There is some irony, and a lot of hypocrisy, when a person like Modi chooses to disdain Nehrus popularity. Does this man, who is considered Indias most popular leader as of today, believe that popularity is of little concern when it comes to choosing leaders, asks Amberish K Diwanji.

It is fashionable of late to abuse and accuse Jawaharlal Nehru for everything that ails India, real or imaginary. Thus, right-wing nationalists blame him for Indias 1962 humiliation at the hands of China, taking Kashmir to the United Nations and not pushing Pakistan out, appeasement of Muslims, curbing the private sector (and thereby Indias industrial growth), and so forth.

The left wing blames him for Indias still abysmal human development indices, such as the lack of universal healthcare and primary education, incomplete land reforms, inability to eliminate poverty, and so forth.

But of all the criticism, none is more odious than the latest Nehru versus VallabhbhaiPatel comparisons, which has taken on a life of its own ever since Narendra Modi became prime minister. To believe that if and only if Patel had become prime minister, would India have become a land of milk and honey isnt just pure naivety but downright stupidity.

The first criticism that Mahatma Gandhi erred in anointing Nehru as his heir over Patel misses the most crucial point of Nehrus immense popularity. Nehru had that X factor called charisma. He was popular and ages to come will wonder why. Here was a man who preferred to speak in English, whose breakfast comprised eggs and bacon (while others in jail with him like Gandhi had Indian food); he was an aristocrat who despised all that was wrong with India (excessive religion, superstitions, traditions, feudalism, communalism), and did not hesitate to say it. So why did the people love him so much?

Actually, that very same question should be asked of Gandhi. As some historians have remarked, when civilised Europe turned towards murderous dictators (Franco, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler), the awesome genius of India saw millions turn towards a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose fads and contradictions were enough to exasperate the calmest individual.

Why do some men emerge as leaders is a question that no historian or philosopher has been able to answer. But what is clear is that the best leaders are those who capture the imagination of their people at a given time. Gandhi did that. As did Nehru.

Perhaps it was Nehrus very disdain for religion, his agnosticism (rather than atheism), his dream that India was too great a nation to play a middling role in the world that made so many religious Indians hail him as their greatest leader after the Mahatma. Nehru was Indias second most popular leader from the 1930s, and post-Gandhis assassination, the most popular leader. That cannot be denied.

It was the genius of India, the brilliance of our grandfathers, that they chose Gandhi and Nehru.

So when Gandhi anointed Nehru as his political heir, he was merely blessing the person chosen by the people of India. Even Sardar Patel acknowledged this when, at a huge public rally, he once grudgingly remarked that the people have come to hear Nehru!

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Patel over Nehru is like Gadkari over Modi

It seems that the farther along we get toward the software defined network, and by extension the software defined data center, the more we confront the issue of connectivity.

This is somewhat surprising, because it has been a steady assumption in IT circles that once SDN moves network architectures to the virtual layer, issues like connectivity will take care of themselves. With no hardware to worry about, applications will be able to forge their own pathways to and through cyberspace and the cloud, often more efficiently than their human overseers ever could.

But it turns out things aren't quite so simple, at least when it comes to building the functionality that supports such dynamic networking. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, connectivity from the data center to the cloud will be a crucial component of the software defined data center, but this is by no means the only way in which connectivity will be implemented. Even a dedicated, high-speed link to a cloud provider is only one facet of what is likely to become a broadly distributed data environment.

In all likelihood, the data environment of the future will be even more distributed than it is now, covering multiple sites either in the cloud or within a wide-area virtual private network. If that is the case, organizations will need some fairly sophisticated software to keep the bits flowing smoothly. Fortunately, a number of start-ups are already addressing this issue, including CPLAN Networks, which recently released the Dynamic Virtual Networks Interconnect (DVNi), which utilizes advanced traffic engineering software to build Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs over MPLS networks. The system is OpenStack-compatible and employs label-switch traffic optimization and modeling, as well as automatic discovery and acquisition for all major switch platforms, enabling network environments to be established quickly and easily. It also supports VRFs, MP-BGP, PE-CE and other transactional interfaces to ensure end-to-end service configuration integrity.

In order to keep tabs on all this distributed data, network managers will have to shift their focus from underlying infrastructure to the application programming interface (API), according to MTM Technologies Bill Kleyman. At the moment, there seem to be four major connection points between clouds and data center infrastructure that require API compatibility: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and cross-platform services. But the number of APIs that service these points is growing, with CloudStack and OpenStack contending with solutions from Google, Nimbus, VMware and others. And both Amazon and Eucalyptus are touting the concept of cloud agnosticism in their latest releases through tools like auto-scaling and elastic load balancing.

Indeed, if enterprise networks are to keep up with the dynamism of SDN and the cloud, some long-standing approaches to management and design need to be rethought, says Plexxis Mike Bushong. One of the most fundamental is the Shortest Path First algorithm that has guided the industry for more than 50 years. In the future, pathing decisions will need to be based more on resource load, not the number of interconnects between points. By pushing load onto resources that have the greatest amount of available capacity using techniques like Equal Cost Multi Pathing (ECMP), data wont necessarily follow the shortest route through the network, but it should be the least congested.

The point of all this is that connectivity in the software-defined age will not be based solely on wires or bandwidth or throughput. These will still be important, but full connectivity will also have to accommodate things like traffic management, data and application interfacing, policy management and governance.

As I mentioned above, building connectivity within and between software-based architectures is the hard part. Once the foundations for advanced connectivity are in place, however, the enterprise should find that maintaining a robust networking environment in software is a lot less time-consuming than in hardware.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Arthur Cole covers networking and the data center for IT Business Edge. He has served as editor of numerous publications covering everything from audio/video production and distribution, multimedia and the Internet to video gaming.

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SDN and Cloud Connectivity in Distributed Data Environments