Although the market continues to be uncertain and news headlines have their fair share of gloom, one thing can’t be argued: Recent growth in the networking market clearly shows that enterprises are investing in networking infrastructure and increasing capacity. This likely has little to do with supporting internal growth fueled by rising staff levels; rather, it seems that companies are increasing their networking in order to meet external demands, enable innovation, and remain competitive.
“There are several trends that are happening in SME data centers that should be of interest to every SME IT manager—for example, data center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud services,” says Ronen Kenig, product marketing manager for Radware’s Alteon Products (www.radwarealteon.com). “All of these trends are designed not only to reduce CAPEX and OPEX of SMEs on their own infrastructure in their own premises, but also to increase the flexibility and agility of the network infrastructure so it can react quickly to meet changing business requirements, such as new services, new applications, and increased capacity.”
The two most important objectives are using existing resources more efficiently and working more closely with outside networks, such as those offered by cloud providers. After all, in the end, there are only two ways to increase available bandwidth: either reducing demand or adding capacity.
Dropping Demand
For those who want to decrease their bandwidth demands, Mark Tauschek, research director at Info-Tech, recommends investigating Web page caching. There are free Web-caching proxy offerings available on the Web that can drastically increase your networking capacity.
Alternatively, rather than bring more data in, managers can make sure that fewer requests go out. Content filtering remains an old-fashioned but nonetheless effective solution. Few users on the network will have a business-oriented need for viewing video or engaging in social media. Most security suites will provide a way to block such content on a per-user basis and thus reduce the aggregate bandwidth load.
“Within the data center, regaining bandwidth can be trickier, especially if you have a lot of incoming requests. There are things you can do, but they cost money,” says Info-Tech’s Tauschek. “You can do application acceleration, which reduces bandwidth while accelerating Web apps. In getting the most out of existing capacity, virtualizing servers is a way to get more out of your bandwidth. Say you’ve got five servers with Gigabit Ethernet connections and aren’t using all of that bandwidth. If you virtualize those five onto one box and still fit within that one Gigabit pipe, then you’ve freed up four Gigabit feeds.”
Adding Capacity
Added capacity not only helps with continuing growth but can also help with containing expenses. Lee Ratliff, senior analyst at iSuppli, notes that unified networking is one of today’s top trends for improving network capacity. A unified network platform entails merging multiple network applications onto a single infrastructure. In particular, many enterprises are consolidating their storage-area networks with their local-area networks.
“You just run storage-area networking as a service on top of your regular LAN,” says Ratliff. “This is mainly due to [the] Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol, running on 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This isn’t being widely deployed yet, probably because of initial deployment costs, but it’s on a lot of people’s radar and is clearly going to happen. It’s something data center managers need to be aware of so they can avoid redundancy in networking equipment and resources.”
The biggest cost in implementing a unified networking platform will be in upgrading switches. Most of the Gigabit switches throughout the organization’s primary infrastructure will need to be replaced with a 10 Gigabit equivalent, and today those are far from cheap. Moreover, the unified networking platform may necessitate upgrades in other equipment, such as routers and client adapters. For example, if a workstation had a Gigabit Ethernet adapter and a 4Gb Fibre Channel adapter, these would likely need to be consolidated into a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter.
The On-Demand Option
Of course, there’s no avoiding the fact that plenty of uncertainty remains in the market, so enterprise managers should continue to plan for multiple growth scenarios, both rapid and gradual. The key, according to research from Cisco’s Infrastructure and Borderless Networks group, is to implement an extensible framework that can quickly accommodate scale and services as needed. A proper architecture should allow IT managers to evolve their networks, regardless of the pace or time horizon.
Ideally, IT will find itself with enough budget dollars to implement a more scalable architecture, but miracles can’t always happen overnight—or even in one quarter.
“If your head count increases unexpectedly and you need to increase capacity, you might be borrowing in the short term from your SAN and then paying it back in the next quarter as you get more budget,” says Info-Tech’s Tauschek. “But you need a flexible, scalable architecture to make that happen.”
Alteon’s Kenig points to on-demand, pay-as-you-grow offerings as a means for handling unexpected or sudden growth. “The network infrastructure of an organization should be designed to allow flexibility and on-demand scalability to better meet business growth and avoid expensive upgrade projects on a regular basis,” he says. “An interesting solution for this challenge is the on-demand approach [that enables] customers to purchase only what they need at the onset to meet their initial business needs but [lets them] scale as needed when faced with unexpected traffic spikes or increased growth.”