps and Security into one large Dev-Sec-Net-Ops team. They also have to check the network much more gradually, because applications are now spread over several (hybrid) clouds,” explains Plak.
