Nortel's new policy management offering emphasizes standards, raises questions

Without question, this certainly puts Nortel squarely on the side of supporting industry standards, debunking to some extent the notion that the policy management systems of the major vendors are little more than proprietary Trojan horses.

An additional value-added feature in the 1.0 release is the ability for users to assign policies through dynamic IP addresses in order to differentiate Web applications based on URL.

Useful stuff, right? Well, yes, it is. At the same time, however, one needs to step back and look at the substance of this announcement, along with other related policy announcements that have come out of the major vendors over the past six months.

First, many of these announcements have been long on standards support detail but short on the detail that matters most to users - which products are supported and what does "supported" really mean.

Second, for those announcements that have a specified product, a number of these announcements are primarily focused on LAN-based product performance support vs. providing much substance on what is supported in the WAN.

Many of the users that I work with will readily assert that unless you're managing an extensive back-end server farm as part of your campus network, LAN product performance support really doesn't buy you all that much, at least in the short term. However, since WAN connectivity is typically the most limited and most expensive bottleneck of enterprise networks, the most effective allocation of the WAN resource can be gained through the application of a set of policy rules that have the bigger picture in mind as the basis for their definition. This approach is no different in nature than was the design of scheduling algorithms for legacy mainframes and minicomputers that had as their basis the optimal use of a very expensive resource. In this case, that resource was the mainframe or minicomputer CPU.

In fairness to Nortel, this announcement really does include support for the company's router family. In addition, it's also fair to say that WAN policy support may not mean much for some users unless LAN support is part of the picture as well. After all, the name of the game is end-to-end.

The upshot is that systems and network managers need to look under the covers of the latest stream of policy management announcements in order to fully understand if these announcements are really 100%, or only 50%, solutions.