According to Network Instruments’ 2012 State of the Network survey, video is having great impact on many companies’ network performance and bandwidth. By the beginning of 2013, nearly one-quarter of respondents expect video to consume more than half of their bandwidth.
For the past five years, Network Instruments, the network and applications performance monitoring vendor, has surveyed network managers to get a sense of how emerging technologies will impact service delivery and IT operations management. The results were recently published in the Fifth Annual State of the Network Global Study. With my apologies to Bob Dylan, I will say, the times, they are a-changin.’ But then, you probably already knew that.
Some of the key findings of the survey include:
• Video is beginning to have a big impact on network resource management, with 70% of respondents saying they have implemented or will implement a video-based solution within a year. By the beginning of 2013, nearly one-quarter of respondents expect video to consume more than half of their bandwidth. Of course, video has implications on everything else running on the network.
REPORT: Video now accounts for half of mobile data traffic
• With so much interest in video, it’s no surprise that bandwidth demand continues to surge. Two-thirds of respondents expect general traffic volumes to increase 25% to 50% in the coming year.
• As bandwidth demand grows, more companies are showing an interest in 10G Ethernet. Nearly 60% of the respondents say they already have or will have a deployment strategy within the year ahead.
• Cloud implementation remains steady, with 60% of the respondents reporting that half of their applications will run in the cloud within the next 12 months.
• As applications become more complex and tiered, the ability to resolve service delivery issues grows. More than 80% of the respondents have difficulty in troubleshooting application issues.
Video is finally mainstream
The survey results indicate that video has finally gone mainstream in the enterprise, especially for videoconferencing, training, and sales and marketing. Videoconferencing has been implemented by 55% of the respondents, with an expected 70% within a year. Typical deployments include standard conference rooms (75%), desktop PCs (63%) and telepresence systems (30%).
Though companies are embracing video, challenges remain. Respondents indicate having difficulty with allocating and monitoring bandwidth (47%), and a lack of tools to manage video performance (47%). Compounding these issues are the lack of standardized metrics to monitor video quality. Network professionals typically relied on a mix of metrics to assess quality, including latency (76%), packet loss (69%) and jitter (60%). Surprisingly, less than 1 in 5 use Video MOS, a metric specifically designed to determine video quality.
Cloud computing impacts the network
Enterprises continue to place more applications in the cloud, and this ultimately has an impact on network performance, especially for private clouds. Cloud computing relies on server virtualization, which reshapes data center traffic flows and increases bandwidth demands at the server edge. According to the Gartner report “Your Data Center is Heading for Traffic Chaos,” by 2014, network planners should expect in excess of 80% of data center LAN traffic to be between servers.
Survey respondents indicate that security for corporate data in cloud deployments is still a concern (74%), but misgivings about security is not enough to stem the flow of applications to the cloud. Data security vendors are certainly taking note of this concern, as numerous encryption solutions for cloud-based data are now coming to market.
Despite the pervasiveness of virtualization, this technology continues to be a large performance-monitoring challenge for many enterprises. When application problems arise, a majority of troubleshooters have difficulty determining whether problems are caused by the network, the system or the application.
Next week I’ll outline some best practices to overcome these and other challenges as network managers plan to re-architect their infrastructures for emerging needs such as video, cloud computing, mobile devices and better overall management.
Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation. You can write to her at LMusthaler@essential-iws.com.
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About Essential Solutions Corp:
Essential Solutions researches the practical value of information technology, and how it can make individual workers and entire organizations more productive. Essential Solutions offers consulting services to computer industry and corporate clients to help define and fulfill the potential of IT.
