* Vendor agreement
Life in IT is difficult enough given all the demands and limited resources. Working in IT, however, is a little bit easier when there is at least somewhat of a clear direction in the market relative to how a given technology is likely to evolve. Conversely, working in IT is notably more difficult when there is a divergence of opinion relative to technology evolution. Using that as a yardstick, we believe that the chaos associated with WAN optimization will make working in IT difficult for the foreseeable future.
The divergence of opinion on WAN optimization was driven home to Jim last week when he was at Interop in New York. Jim was there to moderate 10 sessions, all of which had the goal of identifying the impact of the IT infrastructure and related services on application delivery. More specifically, the goal of the sessions was to identify what changes had to be made to the infrastructure and infrastructure-related services to enable more effective application delivery.
One of his sessions was on branch office optimization. There were five vendors represented on the panel: Cisco, Exinda, Riverbed, Expand and Ipanema. The format of the session was different from the typical death by PowerPoint panel. On this session the panelists were not allowed to make a presentation. The entire session was a question and answer period with questions coming from both Jim and the audience. At the beginning of the session Jim announced that at the end of the session he would summarize both the areas in which the vendors were generally in agreement and the areas in which there was not general agreement. This newsletter will discuss the two areas in which there was general agreement. The next newsletter will address the many areas where there was some heated disagreement.
One of the areas of agreement was the need not just for visibility but for visibility at the application layer. This relates to the newsletter that we recently wrote in which we talked about how a growing amount of traffic now uses port 80. The point that we made in that newsletter is that for a variety of reasons, including security holes, regulatory requirements and legal issues, IT organizations need to understand the actual applications that are transiting port 80.
The other area of agreement was in response to a question from one of the attendees. He asked the panelists how he should spend his scarce IT resources – implementing MPLS or WAN optimization. The panelists were in general agreement that while MPLS provides the QoS functionality found in many network optimization solutions, it will not provide other functionality that is typically found in these solutions such as compression, differencing and protocol optimization. Hence, if the only problem you are looking to solve is the need for QoS, MPLS and WAN optimization are alternative solutions. If you need more than QoS, MPLS and WAN optimization are complimentary solutions.
Editor’s note: Starting Nov. 12 week, you will notice a number of enhancements to Network World newsletters that will provide you with more resources and more news links relevant to the newsletter’s subject. Beginning Monday, Nov. 12, the Wide Area Networking Newsletter, written by Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, will be merged with the WAN News Alert and will be named the Wide Area Networking Alert. You’ll get Steve and Jim’s analysis of the convergence and WAN market, which you will be able to read in full at NetworkWorld.com, plus links to the day’s WAN news and other relevant resources. This Alert will be mailed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We hope you will enjoy the enhancements and we thank you for reading Network World newsletters.
