* Advice for corporate network managers from Gartner's Mark Fabbi
Most U.S. businesses are designing their networks based on outdated assumptions, resulting in expensive purchases of unnecessary services and equipment. At least that’s the opinion of Mark Fabbi, vice president and distinguished analyst for enterprise networking at Gartner.
Fabbi recently released research that indicates most U.S. businesses continue to upgrade their networks by adding bandwidth at headquarters, particularly for desktop users and Internet uplinks. However, this approach fails to address the fact that most corporate users are now at branch or home offices or on the go.
“Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop is a big waste,” Fabbi says. “Then companies buy 10G uplinks. They start overbuilding the uplinks and then they start thinking they need a bigger switch in the core. We need to rethink this whole idea that bigger and faster is what we do with networks.”
Fabbi says that only a small percentage of workers – such as engineers using computer-aided design, geographic information systems or scientific visualization – require Gigabit Ethernet at the desktop. However, Gartner is seeing a big increase in sales of Gigabit Ethernet products across all industries.
“Gigabit Ethernet is one aspect of this problem,” Fabbi says. “There are a few applications where users do need more bandwidth like video production houses, medical imaging and high-end scientific research… But the remaining 85% to 90% of users just push around spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. Even high quality voice doesn’t take up that much bandwidth.”
Fabbi says most corporate workers require only a few megabits/sec of bandwidth rather than gigabit speeds. He advises companies to shift the money they are spending on Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop and instead look at technologies that will make it faster and more secure for remote users to access corporate networks and applications.
“Network managers should be looking at how to make mobile employees more efficient,” he says. “They should be looking at SSL and VPN technologies. They should be looking at the applications running across the network and determine the pain points for remote users. The pain points might be in the branch offices because the local servers are being taken away for server consolidation.”
Fabbi says application delivery, application acceleration and security technologies are areas worth investing in to make it easier for employees to work remotely.
Another common mistake that companies make is to standardize on a single network vendor for key network building blocks. Fabbi recommends that companies run competitive procurements for all infrastructure products such as routers, VPNs, switches, wireless and security.
“You shouldn’t have a single vendor across all of these building blocks,” he says. “You don’t want to be too dependent on any vendor, whether it’s Cisco, AT&T, Oracle or Microsoft.”
Fabbi says network managers should treat the network as a strategic asset and competitively bid each major building block and award it to a strategic vendor. Taking this approach will result in significant savings, Fabbi says.
“You’ll find 25% capital cost savings if you run a serious competition for various network building blocks,” Fabbi says.
In sum, Fabbi offers three pieces of advice to corporate network managers:
1. Understand your applications and what your end users need, and then build your network architecture.
2. Look at alternative vendors because viable options are available.
3. Invest in network technologies that will improve application performance.
Read more about Fabbi’s research here.
