Web 2.0 meets the enterprise: complications ensue

"Web 2.0 creep" going on inside the corporate firewall is challenging enterprise networks to handle the real-time demands and bursty nature of the latest collaboration and social networking software, according to IT executives attending Interop.

Others at the conference say they don't deny the popularity of social networking software but question its role in the workplace and value to the bottom line.

Cisco CEO John Chambers set the tone at Interop in his keynote, when he said that Web 2.0 software such as blogs, chat, Web video and other tools, have "been a way that people kind of communicated in spite of the IT department" inside large organizations. "Now the IT department has to lead," he added.

Much of the network gear on display from Interop's 475 exhibitors focused on squeezing latency out of network traffic or boosting bandwidth for corporate applications. Foundry introduced a switch and switch software it claims can provide millisecond failover and protect Web-based applications from latency. Nortel also entered the market for speeding up Web traffic with new acceleration gear. Cisco and Force10 each showed their switch gear announced earlier this month aimed at handling more peer-to-peer user traffic, instead of the traditional client/server flows from LAN edge to the core and data center.

"Web 2.0, collaboration and so forth — we've been pushing it hugely inside our company since 2000," said Dave Manser, network director for Boeing's LabNet network. LabNet, a subset of the larger Boeing corporate IT/network group, connects more than 700 of the aerospace company's laboratories worldwide using an array of real-time technologies; VoIP, instant messaging (IM), real-time video and digital whiteboarding are some of the tools engineers use to collaborate on projects. One example is testing of the company's 787 aircraft, which involved a wind tunnel facility in England, streaming video, real-time telemetry, voice and two-way text chat to Boeing sites in Seattle and other locations.

The challenge, Manser said, is tuning the network to deliver real-time voice, video and data to the point where users feel comfortable with the technology and are more productive using it. Manser says it comes down to latency: "How do you wring those last tenths of a second of delay out of the environment and do it in real time?"

Overbuilding the network is one tactic, he said. Boeing's LabNet — which spans campus LANs, metropolitan Ethernet and an MPLS WAN — is built so that no link exceeds 50% utilization. Manser also uses technologies such as forward error correction and advanced traffic-buffering schemes. But most important is not letting in-house software developers take the network for granted.

"I and my team are perfect examples of the Layer 2-4 guys who are looking up at the whole stack, and we're engaging the software engineering community at real close range. We're saying, your applications will be tested early on in the alpha stage, not even the beta stage."