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Short for Gigabit Ethernet,
it refers to Ethernet networks that operate at gigabit speeds
or faster. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with Optical
Ethernet, since optical networking equipment is the foundation
for most Gigabit Ethernet services. |
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Related Buzz term(s):
Optical Ethernet services: High-speed Ethernet services,
typically a service provider's metropolitan-area network,
achieved by the use of optical networking equipment.
10G: The fastest Ethernet speed yet achieved, although products
that claim 10G speeds are not yet shipping, nor is the standard
that extends Ethernet to this speed finalized. Ethernet
was originally a 10M-bit LAN technology, but as it has scaled
so wide, 10G has become primarily a service provider technology,
though many believe it will be adopted by large enterprises
as well.
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What to ask Ethernet MAN vendors:
- In what cities does your optical Ethernet MAN service operate?
- How will you provide last-mile access to my office buildings, and who will pay for it?
- How long will initial provisioning take?
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A PC I/O architecture championed by a slate of industry heavyweights, InfiniBand operates at speeds of up to 2.5G bit/sec. Rather than slots on a motherboard, InfiniBand uses host and target adapters. This allows devices to be farther from one another, among other advantages. Version 1.0 of the specification was released about a year ago. |
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What to ask InfiniBand vendors:
- Has your product been certified by Intel's interoperability lab?
- What other products interoperate with yours?
- What network management software supports your product?
- Will I have to replace all my servers to take advantage of InfiniBand?
- Do my peripherals need to be upgraded to support InfiniBand?
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Not to be left out of the IP revolution,
data storage systems can now be built and communicate with this sublimely
popular networking protocol. |
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Related Buzz term(s):
TOE: Short for TCP Offload engines, this technology relieves
the server CPU from I/O tasks of transferring data between
the disk drive and requesting devices, shifting these tasks
to the network adapter or storage controller.
SANs: Short for storage area networks. As companies become
more reliant on computers, they create almost unimaginable
amounts of data. A storage-area network clusters storage
systems together into its own network segment, which can
scale better while improving access to data than when each
server is allocated its own finite storage resources.
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Questions to ask IP SAN vendors:
- Do you have customers
who are using your product in a production environment?
If so, how many? Can I speak to them?
- Have you tested your product for interoperability with other networking storage products? If so, with how many has it been certified as interoperable?
- Have you established alliances with any of the major SAN vendors such as EMC, IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard or Hitachi?
- How do you plan to make your product standards-compliant?
- How does your product compare with Fibre Channel in terms of transport speed?
- Will my employees need special training to use your product?
- Will I have to make any changes to my networking infrastructure to deploy your product?
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An IP virtual private network is a form
of VPN that delivers IP services over a public infrastructure, typically
the Internet, but also frame relay. |
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Questions to ask IPVPN vendors:
- Does your service-level agreement measure latency between my actual sites or just across the service provider's own network?
- Has your VPN gear proven to actually interoperate with equipment from other vendors, as opposed to merely being labeled ìstandards compliant?î
- Does your VPN management platform distribute centrally generated policies to remote VPN equipment to promote scalability?
- Are applications and resources available to authorized users from any device?
- Will this VPN save me money, even when factoring in maintenance costs and the need for additional bandwidth at hub sites?
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A comeback king if ever there was one.
Before client/server, server farms and VLANs, PCs shared data directly with
one another. Today's peer-to-peer networking can be used to swap music files
or for collaboration, but the client-as-server construct remains. |
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What to ask P2P vendors:
- If your P2P product performs collaboration, how does it authenticate users and ensure the security of documents?
- Does your product integrate with Microsoft Office products, or when will that support be available?
- How does your product support customized business rules and policies?
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Front-end software that gives users a single interface by which they can find and view intranet pages, Internet pages, run legacy applications, view pushed data and collaborate. |
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Related Buzz term(s):
Collaboration: Collaboration is a vague, buzzy term for
when people in diverse locations use computers to work together.
Whiteboards, which allow people to view and annotate a file
simultaneously, are a premier example of collaboration.
The term has been extended to mean any method by which a
workgroup uses computers to accomplish a task.
E-business applications: More than e-commerce, these are
core business applications that run over IP networks, frequently
the Web.
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Questions to ask portal vendors:
- Is the portal architecture firewall-friendly with support for single-sign on?
- Does the portal use proprietary APIs or XML or a combination to integrate with existing back-end systems?
- What standards does the product currently support, and which standards are slated for support?
- Are applications and resources available to authorized users from any device?
- Can the portal be distributed among various servers to scale, and if not, how will the portal scale as applications and users are added?
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The middleware that enables and simplifies Web application-to-application connectivity. Web services differ from other forms of middleware in that they are based on XML standards. In theory, these standards will create hub-and-spoke configurations, rather than the so-called spaghetti code that results from point-to-point connectivity. |
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Related Buzz term(s):
XML: Extensible Markup Language is a language that, like
HTML, standardizes the way information is presented to be
platform independent, yet allows its tags to be customized
and defined by the applications using them. It is the cornerstone
of e-business application middleware.
SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol is the message protocol
that allows Web services to talk. Version 1.1 was released
in April 2000 by IBM and Microsoft, and is now under the
wing of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Protocol Working
Group. In July, the group issued working draft Version 1.2.
UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration is
a universal repository for locating Web services. Version
2 was released in June; the third and final version is due
next year. Creators Microsoft, IBM and Ariba are already
running test implementations.
WSDL: Web Service Description Language is a protocol that
allows a Web service to describe what it can do, what messages
it accepts and what response it returns. It was submitted
to the World Wide Web Consortium in January.
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Questions to ask Web service vendors:
- Which emerging Web services standards do you support (SOAP, UDDI, WSDL) and what is your plan for adding that support for standards you don't yet support?
- What other emerging standards do you support (ebXML, XML-RPC)?
- In what runtime can
I execute Web services developed with your tools? Microsoft's
.Net framework or Java Platform 2 Enterprise Edition?
- What pieces of infrastructure do you supply (i.e., application server and database) and which of these support Web services standards?
- What is your security model?
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