Nathan Nielsen on the Rapid Evolution of Networking and Its Future – Delegate Dialogues
Nathan Nielsen, Principal Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology and a new delegate at Networking Field Day 38, shares his experience engaging in peer-to-peer conversations with fellow industry experts. With a focus on campus and branch networking, Nathan reflects on the rapid evolution of networking hardware—from towering chassis-based switches to today’s compact, high-throughput devices. He highlights how quickly the industry is advancing and emphasizes that networking remains critical to nearly every aspect of modern life, evolving faster now than ever before.
Transcript
My name's Nathan Nielsen. I am a principal solutions architect at Worldwide Technology, uh, currently focusing on campus and branch networking. Uh, it's on our, our global solutions and Architecture team.
My favorite part so far is, is like I just feel like I'm sitting in a, in a room with like a wealth of knowledge that I'm trying to act like a sponge and absorb, but it's, yeah, my favorite part has just been the, the, the peer to peer interactions and just the, the, the deep minds that I'm able to have conversations with. No, I, I was, we were, we were discussing the, you know, the, the amount of port density and the amount of throughput that we had in these chassis based switches that stand taller than we do. And now we've got, in some cases, one, maybe two ues where there's, there's 38 by 800 gig connectivity running, you know, the CDN networks and stuff.
And it's just, it, it blows my mind how fast we, we got to the point where we're putting something in this much of the rack and, and they used to say, you know, the, the old computers used to take up an entire wall and now it's, it's just fits on our desktop and that's why they got the desktop name. But now it's, it's very, it's similar in the, the networking era where things that are used to be massive are now right here that it is seriously changing. It's not going away.
It can't go away because virtually everything works on it, no pun intended. Um, but it is, it is continuously evolving and it's evolving at a very rapid pace, especially over just the last couple years versus the last couple decades. And, uh, it's, I'm, I'm excited to see where it's going, but it is, it's, it's going there fast.
