The gold standard for corporate networks today is MPLS, but carrier pricing issues and MPLS’s failure to play well with new, cost-efficient forms of network access are causing problems for the legion of enterprise customers that rely on it.

Consider:

• TDM dedicated access (T-1 and DS3) is expensive; Ethernet access isn’t universally available and, though economical on an ongoing basis, can cost a bundle (and take months) to install because only about half of the major commercial buildings in the US are served by fiber.
• It takes a lot of CPE and management to integrate MPLS with broadband public Internet access, which is widely available and fast, but doesn’t come with robust SLAs (other than site availability).
• MPLS itself may not require a lot of management, but the CPE that accompanies it does.
• The explosion of collaboration tools like Skype for Business and cloud based apps are straining capacity and management. The desire to leverage today’s robust software/cloud applications is driving a need for more sophisticated routing schemes and greater control over how WAN traffic is handled.

It’s not clear how fast MPLS will go the way of Frame Relay and ATM, but changing apps and bandwidth needs, coupled with Continue reading

The gold standard for corporate networks today is MPLS, but carrier pricing issues and MPLS’s failure to play well with new, cost-efficient forms of network access are causing problems for the legion of enterprise customers that rely on it.

Consider:

• TDM dedicated access (T-1 and DS3) is expensive; Ethernet access isn’t universally available and, though economical on an ongoing basis, can cost a bundle (and take months) to install because only about half of the major commercial buildings in the US are served by fiber.
• It takes a lot of CPE and management to integrate MPLS with broadband public Internet access, which is widely available and fast, but doesn’t come with robust SLAs (other than site availability).
• MPLS itself may not require a lot of management, but the CPE that accompanies it does.
• The explosion of collaboration tools like Skype for Business and cloud based apps are straining capacity and management. The desire to leverage today’s robust software/cloud applications is driving a need for more sophisticated routing schemes and greater control over how WAN traffic is handled.

It’s not clear how fast MPLS will go the way of Frame Relay and ATM, but changing apps and bandwidth needs, coupled with Continue reading

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

If network infrastructure is not your organization’s core competency or you have outsourced the environment, you lack control of equipment and transport services and probably struggle with complex pricing and non-standard billing. Worse yet, if your service provider owns either all or components of the processes, procedures, staffing and tools, it limits the changes you can make.

If that describes your environment, a network infrastructure cost optimization consultation can help you drive infrastructure costs down, capture the network environment processes, identify systemic issues and leverage best practices.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

The model of the future is based on social, mobile, cloud and big data, and IT is realizing that to succeed it must have the right processes, tools and culture. This is where open source is a major benefit.

Once you’ve decided to make open source a key feature of your enterprise IT infrastructure, here are steps you should take:

* Identify critical dependencies: It’s important to determine which components of an open source deployment represent critical dependencies. These are the ones you need to be fully certain about in terms of community size, robustness, feature suggestions and more. When it comes to components that represent dependencies, it’s important to ensure you don’t get locked into something that isn’t the perfect fit.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

IT is headed toward being something more akin to a utility service, transformed by OpenStack’s open standardized cloud architecture, which will improve interoperability and render vendor lock-in a thing of the past.

Initially a solution adopted by smaller ISVs lacking the capital to build private clouds, OpenStack-based cloud solutions are shaping up to be the logical choice for large enterprise as industry leaders, including IBM, Cisco, EMC, HP and Oracle, bet on its value for defining the next-generation model for business computing.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Overprovisioning has been the go-to approach for ensuring infrastructure and application performance. But when performance degradations and unplanned outages occur, even the most experienced teams move into “react-and-guess” mode.

Where to start? Every level of the infrastructure stack comes with its own possible issues, and tracking the culprit down takes time. And with IT infrastructures growing at an exponential pace and workloads to the cloud, the typical approach of overprovisioning and reacting-and-guessing is no longer a viable option.

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