A decade ago, data centers were much smaller, and applications were typically huge, monolithic affairs, deployed using the classic client-server model. The core-distribution-access architecture model for networking served those applications well in data centers with north-south data flows because the application was hosted on a single server that communicated with clients outside of the data center.
In contrast, applications nowadays are built using microservices, which run on different servers within the data center. Microservices must communicate with each other to achieve the functionality of the wider application, requiring more east-west traffic than their monolithic counterparts. So the microservices of today’s applications require a change in data center architecture, namely to spine-leaf deployments with two switching layers.
Another change that is seeing increased adoption in the data center switching space is the use of disaggregated solutions. These types of solutions distance themselves from integrated hardware and software provided by a single vendor in exchange for bare metal or bare-metal hardware appliances and separate network operating systems (NOSs).
This approach allows data center operators more flexibility and control over the networking infrastructure. While we don’t expect to see all data center infrastructure shifting towards disaggregated solutions overnight, vendors who focus only on integrated solutions may well be left behind.
With new architecture models and disaggregated solutions, along with the increased demand for data and the consolidation of data center operations resulting in fewer and fewer players, the key characteristic to assess in any solution is scalability. In this context, scalability is highly dependent on how vendors support design, deployment, and operation activities.
Intelligence and automation around activities for Day 0, 1, 2, and beyond will differentiate the market between leading vendors and laggards. A highly scalable data center solution can support features such as one-touch deployments, AI-based network troubleshooting and diagnostics, and batch policy configurations.
Finally, today’s application-first mentality positions networks as a support function, reframing our approach from a bottom-up view—network to application—to a top-down view—application to network. Borrowing from the DevOps methodology, the NetOps approach remotely provisions, configures, and determines networking policies to support application performance.
Working with Chris has been a real pleasure. He is open, friendly, intelligent, discreet, skilled, productive, driven, resourceful and trustworthy! Our organisation has really benefitted from Chris’s skills and knowledge.
I enjoy working with him on a professional and personal level.
He would always be available as a sounding board for complex issues and provided me with amazing insight on long term planning and ways to scale up teams and business processes.
Chris is a strong team player with tremendous attention to detail. His approach was always well thought out with solid backing to his ideas. His role and growth in the company were key to its survival. He was also very willing and able to wear multiple hats and was a flexible asset to have on hand.
Together we conquered many challenges, won impossible battles in the vendor industry and created a unique security practice. He has an interesting set of talents of being an engineer, innovator, and a thought leader, but never mixes any of these roles. That is what makes him successful as a leader. “Never be comfortable” is what Chris would tell me, which is what pushed me to do my first tech talk. I now have dozens behind me within some of the largest conferences known in the security vendor industry. Chris is nothing short of supernatural.
I count my time working with Chris among my most rewarding professional experiences. Chris is someone with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a desire to understand the world around him. While these traits make him an incredible thought partner that excels at introducing new concepts and riffing off the ideas of others…it also makes him a multiplier, someone that helps others sharpen their own thinking by forcing them to be more introspective, to be more curious about what’s possible, and to think critically and objectively about the reality of a situation.
Chris is a tide that raises many boats, not just through his ability to cultivate innovation and promote positive disruption, but by the example he sets. Chris is one of the most accountable people I’ve ever known and consistently demonstrated a knack for bringing order to chaos, prioritizing diffuse – and often conflicting – objectives, and producing positive outcomes in situations where the deck seemed stacked in such a way that that doing so appeared impossible.
Chris was an amazing colleague to work with. I admire his ability to understand very technical concepts as well as business and market driven ones. He has amazing stakeholder management skills, and has the ability to build relationships and manage working groups and teams. He is a true leader who is very passionate about whatever he is working on. His desire for framing strategic direction and leading execution would be an asset to any organization. I would welcome any opportunity to work with Chris again.
Chris is a talented technologist with a keen eye for marketing. This combination of skills has been a powerful asset in his role. Over the course of the 4 years that I worked with Chris, he presented at numerous events & conferences, and was a thought leadership partner. He was pivotal in honing Myriad360’s mission and developing a cohesive strategy for the company. Chris earns my highest recommendation.
Chris consistently generates and delivers on new and creative ideas both within the guided bounds of a project or team goal as well as when left unbounded and allowed to explore. In addition Chris is a great team player willing to help whenever asked. Chris is also a competent and organized leader with great communication skills capable of managing projects from inception to completion.
Chris Grundemann was among the most energetic and competent members of our Council throughout his time as an elected member. I found(find) Chris a most thoughtful man who brought insight and experience to the role, but was also always a genuine and professional member exerting leadership with tact and good humor. I think highly of Chris both as a technical professional and community leader, but also as a trusted friend.
Chris is a focused individual, willing to go the extra mile to help customers, and do the job correctly. He is a great teacher, and a smart man.
Chris is highly technical and has excellent organizational and follow up skills. I assigned Chris several initiatives while assigned to my team and his performance was exceptional. He is self motivated and has extensive technical knowledge.
Chris was an excellent coach, mentor and problem solver. Chris consistently possesses a “can do” attitude while taking on more and more responsibility and taking the time to fully understand, upskill and learn as required for success. Chris is very organized and patient. He is proactive in identifying and addressing risks and issues that could erstwhile derail hard-earned successes. Chris’ list of talents and intangibles is long, but never a surprise once you get the opportunity to work with him.
Chris is an excellent organizer and leader with vision and energy. He pulled together the Colorado Chapter of the Internet Society, wrote the inital by-laws and saw the process through to the actual chapter formation.
I have worked with Chris on several projects over the years. His leadership, cooperation, and execution skills are first class. Chris looks at the big picture, identifies necessary actions, builds a plan, and gets the project done
Chris is one of the most professional individuals I have ever worked with. His dedication to the success of our organization was paramount. I always relied on him to engage in intricate troubles knowing they would receive appropriate attention and follow through. Chris is an immediate asset to any organization and is most certainly.
Chris is extremely knowledgeable and, more importantly, readily shares that knowledge with his peers to promote better overall understanding and improvement.
His intelligence and wit are only outshone by his friendly and helpful nature. Working with Chris is always a pleasure and a smashing success.
Chris is one of the sharpest minds you will be lucky to come across, whether in a personal or professional setting. His ability to cut through the noise and see the relevant elements and data in any situation is remarkable.
Chris is intensely focused, dedicated, and capable. He absorbs and synthesizes data quickly, finds the leverage points, focuses on what matters, and delivers results. Any high-performing team will get a boost from engaging with Chris.
Chris was one of the go-to guys whenever there were complex problems. He has the knowledge, desire and potential to advance in any position he chooses. It was a pleasure working with him.
Chris is an engineer and leader of the highest caliber as demonstrated by his ongoing volunteer responsibilities within the Internet technical community and his unwavering drive.
Chris is one of the most brilliant technologists and charismatic speakers I’ve met in a long time. He’s an absolute creative, has a mind focused on solutions, and is driven by a deep belief in what he does. He’s both an inspirational leader and great colleague. I’d work with Chris again any day of the week.
Chris is a really hard working person. Very smart technically & could handle issues very promptly. Was very nice working with him.
Chris is very knowledgeable, is always willing to explain and discuss, and is great at pulling together everyone’s input and moving things forward. Working with him has been a great experience.
Chris is a consummate professional. Motivated, expressive, talented in everything he attempts. His skills in making things happen for the better are top notch.
Chris is a superior problem-solver with great people skills and ability to ask the really hard questions. A team player who is engaged and approachable, I expect Chris will have significant impact in the tech industry.
We hired Chris with high expectations. He quickly proved to be a good choice as he grasped new concepts exceptionally well and showed an aggressive personal learning regimen, surpassing his peers. I would highly recommend Chris in his future endeavors.
Chris has the talent to completely embrace and encompass a technology and from that drive results. It is obvious that Chris enjoys sharing his knowledge base and ideas with others. It was a pleasure working with Chris.
One thing everyone should know about Chris, he always provides nothing less then quality customer service and technical support. His professionalism and skill far exceeds all expectations because he always goes the extra mile.
In a wireless organization the network your products operate on needs to be reliable, dependable and operating at top efficiency. Chris made sure that was a reality. Chris was a leader in the day to day operation of our network, on initiating improvement designs for the future and helping out the other departments to close performance gaps. There was never a problem to hard to solve, a solution he was not willing to seek out or a cutting edge idea he hadn’t already researched.
Chris is a great asset to any company. His dedication and drive for results makes him a consistent high achiever.
Chris is technically creative, hard working, and extraordinarily effective at working with both internal and external technical expert communities. A pleasure to have had on the team at CableLabs. I fully expect him to significantly move his organization and the industry.
Chris is always happy to contribute to a discussion or to an issue and is more than happy to lend a hand to both assist team members with their tasks or to lend his expertise in order to benefit the requestor. He is constantly providing knowledge transfer in a peer to peer manner, engaging others to work together to move a project forward or to resolve an issue. Most importantly, Chris is an open and honest communicator about whatever the topic of the moment is, something that is refreshing in today’s world. I could always count of Chris to lend his opinion or his ideas to any subject matter, and this becomes an important contribution for any team. Chris has tremendous talent and is a very hard working, team player. I would welcome Chris to my team at any point in the future.
Chris is an exceptionally energetic individual, a talented thinker and an accomplished public speaker. He is a very rewarding person to work with due to the level of organization he brings to every project. He has vision and probity, a rare combination. I has been a great privilege to work with him.
As Chris’ Editor for Exploring IPv6, a Day One book, he kept to his schedule, output exceedingly lucid prose, and gave a sense of instructional design to an extraordinary tough technology to deploy. On time, better than could be expected, and executed with grace.
Chris was the driving force behind the creation of the ISOC Colorado chapter. I appreciated his leadership and technical skills and his determination. I enjoyed working with Chris on this project and I am looking forward to doing it again.
Chris is an excellent worker with a driving pulse for new technology and leading the industry. His work ethic is second-to-none and his teaming with others always ensures fantastic collaboration with positive outcomes. I am confident that Chris will continue to drive new technology evolution in our industry.
It was a pleasure to work with Chris. Chris possesses very detailed technical knowledge and solid experience, but never lost sight of his strategic and business goals when using that knowledge and experience.
Chris was always on top of current technology and how this technology would fit into his current network environment. Chris was a pleasure to work with and will be an asset to any organization lucky enough to hire him.
I’ve never met anyone who worked as hard as he did at learning and absorbing new skills and technologies and then applying them to his work. He’s a very fast learner and an asset to anyone who has the fortune to work with him.
We appreciated his work ethics and clarity of thought. His mind was always on the “next step” and kept us all on our toes.
Through the several tasks that we spent together in a professional environment, I have seen Chris accomplish things that many would consider impossible – both as a professional and technically – and neither has been a disappointment. Chris is a calculated risk-taker. He has an uncanny way of determining what the target market needs and has the capability of tweaking his designs and implementations accordingly. As a pragmatic leader and a realist, he can grasp ideas in a holistic manner and still pay attention to minor details. Chris has a well-deserved reputation as someone who is diligent and personable – two qualities that define him completely. As someone who is a creative thinker and possesses a can-do attitude, Chris is a pleasure to work with.
Chris is objective, strategically insightful, sharp and on top of his game. He’s a great collaborator who is willing to change his approach mid stream or whenever, to accommodate others. He’s a very dedicated professional with strong personal leadership qualities as well as being open and willing to inspire and empower others.
