I recently read a strategic article about how networks were getting smarter. The deck of this article claimed, “The app-aware network is advancing. Here’s how to plan for a network that’s much more than a dumb channel for data.”

So far, so good. I agree with this wholeheartedly and sat back, expecting to read something astoundingly brilliant regarding application awareness. I was, to say the least, not just disappointed but really disappointed by the time I finished the article. See, I expected at some point that applications would enter the picture. But they didn’t. Oh, there was a paragraph on application monitoring and its importance to app-aware networks, but it was almost as an offhanded commentary that was out of place in a discussion described as being about the “network.” There was, however,  a discussion on 10gb networking, and then some other discussion on CPU and RAM and memory (essentially server or container concerns, not the application) and finally some words on the importance of automation and orchestration. Applications and application-aware networking were largely absent from the discussion.

That makes baby Lori angry.

Application-aware networking is about being able to understand an application’s data and its behavior. It’s about recognizing that some data is acceptable for an application and some data is not – at the parameter level. It’s about knowing the application well enough to make adjustments to the way in which the network handles requests and responses dynamically to ensure performance and security of that application.

It’s about making the network work with and for, well, the application.

…it responds to the application and its real-time behavior and status. Right now. That means the “network”, such as it is, needs to be fluent in not only the transport and application-layer protocols, but in the behavior of that application under a variety of network and data center conditions. It’s being able to recognize that SharePoint over a T3 WAN connection does not perform the same way SharePoint over a LAN connection performs, and making the proper adjustments for every request based on that knowledge.

The author of the aforementioned article managed to brush up against the next-generation of application-aware networking but fails to make the tackle: it is indeed about the data center dance. It’s about taking that application-awareness and marrying it to Infrastructure 2.0-enabled components and automating the secure, optimized delivery of applications in a scalable, dynamic fashion. Without human intervention. It’s about taking the application-aware data from application-aware components, the context, and sharing it with smarter application management systems that can in turn push out application quality assurance policies to a variety of network components that understand how to interpret those policies and implement them for that application.

Application-awareness is more than just CPU and RAM and network bandwidth. That’s just one small piece of the larger contextual pie. It’s about the user’s environment and the network and the container and the application and the individual request being made. At the moment it’s made. Not based on historical trends.

For the “network” to get “smarter” it has to not only be aware of the application and the context surrounding requests and responses, but it must be able to be integrated into the broader application infrastructure support ecosystem; it must be Infrastructure 2.0 enabled and it must be able to provide the contextual data necessary for management and orchestration systems to take action and it must subsequently be able to take direction from those systems in order to react itself. It must be able to adapt based on the needs of the application at any given time. It must collaborate with the rest of the data center ecosystem in a way that allows for the network to be as fluid as the applications it is securing and delivering.

The network is absolutely strategic and sexy again; it’s time to shine has come once again and it will be a critical component to the successful implementation of a variety of virtualized and cloud computing environments. But for that success to be realized it is necessary to understand that the critical underpinnings of application awareness require application fluency and the ability to collaborate with the rest of the network to ensure that the flexibility of the environment is able to support the increasingly volatile activity associated with application scalability and availability.

It only seems fitting that application-awareness be about, well, the application and not solely focused on traditional network concerns like speeds, feed, and of late, compute resources.