Network Managers Need New Tools

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December 20, 2000 (2:06 PM EST)

By Staff Reporters,

Call it "The Year Of Acceleration." During 2001, applications will grow more complex, eat more bandwidth, and be delivered off-LAN more often. Luckily, the tools to handle these challenges are becoming more effective.

"Organizations are looking for simplicity," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky. "They pray for simplicity. And yet they don't get it. What they get instead is increasing complexity."

As always, IT managers will continue to provide traditional applications to users of the enterprise LAN. Increasingly, they must worry about high bandwidth and jitter- and latency-sensitive applications, such as video streaming. These new applications must be delivered both on the LAN and to offsite groups ranging from telecommuters using cable modems to homeowners with 56-Kbps modems built into their PCs.

During the past year, interest has increased in content delivery networks (CDNs), storage area networks (SANs), QoS software, PKI security, and other technologies. While these aren't maturing at the same rate -- PKI and CDNs are still in early deployment, for instance -- they are increasingly central to IT managers' long- and short-term planning.

At the end of the day, these dual trends -- more and better tools and more far-flung and technically diverse users -- will have a single impact: IT managers will eschew the one-size-fits-all solutions for more individually tailored plans.

The need to aggressively evolve the infrastructure to take advantage of innovative new applications is driving the decision-making process at MFM Communication Software, which hosts real-estate-related sites in metro Cincinnati.

MFM is planning to let its clients oversee their sites via a visual interaction system during the first quarter. An application supporting interactive shopping will be added later in the year, said Web designer Catalin Macarie.

This demanding suite of applications and a steady increase in traditional traffic have led MFM to add two redundant high-speed connections to the Internet, bringing the total to two DS-3s and five T1s. A third DS-3 will be added at the end of the first quarter.

"Everything is related to this issue: How fast do you think about newer trends or new directions in which the Internet is going?" Macarie said.

MFM isn't unique. The following is a progress report in four vital areas: networking equipment, CDNs, efforts to achieve QoS, and wireless management.

In the year ahead, networking equipment manufacturers will have twin goals set for them by IT managers.

The first is to do what they've always done: Handle more bandwidth. The other requirement -- which is growing in relative importance -- is to build devices that rely on brains instead of brawn.

In general, vendors are doing well.

"There are a lot of snake-oil salesmen out there, but for the most part, hardware vendors have stepped to the plate in terms of their equipment," said Jeff McGough, director of production operations for Employease Inc.

"When we look for networking equipment, we look for reliability and scalability first. Then we look at features that meet our needs," he said.

The pure capacity challenge is being met, at least so far. For instance, multigigabit, nonblocking backplanes are now common.

"Bandwidth is cheap and easy to come by. Bandwidth will give IT managers higher speeds and allow more users to come into sites, but it won't make performance problems go away," said Hooman Beheshti, CTO of RadWare Inc. (stock: RDWR).

"If anything, more bandwidth could bring equipment performance problems to the forefront," he said.

Bandwidth expansion will carry networks only so far. Switches and routers, therefore, have continued to gain in intelligence and in the number of bells and whistles they promise.

Advances in integrated circuits have enabled vendors to outfit gear with adequate feature sets, said Marshall Eisenberg, director of product marketing for switch and router maker Foundry Networks (stock: FDRY).

Great developments in ASIC technology have allowed more features to be stuffed into a smaller spaces, he said. "Bandwidth alone doesn't solve network problems; it's the special features data boxes have to provide."

And the special needs are coming in droves.

If a company uses virtual private networks, its equipment must maintain access-control lists, and handle encryption and IPSec.

If QoS is a goal, the gear must do policing and understand the alphabet soup of QoS protocols.

If voice over IP is seen as a vital application, switches and routers must support low-latency queuing and compression techniques. On top of that, vendors must throw in load balancing, link aggregation and, perhaps, caching.

Creating a platform able to carry out any combination of these tasks may mean that the day of the ASIC, at least as the sole or primary engine of a networking device, is passing.

Indeed, there is a trend to upgrade existing and new switching and routing platforms with network processors. These devices can handle the increased demand for bandwidth as well as add new IP services on the fly.

The trend toward intelligence, which will blossom during 2001, is already well under way.

Cisco, for instance, has developed its own processor, PXF, or parallel eXpress forwarding. This processor, embedded in the Cisco 7200 router, works alongside the central processor, offloading high-performance services. IBM is set to announce a network processor for its gear, as well.

Other vendors have upgraded their entire switch architectures in order to offer improved performance and flexibility.

Alteon WebSystems last March introduced its virtual matrix architecture (VMA) software to boost switch capacity by making better use of resources like processors and memory. Alteon promised that VMA would offer a four-fold increase in HTTP-session performance. And the architecture change can in the form of a free download to existing customers. Alteon was acquired by Nortel Networks (stock: NT) this year.

Enterprise network managers are increasingly responsible for serving information via the Internet to customers, telecommuters and business partners. But as content becomes more complex, the Internet's chaotic nature -- and IT managers' lack of direct control over QoS -- is an increasingly destabilizing factor.

The problem is that more and more users of the increasingly complex enterprise content are nowhere near the enterprise. For this reason, enterprises are increasingly relying on CDNs to help deliver content and maintain QoS.

Until recently, content delivery was a pricey option reserved for only the largest e-commerce providers. Within the past year, however, dozens of vendors have emerged. While increased competition bodes well for innovation and prices, content delivery still may not be the right option for everyone -- at least not now.

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