* The need to add intelligence to your network
Last time, we stated our belief that an IT organization’s competence in planning and managing the IT infrastructure in general, as well as the network infrastructure in particular, determines the degree to which the organization provides business value. We also highlighted some of the business changes that have occurred in the last decade. Today, we will discuss some of the network changes that have happened in the last several years and identify the types of enhancements that network engineers need to add to their company’s network infrastructure.
If, as shown in the last newsletter, a decade is a long time in terms of business evolution, it is an eternity in terms of the evolution of technology. For example, a decade ago virtually all LANs were based on shared media. While this was typically Ethernet running at 10Mbps, 10 years ago a significant percentage of LANs was based on Token Ring. In addition, large organizations sometimes connected their workgroup LANs with FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface), a shared LAN that ran at 100Mbps.
At that time, we started to see large-scale movement to switched LANs based on Ethernet. This was not an overnight shift, but a well-planned and much needed transition to meet the technical and business needs of the day. Today it would be difficult to find any wired LANs that are not based on switched Ethernet.
Ten years ago IBM’s SNA (System Network Architecture) was still a very prevalent WAN architecture. According to a 1998 Network World article, 70% of vital corporate data and many mission-critical applications still resided on a mainframe or AS/400 (using SNA) at that time. While there is a lot of SNA still deployed, it is in maintenance mode. In fact, if you were to Google SNA you would find out that SNA is the three-letter code for the John Wayne airport in LA before you would find an article about IBM’s System Network Architecture.
So what type of change is needed to enable enterprise networks to continue to support evolving requirements? Well, the wholesale adoption of fundamental new technologies is not in the cards. Ethernet is firmly entrenched in the LAN, as are the Internet and MPLS services in the WAN. The key issue going forward is designing an appropriate level of intelligence into networks. This is a relatively new concept in the LAN, which has historically been designed to be fast and dumb. It is somewhat less new in the WAN as many companies have deployed WAN optimization solutions.
