Prepare Your Network Infrastructure for Changing End-User Needs
Posted on Thu, Jan 27, 2011 @ 09:50 AM
During your Internet-browsing experiences at home, you’ve probably seen the “spinning wheel” or the dreaded “hour glass” — especially when visiting rich-media sites where videos download to your browser. You may blame it on slow bandwidth, the number of people using your wireless router, your children playing Halo with their buddies, or your Internet service provider. However, most times, you chalk it up to life in the Internet era.
Now, imagine you’re at work and hurrying to a meeting with your boss. You need to complete a critical task on your iPad prior to arriving, but the web-based application that you are using slows to a standstill. Your blood pressure rises, your face turns red, and you are ready to strangle the first IT staff member that you can find. But what is to blame?
Understanding Infrastructure Layers
There are many layers to this problem, as typical enterprise architectures combine:
- Hardware, including storage, servers, personal computers, laptops and mobile devices
- Software applications
- Graphical interface-driven, business-data manipulation solutions, and
- Networking (the fabric that connects everything together).
Since each of these ecosystem elements evolved independently, business-critical issues — such as performance, usage, security and availability — have typically been refined in a vacuum. As a result, infrastructure managers are spinning up virtual machines and clouds to offset hardware performance issues.
Infrastructure Challenges
While server virtualization offers performance, economy and consolidation, it also creates some critical challenges. For example, IT leaders require applications to be tracked as they move from one virtual machine (VM) to another. This is especially important when optimizing virtual infrastructures, responding to peak loads and managing VM failovers.
In addition to virtualization, massive data centers — called cloud-computing facilities — are being built to host applications at scale, and offer infrastructure, platform and other IT services.
At the same time, application-development groups have stepped up efforts to create richer product experiences, applying video and rich-interface applications liberally. These slick user interfaces provide end users with a multitude of options, but tax the network, back-end storage and server infrastructure, which have to manage large data influxes.
To further complicate the problem, developers are writing a new breed of code for mobile applications at a frenzied pace — thanks to Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and Google’s Android. Legacy enterprise applications are being extended to mobile platforms and virtualized desktop infrastructures (VDIs) are in motion with the assumption that the network is suitable for delivery.
While all of the previous is happening, applications are being centralized into consolidated data centers, creating greater distance between users, applications and data.
This modernization leaves the network grappling with the resulting dilemma: how to deliver the same level of productive experience for all applications, to all users, at any place and at any time. Talk about causing an IT manager to lose sleep!
Preparing Your Network and Infrastructure
The good news is that equipment manufacturers are working to solve this problem by looking at the entire ecosystem from a services perspective. Organizations like Cisco are taking the required network services and building them within switching, routing, security, wireless and wide area network (WAN) acceleration products.
By integrating these services into the existing network infrastructure, and providing the ability to control them via policy and management, organizations can enable a rich end-user experience.
These new network technologies work to eliminate the disconnect between applications and the network, by making the network aware of the applications that navigate it and the endpoint capabilities it connects. This revolutionary thinking enables any users, of any application, at any time, on any device, to remain truly productive.
It is a brave new world out there, in which your network needs to be prepared to provide traditional services on new platforms and devices. As a result, your network and the infrastructure supporting it are becoming more important everyday.
Your Thoughts?
- How do you deal with unhappy end users on your network?
- What steps have you taken to enhance your network and prepare it for the future?
 |
Darin Haines is Group President of MCPc's Advanced Technology Group - Delivery Division and has over 16 years of experience in leading the technology function in mid-sized and enterprise-level organizations. Connect with Darin on LinkedIn.
|
Photo credit: BasicGov
Stay Connected with MCPc: Subscribe to the blog; follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.