Getting NetSmart - What's the state of your WAN?

What's the state of your WAN?
Fine tuning your wide-area infrastructure

Network World, 09/04/02

When we began planning the content for this year's State of the WAN tour, we took a decidedly different direction. As with our other seminars in the latter half of this year, we are focusing more on prepping your network for emerging technologies than bells and whistles.

After all, not many network executives have room in their budgets for bells and whistles. Instead, your goal is to get your network optimized so that every bit of use can be accounted for. We've taken this into consideration in creating "State of the WAN: Fine-tuning Your Wide-Area Infrastructure."

Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler and Associates, will host this event and I will be with him on tour as moderator. We've got a full complement of vendors on board -- Cisco, Fiberlink, Nortel, Proficient, Qwest and Visual Networks. Together, we'll offer you a succinct look at how to tweak your network to support some of the upcoming wide-area technologies.

In his two-part keynote, Metzler will talk a lot about performance metrics and how to get a handle on the traffic crossing your enterprise. He'll tackle the issues of availability, delay, throughput and jitter as well as what considerations need to be made in accounting for each area. He'll also dig into your relationships with your service providers and give you tips for determining when outsourcing certain operations is appropriate.

An interesting addition to this year's program is the use of a case study. Metzler and I have asked the presenters to answer the needs of a fictitious company, Acme. In their afternoon presentations, they'll show how their products could help Acme reach its business goals.

The array of presenters we have on tour will make for some great dialogue, as some approach technologies in different ways. For instance, Nortel and Qwest will both address the need for virtual private networks, but their approaches are sure to be varied. Proficient will show how smart bandwidth can make a difference in your network and help with your ultimate goal of optimization. Cisco's focus is on the larger enterprises as well as the service provider market and the company will explain what gear it's rolling out to help both network environments. Fiberlink intends to hone in on the challenges you have in dealing with remote users and what solutions are available to solve those issues. Finally, Visual Networks will demonstrate the value of frame-aware virtual private networks and Multi-Protocol Label Switching.

As always, we'll have a chance for you to get your questions answered during the two roundtables we have scheduled for the day. You'll also have time to visit with each of the companies throughout the day. I look forward to seeing you in one of the six cities we are heading to.

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