Getting NetSmart - Your WAN concerns

Your WAN concerns
Lessons learned on the WAN tour

Network World, 10/16/02

For the past three weeks, I've been on the road with our State of the WAN Town Meeting tour. Moderator Jim Metzler and I have traveled across the country, talking with IT executives about their wide-area concerns. In each of the six cities we've visited, the worries have been the same: How do I take control of my network and account for new disruptive technologies?

The disruptive technologies that IT executives referred to were voice over IP, storage-area networks, wireless networks and multimedia. They said all of these would require enormous amounts of bandwidth, monitoring and management.

In fact, a question that always comes up on our State of the LAN/MAN tour reared its head on the WAN tour. "Why would I implement quality of service when I can just throw more bandwidth at the problem?" an attendee asked. Panelists from Cisco, Nortel, Qwest, Fiberlink, Proficient and Visual Networks were almost unanimous in their replies. They told the attendee that in the wide area, bandwidth is far more expensive than in the local area. Therefore, "just throwing bandwidth at the problem" could be an expensive proposition. Add backup to that bandwidth, which you would probably need if mission-critical traffic was riding across it, and you've got a pretty costly situation.

But the panelists, specifically a representative from Cisco, warned not to get hung up on buzzwords. He said that focusing too closely on whether service providers and gear makers support Multi-Protocol Label Switching could be a mistake. MPLS still needs work so full deployment is still a question mark. Instead, IT executives should make sure that services and offerings have some type of quality of service solution and that that solution can be measured, monitored and accounted for.

Attendees also asked about the state of inter-network priority-of-service guarantees. The panelists, who chuckled a bit at the question, said that the issue is not so much technical as it is financial. Right now, they say, there is no mechanism for carriers to bill each other for traffic crossing their networks. Therefore, if one carrier is getting a certain amount of money for prioritizing traffic, another carrier can not share in that deal. The panelists were pessimistic as to when this situation might change and said that there is no incentive to fix the problem.

As Dr. Metzler tackled the issue of voice over IP deployments and their effect on the wide area, attendees remained skeptical. When we dug down into what was at the heart of that skepticism, attendees offered that voice over IP on the surface seems less expensive and easier to manage, but they are sure that there are hidden costs and management complexities. In fact, Dr. Metzler agreed with that assessment, saying that those IT executives who think the convergence of voice and data networks at the beginning will mean less work are mistaken. Instead, parallel networks will run for some time and voice and data teams will have to work in unison to tackle the issues of convergence. He said many of the companies that have rolled out voice over IP haven't figured out how to get those teams coordinated and are risking the success of the rollout.

Dr. Metzler added that voice over IP implementations require massive amounts of testing, and link with other parts of the network, including storage and server systems. Having any of these areas go down because of poor preparation will bode poorly for the rollout. He said IT executives should test their systems and then test some more. After all, if users are expecting 100% availability as they get with the traditional phone system, they have a high bar to meet.

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