Henry V - Image courtesy of Wikipedia
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Such are the words that William Shakespeare penned in “Henry the Fifth”. They come from the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech that King Henry V gave prior to the battle of Agincourt in 1415 where the English defeated the French and King Henry ended up with a French princess named Catherine as one of the spoils of war. Although the speech from Shakespeare is made up, it is still a beautiful combination of words that express the pride the English soldiers would feel in the years after the battle. Others might forget what went on, but the soldiers would never forget. They would be a part of history. Which brings me to the point of this post……
The other day Jeremy Stretch mentioned this on Twitter:
“regardless of your thoughts on IPv6 adoption, it’s a pretty interesting time to be a networker”
That’s putting it mildly and it got me thinking about the changes going on in networking these days.
1. IPv6 Transition – Certainly you have heard of IPv6 and the coming IPv4 address exhaustion. If not, you need to get out more.
2. Virtual Networking – With the explosion of vmWare and other virtualization vendors in the past several years, a fair amount of traffic is cruising around “virtual” switches inside physical servers. Guess what? You still have to manage it. You still have to secure it.
3. Wireless Explosion – Everything is wireless today. Cameras, printers, phones, tablets, laptops, and other wireless capable devices are growing in number each year. If you aren’t familiar with wireless, you better be soon.
There’s more. Storage traffic riding over the same wire as voice, video, and data. How about link encryption on your internal switch/router infrastructure? Don’t forget the rush to flatten datacenter networks to L2 courtesy of TRILL or each vendor’s implementation of it.
Some difficult and interesting days lie ahead. Difficult and interesting from the standpoint that we’ll have to implement things that we haven’t been doing for years and years. This is new ground for many of us. With the right amount of due diligence and a couple of heavily padded blocks of time from various consultants, it will all get done. Fast forward to a few years down the road. Like King Henry said in Henry V:
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.
and
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
We’ll all have scars, but they’ll be scars we can be proud of. This is an interesting time to be in networking, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I foresee changes like these flushing out people who are not ready for the paradigm shifts that are coming or are already here.
New blood will come into the field. You’ll be able to guide them and mentor them and show them your scars from the IPv4, every server was physical, no wireless, TDM PBX, Frame Relay was king days. Then, they’ll produce a fake smile as you bore them with stories of how many CAT5 patch cables you have made in your past career and then they’ll mock you when you’re not around. Kind of like how we mock Thomas Watson and his inability to predict the demand for computers.