July 1998

Closing The Performance Gap:
Building Networks That Deliver What Enterprises Need

BY TONY RYBCZYNSKI

Enterprises are demanding more of their networks, but they aren't necessarily confident that their demands will be satisfied. Indeed, many enterprises recognize that their current networks won't carry them into the next decade. Which isn't to say these enterprises have figured out how to close network performance gaps. Some of these enterprises have resorted to stop-gap measures.

For example, some enterprises continue to invest in T1 multiplexing, even though T1 multiplexing's reign as technology of choice for enterprise networks has long since passed. Better alternatives have been developed, but thousands of networks utilizing T1 multiplexing are already in place, which explains how the yearly investment, on a global basis, could reach $500 million.

The absence of adequate responses to performance shortfalls is also evident in the LAN space. Go to any data networking convention, and you will be struck by the plethora of LAN and multilayer switching technologies being demonstrated. But what business problems do all these technologies solve when users are not at their desks? (On average, users are away from their desks 30 percent of the time.)

While these examples may seem discouraging, enterprise networks can take heart from several positive developments:

• IP is the protocol of choice for new applications and is starting to dominate data networking. The operator can look forward to a simplified world in which multiple protocols become part of the legacy environment.
• Connecting workstations together in a campus environment is moving toward commoditization. And the number of carriers and carrier services is increasing significantly, so there are many ways to connect sites together over the WAN delivering improved price/performance.
• Choices from wide area transport to fully managed voice/data network services are increasingly becoming available.
• And, of course, the Internet is opening up new ways of getting to customers.

How can enterprises take advantage of these positive developments, and create high-performance networks? A lot rides on the answer. Just look at the impact of network failures on business operations. Furthermore, companies of all types are building their businesses around their networks. This has been the case for certain industries, such as finance, for years, but the difference is that this is now true for virtually all industries.

Indeed, in a very real sense, the enterprise network is the business. After all, the enterprise network is more than just a collection of links that automate back office functions. Enterprise networks allow connectivity from end users to applications, between applications, and between users for all forms of traffic, both within the enterprise and to off-net employees, customers, and partners.

As companies move applications online at an ever-increasing rate, the challenge for enterprise neworks is to keep up with business needs. These needs are driven by customer and shareholder value, competition, and globalization. In this article, we will review how these needs arise, and what enterprise networks can do to satisfy them.

DEMANDS GROW MORE PRESSING
Not only are enterprise users overwhelmed by the increasing pace of technology innovation, they also worry about missing their business objectives. More and more IT managers are measured on time to market for new applications, not just reliability and cost. So what are some of the challenges faced by enterprise users today? Let's look at four of these.

Traffic Growth And Increasing Networking Complexity
Many enterprises have a collection of single-purpose technology platforms designed for individual voice, data, or video services, and these networks are optimized for either local area or wide area transport. In fact, conventional wisdom says that the average enterprise network consists of up to half a dozen disparate networks. These patchwork solutions are usually inflexible, expensive to operate, and difficult to manage, particularly when new applications are introduced or when requirements change.

These difficulties are exacerbated by shifts in traffic patterns and traffic growth. A few years ago, 80 percent of LAN traffic stayed on the LAN. Now, however, this proportion has been reversed. Up to 80 percent of LAN traffic goes beyond the LAN, to various forms of servers, locally and remotely. On top of this, data growth rates of 100 percent per year are not uncommon. As the network becomes truly mission critical, the reliability of the enterprise network must approach the reliability of today's telephone network.

New Ways Of Getting To Customers Via The Internet
There are approximately 70,000 call centers in the United States, and the call center industry grows 20 to 30 percent per year. More impressive is the fact that over $200 billion in transactions are carried out over call centers annually. Like networking, call centers have become a key business tool. At the same time, Web-based services have opened up a whole new way of getting to customers, whether it is in the context of consumer information, retailing, or customer service. These two developments are very closely related, driven largely by the reality that consumers demand human contact to varying degrees during the lifecycle of a transaction.

User Mobility
Thought for the day: There are more wireless telephone users than Internet users, and both are growing at double-digit rates. And both have had a dramatic impact on how business operates. For example, they've made telecommuters and road warriors business realities today. Consequently, enterprises need to account for end user device preferences. That is, the end user is likely to use different devices at different times of the day (for example, desktop PC, laptop, palmtop, wireless phone, business phone, Web phone, Java phone). In addition, users may vary the methods they use to access the network (for example, high-speed LAN, ATM, ISDN or modem, xDSL, narrowband or broadband, wireless). These user choices affect price/performance, and they certainly impact the richness of the communications.

Emergence Of Multimedia Applications
There is debate in the industry on how quickly multimedia will be mainstream in corporate America. There is no debate, however, about the rapid developments in standards and application and networking technologies. In my view, there are three major reasons why multimedia will grow:

• Multimedia applications are already demonstrating their ability to enhance customer service in certain vertical markets, such as education, healthcare, and film production. (In these markets, multimedia is being driven top-down.)
• Multimedia will appeal to end users looking to enhance their working environment, for example, through the deployment of distributed collaboration tools. (Thus, multimedia will be driven bottom-up as well as top-down.)
• Multimedia will augment corporate education, which corporations already use to justify spending in the billions of dollars.

CLOSING THE PERFORMANCE GAP
So what is an enterprise IT manager to do? What is needed is a blueprint for integrated multimedia networks that are more responsive, reliable, simple, secure, flexible, and cost effective than traditional data networks. A tall order indeed. These can provide the foundation for a class of productivity-enhancing applications including multimedia collaboration, video conferencing, and Internet-enabled call centers. More vendor architectures are not what is needed since enterprise users have the responsibility of developing the network architecture which best meets their particular demographics, installed base, and business objectives.

In general, next-generation enterprise networks should provide:

1. the highest performance for the dollar. That is, network design should move beyond the traditional approach, which resulted in the lowest-cost network for a narrow set of performance requirements. Instead, networks should include class of service capabilities that meet business objectives. Not all applications and users are created equal in the context of accessibility to network resource guarantees.
2. an environment that allows person-to-person communications to acquire multimedia capabilities. (I also refer to person-to-person communications as personal networking, a concept that expands on the concept of personal computing.) In other words, networks should make a multimedia call as simple, reliable, and secure as a voice call is today, or as information access is today via the Web.
3. a broad range of options with respect to access devices and connection methods. That is, networks should accommodate users who may prefer different devices at different times of the day and at different locations, as well as users who may prefer different means of connecting to the network. For example, networks can tap into a powerful source of service differentiation by extending to customers the broadest range of choices in accessing Web-enabled call centers. (Or are these call center-enabled Web sites?)
4. the freedom to explore outsourcing options. That is, networks should let IT managers decide whether they want to build their own networks or outsource parts or all of their networks or network operations to service providers.

SOME ADVICE FOR NETWORKERS
Let me conclude with some advice for enterprise users, in working towards these objectives for the next generation of enterprise networks.

Eliminate Organizational Barriers
Organize to be able to leverage the price/performance advantages of moving all your traffic onto a single integrated infrastructure. Such a network also can accommodate the inevitable organization changes that are required to meet business objectives (e.g. mergers, acquisitions, partnerships).

Assess Make/Buy Strategies
Depending on business, financial, and resource objectives/constraints, assess how much you want to roll your own, work with strategic vendors, or out-source to service providers and system integrators.

Go With Switching
Just as switched LANs are seen as the ultimate solution in the in-building environment, target a single high performance packet-switched network. The inherent nature of the various forms of packet switching (i.e. IP, frame relay, and ATM) is that it gives you the biggest pipes with dynamic bandwidth that will deliver the highest bandwidth for throughput- critical applications, the lowest latency for real-time applications, and the highest degree of agility for new applications.

Don't Be Egalitarian
Egalitarian networking doesn't differentiate between different applications and users. In corporate networking, however, the reality is that not all users and applications are created equal. Under congestion and failure conditions, mission-critical data and time-sensitive traffic have to be given priority. Even voice classes of services need to be supported, in the sense that the quality of customer voice communications has to be maintained under all cases. Multiple classes of service must be supported with appropriate chargeback mechanisms.

Plan For Voice Everywhere
Voice will be supported on ATM (for example, in the backbone), on frame relay (for example, to branch sites), and on IP (to remote sites and to PC desktops and Web phones). Service and feature interoperability between these environments and with the installed PBX system base is very important. Running voice over IP, frame relay, and ATM incurs varying taxation rates (as high as 100 percent with IP, 40 to 50 percent with frame relay, and 10 to 20 percent with ATM), so tax avoidance is called for.

Recognize That WANs Are Not LANs
Much as we may dream about eliminating LAN/WAN distinctions, there are some long-term sustainable differences between LANs and WANs, including cost of bandwidth, range of connectivity options, delay, and reliability. Over-engineering of wide-area bandwidth is not feasible, and so more rigorous class of service support is appropriate.

Invest In Network Management
This is a topic in its own right. But help desks, operations centers, and windows on carrier performance are all important ways for networkers to get the most out of their networks and meet customer expectations.

THE BOTTOM LINE
Think holistically in evolving your enterprise architectures toward the integrated multimedia networks that are required to narrow the performance gap between what your network can deliver and what your business requires, and to propel your enterprise ahead of your competition.

Tony Rybczynski is director of Strategic Marketing and Technologies for Nortel's Enterprise Data Networks business unit, which delivers high-performance data networks globally. This business unit creates new alternatives to increasingly complex data network infrastructures, and offers them through direct and indirect sales channels. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.nortelnetworks.com.   E-mail questions or comments to the author at [email protected].