11 & 12. Voice over IP, Storage over IP
Voice over IP
Going into 2001, eWEEK labs expects to see a variety of advances in voice-over-IP technology. Implementations are another matter, however, because at the end of the day, vendors of VOIP wares will still have trouble countering the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Despite the loud buzz that has surrounded VOIP for close to three years, most major corporations are still waiting and watching. They demand high-quality phone service and take it for granted because the technology is mature and reliable.
Those adjectives still don't come to mind when one thinks of Internet service providers and network applications, and most companies won't risk the quality of a service as basic and mission-critical as telephony.
With the advent of supporting applications such as unified messaging, VOIP will gain credibility and might even fulfill vendors' claims that it is destined to be a must-have technology. But 2001 will not be the year when most major corporations replace their telephony infrastructures with VOIP systems.
A key area to watch next year will be the development of chip and codec products from companies such as Lucent Technologies Inc. and Global IP Sound. Those products will allow vendors to improve the sound quality of IP calls while making network utilization more efficient.
Another critical area to watch is the evolution of soft switches (software switches). Soft switches are responsible for call-control functions such as call routing, admission control and connection control. 3Com and Lucent will likely peddle their soft-switch products vigorously in 2001.
Last but certainly not least, IT managers should watch the headlines for hints of heavy-handed government regulation that could pour cold water on the entire VOIP movement while protecting Old Guard telephone service providers.
ââ,¬"Henry Baltazar
Storage over IP
As IP networks grow to carry ever more enterprise data, the demand for storage and access to archives grows in (at least) equal proportion. Economics will make IP storage connection an important item on the 2001 agenda.
We'd like to call this concept "storage over IP," or SoIP, by analogy to voice over IP; unfortunately, the attractive "SoIP" label is a copyrighted term owned by Nishan Systems, pushing the industry toward some less convenient label such as "SANoIP" for the next step beyond today's Fibre Channel SANs.
Worldwide capacity on IP is growing, performance and cost of IP switching equipment are improving, and quality of service on IP is being propelled by the stringent demands of streaming media. For enterprise data administrators, SANoIP has the further attraction of consolidating network administration and other technical support around a core set of knowledge, skills and tools.
Administrators should be wary, however, of letting expectations get too high. Distributed systems, it's been said, work best when they're no more than five feet apart: It's useful to maintain short signal paths between storage systems that have to agree with each other. Longer paths suffer from speed-of-light and switching delays that threaten cache coherence. They also suffer from risks of physical interruption.
Prosaic problems such as cable connector types, and esoteric problems such as autonegotiation standards for heterogeneous network interactions, can create unforeseen costs and prolong adoption timetables. But SANoIP adoption can be incremental: Initial investments can focus on connection of dispersed Fibre Channel SANs rather than relying on bleeding-edge technology for their most critical systems.
ââ,¬"Peter Coffee
