Hyperconnectivity Drives Network Transformation

Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everyone and everything that can benefit from being connected will be connected. This takes the form of hyperconnected users, and of an explosion in network-connected devices — for example, in the realms of energy and property management, asset and location tracking, telemetry and enhanced security systems.

So what are the enterprise networking implications of hyperconnectivity?

With hyperconnectivity, the diversity of traffic on enterprise networks expands significantly and includes latency- and bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications, associated with person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. Bandwidth of course needs to be engineered to meet capacity requirements of a broad range of applications. Individual sensors generally represent a low volume traffic source, but at peak times may generate a high volume of time-sensitive traffic. For example, imagine a building Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning system with tens of thousands of IP addressable points being restarted after a failure!

Time-sensitive applications must operate within an end-to-end delay window (150 msec for human communications, but potentially much less for telemetry). Delivering low latency and low loss across the bandwidth-rich LAN environment is relatively straight forward. Achieving real-time performance across the WAN mandates the elimination of speed bumps, by leveraging technologies such as carrier-grade Ethernet. With hyperconnectivity, network reliability becomes even more important than today. Investments that put in stand-by capacity just-in-case it’s needed, are wasteful. Also, recovery times must be accelerated so that real-time applications continue to operate under failure conditions. Scaling the network by a factor of 10 to 100 cannot be met by simply scaling the existing wired network. Increasingly WLANs will become the preferred access technology. The emerging 802.11n WLAN standard is a key enabler of the unwired enterprise. Finally, hyperconnectivity demands simplification and improved price/performance on a grand scale, transforming the network into a business optimized infrastructure. Even today, considering alternate data suppliers can result in up to a 50 percent reduction in Total Cost of Ownership, including a 40 percent reduction in energy consumption, while delivering 7x the resilience and 20x the performance.

Hyperconnectivity will drive as big a network transformation, as the transformation from departmental LANs to enterprise IP networking. IT

Tony Rybczynski is Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies at Nortel (News - Alert) (www.nortel.com).

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