State of the LAN: Enterprise energized
We recently wrapped up our fall "State of the LAN" tour, and it was a good one.
This time around, veteran network executives from Alcatel, Avaya, Alteon (now a part of Nortel Networks), Extreme Networks, Hubbell Premise Wiring and Marconi joined me and Network World Editorial Director John Gallant for the tour.
The impression I'm left with after the many hours of discussion and scores of questions is that we are on the verge of major corporate changes. The fundamental restructuring of business around the Internet model is affecting -- and energizing -- corporations. Many advancements put into place to power high-end, "carrier-class" Internet environments such as Yahoo and Amazon.com are finding their way into products with enterprise-level price tags resulting in a dizzying array of building blocks for our campus nets.
With the influx of new technologies, they'll be no dearth of work for network architects. The biggest challenge will be taking it all in. Here's a summary of some key trends discussed at the show:
* 10-Gigabit Ethernet. While we won't see an official standard until early 2002 with some prestandard gear rolling out a bit earlier, 10-Gigabit Ethernet (over fiber) will be the natural uplink/backbone technology to link all that Gigabit Ethernet you'll be rolling out. This gear will not only help you on the LAN front, but also will likely find fairly extensive deployment in metropolitan-area networks.
* Layer 4+ Switching. Why stop at Layer 3 when you can keep climbing up the stack and get more granular control? With gear already shipping, you can look as deep in the packet as you wish and direct traffic to specific servers or bump up priority.
The arrival of Layer 4+ switching doesn't mean that Layer 2 and Layer 3 are passé. Higher-layer switching will be deployed at specific points in the network (such as in front of a high-use e-commerce server) rather than being enabled on every switch on campus.
* Network Management. This still tends to lag behind performance and new features on vendors' to-do lists. Despite customer talk about the importance of network management, it still doesn't play a critical role in the buying process. You need to let vendors know how important it really is.
* Security. This will permeate our campus networks more and more. Whether it's in the form of Secure Sockets Layer transactions flowing across the LAN or improved authentication, security will vary by company. Some people are even talking about personal firewalls and encrypted sessions on campus. Good security measures, but take heed: Placing the responsibility for Triple-DES encryption/decryption on our general-purpose client and server PCs may seriously degrade user sessions.
Finally, expect to see these technologies integrated in different ways. Firewalls in switches, cryptographic processors on server network interface cards, and so on. It will become more difficult to classify the products we deal with.
» posted by ITworld staff
Network World
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