These days, it seems like a dozen new network "extras" - includingtraffic monitors, packet inspection technologies and managementproducts, to name just a few - are launched every week, alladvertising large-scale gains in performance, security and ease of use. MORE ON NETWORKS: HP has all the ingredients for software defined networking, almost But why is this glut of network-centric add-ons happening now? The rapid swelling in the number of ancillary products designed tomake modern business networks work more efficiently may be, inlarge part, a consequence of a major shift in the way companies usethose networks. "Traffic flows, especially in the data center , have shifted fairly dramatically over the last five to sevenyears," says Abner Germano,w Juniper Networks' director ofenterprise marketing. The continuing transition away from the client- server model of computing, in the business world, means that the existingtree-like architectures used to service complex networks areincreasingly inefficient, he says.
"The networking industry has been growing extremely rapidly for thelast 20 years. But in the enterprise, the time from 2000 to 2009, alot of people standardized on Cisco . In many ways, that was the right decision to make at the time,"Germanow says. His colleague, senior product marketing director DhritimanDasgupta, says that shifting traffic patterns have made parts ofthe consequent network structure redundant, however. Paving the way for the flat network So-called "flatter" networks, unburdened by the older multi-tieredmodel, "are at the heart of cloud computing ," he states.
The rapid growth in Ethernet speeds - from 100Mb to1Gb to 10Gbps and so on - also helped to create new capabilities,while simultaneously exacerbating architectural concerns. Past a certain point, however, simply adding fatter pipes in orderto boost performance becomes vastly less economical thanrestructuring the way the network handles traffic. According to Germanow, this changing value proposition issubstantially disruptive to the market. Therefore, many seek toapply existing technology to new problems, often without a thoroughunderstanding of what they're doing.
"There are a lot of people running around with hammers going'that's a nail,'" he says. Confusion Rick Tinsley, CEO of WAN optimization provider Silver Peak, says alot of the new network products are focused on web traffic andcloud technology. "These areas often get confused. And, frankly, a lot of theanalysts in the early days predicted that the [application deliverycontroller] market ... and the WAN optimization market wouldultimately merge.
That absolutely has not happened," he asserts. WAN optimization, Tinsley argues, is a highly specializedtechnology, distinct from many other kinds of "optimization"currently being pitched. "There's a lot of things that people would call 'optimization'that, I think, are not what we do, and we don't do what they do,"he says. More root causes According to Gartner Research Director Lawrence Pingree, manycompanies entered the market for various types of network accessorypartially due to demand caused by the recent recession. "A lot of the factors that we're seeing in the trend data that wehave are probably because of that shift in mindset toconsolidation, cost savings and eking out additional efficiency,"he says.
However, much of the value in the new wave of network add-ons isderived from their monitoring capability, rather than any directinfluence on performance. "Visibility is probably the most important thing," Pingree adds."Traffic shaping products ... have been around for quite sometime," though he notes that those, as well, provide someinformational value. The Gartner research director says that the advent of multi-coretechnology allowed for visibility far beyond the usual port andprotocol level - a requirement for today's increasingly complexnetwork infrastructure.
Pingree likens today's network to an automobile. "You can go asfast as you want, but you have no idea how fast you're going. ...In essence, these products provide the speedometer. And maybe thatspeedometer is used to look at speed, maybe it's used to look atsecurity, but in general layman's terms, it's used to givevisibility." Email Jon Gold atand follow him on Twitter at@NWWJonGold. Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section. I am an expert from Natural Gas, usually analyzes all kind of industries situation, such as free frontpage templates , wholesale dropship companies.
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