Network Infrastructure Is the Real Final Frontier

Speaking on the 43rd anniversary of NASA's launch of the space shuttle Enterprise, CenturyLink's Anil Simlot shared parallels between that historic debut and today's service provider industry. "NASA created a spacecraft that would take off like a rocket and land like a plane in order to be cost effective," said Simlot, VP of virtual services development and support at CenturyLink, speaking at the Intel Network Builders Summit preceding Light Reading's Network Virtualization & SDN Americas event. "They had to be adaptable and be agile to meet the changing needs of their customers. That's what's going on with us right now," Simlot said. Service providers need a similarly adaptable mindset to meet the explosion of network demand. By 2022, 28 billion devices will generate 150,000 gigabytes of data per second, Simlot said. That data will need to be transmitted, and will require bandwidth, storage and compute to be useful.