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High bandwidth applications are where end users are currently spending their money within network infrastructure. According to Noreen O’Hare, director of European operations for Cable&Wireless, high-bandwidth IP applications “such as voiceover IP, video-over IP, application performance management (APM) and unified communications (UC) services” are where funds are being funnelled towards.

“With an increasing number of enterprise organisations adopting these new systems and applications, there is a need for more capacity, higher speeds and guaranteed levels of performance from telecoms and network providers,” she added.

Wider WAN
BT Ireland’s Dave Bergin, who acts as practice principal for network services with the company, said that the fact that wide area network (WAN) links are now becoming affordable at LAN speeds is also influencing the spend of many companies. “It is common to see links of 100Mbit/s being provided where heretofore, 2Mbit/s was seen as ‘high speed’. Whereas this might suggest a state of utopia, it is becoming apparent that traffic is increasing to match these speeds and the need for effective control of that traffic is as important as it ever was.”

As well as outright performance, network users for both local and wide area are demanding very high availability he added. Whereas networking equipment is becoming more and more reliable, Bergin said, it is important to ensure that the “topology designs are appropriate for 100% up-time”.

“This,” he added, “is readily achievable in LANs, the challenge is greater in the WAN where significant consideration must be given to ensuring the necessary (and appropriate) levels of resilience and availability. Some organisations are looking to dual network providers whilst others are seeking to achieve such availability within the one provider.”

“Class of Service is needed to enable certain types of traffic to be prioritised and this is becoming more and more important with the ever-increasing levels of convergence we are seeing, where the same networks (based on IP protocol) are carrying mixes of voice, video, time-critical data and less critical data.”

Operating costs
Daithi De Faoite, technology consultant with HP Ireland, said that currently it is seeing “data centre consolidation” as being the major network infrastructure concern of its vast customer base. “We would see a lot of customers that are trying to leverage their IT infrastructure and trying to be clever in how they use IT. Reducing usage in data centres, putting in larger more powerful servers and virtualising them, that’s the trend we’re seeing right across the industry. One other area is unified communications; we’re seeing a lot of companies using UC particularly around video integration.”

Head of engineering with Baker Security and Networks, Claudio Corrocher added to this, saying one of the other main influences in the market for end users at the moment is a move towards centralisation. “We see a move back to this along with server consolidation,” he told ComputerScope. “The network is the real enabler for this. With the aid of centralisation, the network currently linking locations to the server farms are becoming increasingly important. Network managers are finding that not only the nominal bandwidth of a connection is important, but that equally, latency is impacting the end-user experience. This triggers new interest in WAN acceleration – and compression technologies, both of which address this issue.”

Operating costs
As well as UC, growing bandwidth and speed requirements, alongside the desire for centralisation, there is a comparable drive to lowering the operating cost in the comms room and data centre. That’s according to Neil Wisdom, sales director at Complete Telecom. “Most of the main vendors are actively refreshing their product ranges with far more power efficient products. It is a simple fact now that the operating cost of a comms room or data centre in terms of power, cooling and rack space, generally far outweighs all other costs on an annual basis and real return on investment modelling has to factor in a lot more elements other than just the traditional capital acquisition cost versus basic hardware break/fix and equipment administration costs.”

He joined the ranks claiming that the driving force for more bandwidth is the dramatic increase in IP-based video traffic. “High Definition TV and video streams, network connected CCTV/surveillance, high definition tele-presence and video conferencing solutions are becoming far more available, affordable and far more useable. Other related areas such as content rich digital media services and digital signage are also contributing to the demand in the growth of core and distribution networks as well as the related technologies to produce, deliver and manage the video sources and infrastructure required to support them.”

Power over Ethernet
On a similar theme, David Palmer-Stevens, system integrator manager EMEA with Panduit Europe, felt that the biggest technology developments within network infrastructure at the moment is how the data centre is being virtualised, “but now its reaching the desktop with VDI – virtual desktop infrastructure”.

He added, “This turns the old thin client from a dumb terminal to a full blown PC. With the IT-preferred benefits of it being easier-to-manage; being one software patch automatically deployed on 5,000 PCs if need; being only one copy of the data et cetera. This is a big change taking place in the enterprise. Users should be using Power over Ethernet (PoE) to power them not a mains adaptor,” he added.

Frazer Furlong, sales manager for Ergo’s network services concurred with this. “From a network infrastructure point of view, the next big thing in my view is virtual desktop infrastructure. There’s a whole range of benefits of doing this instead of a complete desktop refresh. People are becoming a lot more familiar with virtualisation and it makes a lot of sense, there’s a lot of capital cost benefit, management benefits, a lot of up-front benefits basically, in having a virtual desktop infrastructure, and it’s something which more and more people are happy to talk about. On the hardware side end users are spending money on servers best suited for virtualisation so there’s still some consolidation going on as that’s being rolled out.”

Paul Kenny, head of infrastructure consulting services, Dell Ireland, also weighed in on the topic of the influence of virtualisation, noting, “there is continued growth in demand for PoE in both chassis and standalone technology and interestingly network switch performance is starting to raise its head as customers start to use more bandwidth-hungry applications such as video. Virtualisation is a huge driver, not just at the data centre but also within the storage arena and latterly at the desktop level, once again this is having an impact on network performance.”

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