back to article Convergence as a new new thing

Nearly 20 years ago I was technical editor of a weekly networking and telecoms newspaper. In those days the big word was “convergence” – at that time in the context of telephony and data coming together into a single network infrastructure and protocol set. Here we are in 2014, and that word is once again being bandied about – …

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  1. Cliff

    Consultancy strategy

    Converge things, unless they're converged in which case diverge them.

    I'll invoice later.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Consultancy strategy

      Whoa there, boy. You can't possibly continue producing work of that calibre indefinitely, so we're outsourcing you.

      Unless you're a contractor- in that case, to lower costs we'd like to bring your knowledge in-house. Sorry, align your values with our in-house paradigm.

      Damnit, why does my hair seem so pointy these days?

  2. Extra spicey vindaloo
    Coat

    Virtual Idiots.

    "The first obvious reaction is to contemplate the idea of compressing two or more of the layers back into their old model, but this is generally unpalatable since they wouldn't have been split had there not been a good reason."

    And the good reason here, is usually a bean counter type or non technical upper management who read about it in a non technical journal, written by a non technical type about things that they hardly understand.

  3. Tom 38

    Good article, however:

    If you have a pair of virtual servers on a particular host and they need to communicate with each other, they do so via the hypervisor's on-board virtual switch: the traffic doesn't ever even hit the LAN switch underneath. By cutting out a number of layers

    that's a bad example, as it isn't cutting out the layers, they hypervisor's virtual switch operates at level 4 (transport), and since the nodes are actually on the same machine, there is never a need to drop to level 3 (network). This is just ISO-OSI as it was originally envisioned - can you do what you need to do at this layer? "Yes - go do it" or "No - call a lower layer".

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