by Talari Blogger-in-Chief Andy Gottlieb...
Fish don’t notice water.
It’s just a given of their environment.
Similarly, scarcity of enterprise WAN bandwidth is a "fact" that IT managers have long taken as a given. Despite 10 Gbps LAN backbone and server links today, and a minimum of a switched 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet link to every desktop, with Gigabit Ethernet desktop connections more and more frequent, network managers – and application developers, too! – live with the reality that a 1.5 Mbps T1 WAN connection shared across 5 to 50 people is frequently all that’s available. Even at larger sites, average WAN bandwidth per person will often be similar (or even lower).
This 3 or 4 order-of-magnitude difference in the
availability of bandwidth on the WAN has major implications for network design,
server deployment and applications which can be run on the corporate WAN. And in tough economic times like these,
spending twice the amount on your WAN to get more bandwidth to run applications
is just not an option. Heck, spending the
same amount you did last year is tough
for some companies to do.
When we talk to customers about Adaptive Private Networking
(APN) and its benefits, some customers pick up on this idea that they can now
afford to have 20 or 30 times the WAN bandwidth they’ve been forced to live
with, but for many, it’s an idea that’s so foreign they’ve not though much
about the possibilities.
A great example of an application APN enables is
videoconferencing. “Gee, I’d never run
‘real’ videoconferences over the public Internet” is what any network
manager worth his salt knows, after all. That’s
what QoS on MPLS is for.
At Interop Las Vegas 2009, we’ll be demonstrating how having a lot of
bandwidth changes the way networks are designed and applications are run. While almost all techniques from WAN
Optimization vendors like Riverbed and Blue Coat are about conserving
bandwidth, APN actually takes the opposite approach, focusing, much as RAID did
with “cheap” PC hard disks for storage, on making inexpensive bits business
quality.
Because of the inexpensive nature of Internet bandwidth, not
only does APN make it affordable to have enough bandwidth to run high
definition videoconferencing to the smallest of branch offices simultaneously
on your now “converged” network with the rest of your data traffic, it actually
duplicates videoconferencing and VoIP sessions to enable very high quality even
over “pretty good but by no means perfect” public Internet connections. [Note:
such duplication is administrator configurable, and can also be done dependent
on the availability of bandwidth.]
So if you’re in Las Vegas next week, please stop by booth 1567 and see for yourself the video quality APN enables even in the face of network conditions which would ruin a simple voice call.
And start thinking about the applications you could run, and
the centralization redesigns which would be possible, if only you had 20 times
the bandwidth on your WAN.
Because now you can afford to.
Comments