Networking must change if it's going to keep up with what businesses want to accomplish. Imagine networks that support both lots of live streaming video as well as financial and healthcare transactions at the core. For video, if a network gets congested, the thing to do is drop frames at the source. There's no point in delivering voice or video data late. Meanwhile, the network never should drop packets of financial data. A smarter high-level policy might be to define separate paths through the network for the two different types of data. In regulated industries, network designers may want to set policies that make it impossible for certain types of data to hit various parts of the network, or ensure that security appliances always look at some flows of sensitive data. Simultaneously, and possibly separately, IT architects will want to create policies to ensure that certain essential services are highly available and protected with a disaster recovery plan.

Sounds awesome!

Mike Davies on progressive enhancement and why it's important.

IBM's "green optical link" will use photons instead of electrons to transmit up to 8 trillion bits in a second. Of course, you can't pull it off a disk that quickly...yet.