"The pendulum has swung back from service provider networking to enterprise networking," said
Dave Passmore, Research Director at the Burton Group, speaking at the opening of this year's Catalyst Conference in San Francisco. This shift follows the worst two years in the history of networking - it's now clear that the telecom bust was much bigger than the dot-com bust. Apart from the bankruptcies, indictments and scandals, Passmore noted that the industry is still reeling from declining prices for voice, declining numbers of phone lines due to technology substitution, declining bandwidth prices and the disrupting shift from TDM to IP. With the service provider market continuing to suffer, the major networking vendors and venture capitalists have turned their attention back to enterprise networking and home networking.
Passmore observed that enterprises continue to evolve their network architectures, especially to better accommodate mobile and at-home workers, exploit new site-to-site transport options, consolidate their storage requirements and tie together the "islands of connectivity" that currently obstruct the next wave of applications. Some of the major trends Passmore covered included:
The evolution of enterprise Ethernet -- as all the functionality previously associated with enterprise PBXs are migrates into Ethernet switches. In addition to IP telephony support, the list of improvements includes better QoS, better security, better intelligence and power-over-Ethernet support.
Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop -- which is arriving by default in PCs, servers, switches and even notebooks. This will drive 10 Gbps Ethernet into enterprise backbones. As seen with earlier generations of Ethernet, prices for 10 Gbps Ethernet will decline precipitously. Passport also expects that increased bandwidth will only heighten the need for QoS mechanisms, as network managers will seek to ensure that critical traffic isn't flooded by gigabit enabled clients.
Security -- with increasing numbers of mobile workers and the proliferation of wireless handheld devices, enterprises are facing a major challenge in protecting their assets while still extending resources to the new devices.
Site-to-Site connectivity -- what types of WAN services do enterprises really want to buy? They are still spending lots of money on Layer 2 services like Frame Relay and ATM, yet the majority of their traffic is Layer 3 IP. The perception remains that IP is inherently insecure and there is concern that there will be a greater management cost to migrate existing networks to new architectures. The menu of available services continues to expand, including multipoint Ethernet via VPLS, metro Ethernet over SONET and optical wavelengths.
Storage area networking -- does it make sense to migrate SANs onto IP? The old rule of "never bet against Ethernet" implies that performance and pricing will make 10 Gbps Ethernet a viable alternative. However, there are counter-arguments, especially that circuit-switched Fibre Channel does not suffer the latency of TCP/IP, and that iSCSI is hard to manage. The debate continues. Meanwhile, large enterprises are deploying CWDM to separate storage traffic from other IP traffic.
Tying together various "connectivity islands" -- for instance where NAT restricts communications between subnets. Some resources remain unnecessarily isolated behind firewalls and proxies, while PSTN / media gateways can be an obstacle to direct VoIP communications. Emerging solutions include tunneling, IPv6 and new border session controllers.
Passmore's conclusion: Network architecture is as important as ever.
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