2. Bandwidth management and QOS
The problem of managing QOSââ,¬"the prioritised allocation of network bandwidth when transmissions contend for pipeline positionââ,¬"will blossom next year as IT managers face ever-greedier applications and an increase in raw traffic volume.
Even with the increased importance of quality of service and its cousins, SLA (service-level agreement) and class of service, eWeek Labs does not foresee any meteoric advances next year. The Common Open Policy Service technology endorsed by Cisco Systems Inc. should evolve a bit, and the Distributed Management Task Force will likely make headway on QOS-related standards. Elsewhere, there's not much brewing.
Rather than scanning the horizon for technological advances, IT managers should focus on relationships with service providers and haggle to get traffic prioritised. With the unsettled state of the provider market, the time is right to demand lower rates and forge favorable SLAs.
Bandwidth management will be a critical issue next year for companies adopting VOIP (voice over IP) or other technologies that require timely delivery of data. Managers of traditional data-only networks should leave QOS to those on the bleeding edge of VOIP and focus, instead, on providing sufficient capacity to handle the heaviest consistent loads of data traffic.
One problem that won't go away in 2001 is the complexity of implementing QOS, especially in heterogeneous networks. Network equipment vendors seem almost to take delight in blithely ignoring customers' needs for interoperability among devices from diverse vendors. Managers should look to products such as IPHighway Inc.'s Open Policy System to help set policies across disparate equipment.
Similarly, upcoming technology changes such as IPv6 will likely make overall network management easier by including QOS as well as IP Security in the core of the TCP/IP protocol.
