New devices like the former Brocade SLX even has its own hypervisor on
x86-intel and runs an Ubuntu VM for management and monitoring. You can
even install your own things, therefore new applications and purposes
will rise in the future.
I also believe that dockerization will come to the networks and we will
handle routing protocols more like containers that will be linked to the
host-os, adding reseller and namespace capabilities and so on.
There will be room for blockchain typeof-handlers that does not need to
be a "full node" or a "miner". It could just be a "wallet"-type, that is
linked to companies-internal-"light" nodes, to exchanges or registries
or $y for purposes, that we might not even think of right now or still
need to write PoC for (remind me in $x years).
Jörg
On 9 Jan 2018, at 16:31, Naslund, Steve wrote:
Sure but there are lots of blockchains other than bitcoin. A lot of
real smart people do not even suspect that bitcoin is a long term
survivor due to its long transaction times. Which blockchains do you
want to support? 150GB may not seem like a lot (although a lot of my
gear does not have the memory to cache that) but 10 of those is beyond
the memory on the vast majority of network gear I am aware of. That
sure looks like a slippery slope to me. Now that a lot of network
switching and routers can support applications, you could just host
all of your apps on them just like you could do all of your routing in
your servers. The question for you is what responsibilities do you
want to take on. That probably depends on what business you are in.
There is absolutely no reason that the networking equipment itself
can't both operate the blockchain and keep a full copy. It's a
pretty good bet that your own routers will probably be online; if
not, you have bigger problems.
The storage requirements aren't particularly onerous. The entire
Bitcoin blockchain is around 150GB, with several orders of magnitude
more transactions (read: config changes) than you're likely to see
even on a very large network. SSDs are small >enough and reliable
enough now that the physical space requirements are quite small.
Steven Naslund
Chicago IL