As network hardware reaches saturation point, now's the time to pick up a bargain in emerging networking technologies. David Braue examines which innovations you can ignore and which ones your business can't do without.
The recent spate of profit warnings, mass layoffs, product rationalisation and strategic restructuring has been like a bucket of cold water thrown on the once-buoyant networking industry. Yet as the industry regroups and searches for a way to recover its lost glory, customers could be the ultimate beneficiaries as a new breed of business solutions brings the promise of more flexible, far-reaching and effective data networks.
It's a change that had to come after what can only be described as deadly efficiency within the networking industry. Fuelled by a rapidly swelling explosion of interest in the Internet, networking companies flooded their customers with products to help their internal networks support all manner of online business applications.
This led to a boom market for the sale of hubs, switches, routers, network interface cards (NICs), and the myriad other components that make up today's networks.
In a word, the networking industry was doing its job too well.
Now that everybody has a network, sales are plummeting. Telecommunications carriers, a core base of loyal customers that who had for years helped networking vendors deliver healthy results, are slowing their spending and tempering once ambitious expansion plans as they face increased competition and tough economic times in their own backyards.
There is no more opportunity for networking vendors to piggyback on the corporate compulsion to upgrade information systems in the face of a threat like the Millennium Bug or the GST. And within the crucial corporate and government spheres, the overall sense of increased fiscal responsibility has seen network upgrades taking a back seat to IT investments that potentially offer a more immediate return on investment (ROI)-within a matter of months.
It may all sound glum, but the industry's current uninspiring state may be the best opportunity in years to get vendors to jump through hoops for you. Just as the focus of networking buying over the past five years has been to bring companies onto the Internet, your focus now should be on laying the framework for a number of emerging technologies that could dramatically improve the way things run on your network. When done right, they can deliver a broad range of benefits-including that six- to twelve-month ROI your manager is now demanding.
Fewer choices, easier planning
Because volume is perhaps the most important driver for bringing prices of IT equipment down, many of the difficult choices that faced network architects years ago are no longer issues. This is because a host of technologies that once competed for networking mindshare-including physical topologies like 4 megabit-per-second (Mbps) Token Ring and 100Mbps FDDI, and transmission protocols like SNA, DEC LAT, NetBIOS, IPX, and others-are now all but extinct.
If you're building a network or upgrading a previous system, odds are that you're going to be using what has become the trinity of corporate networking: 100Mbps Fast Ethernet connections to desktop PCs, 1000MBps Gigabit Ethernet connections between servers, and the IP protocol for data transmission.
The dominance of these standards has come despite repeated predictions that Ethernet had hit the wall several years ago. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention, and the industry's need to push down the price of networking equipment inevitably led to a concerted focus on ways of continually extending the Ethernet family. It has even marginalised ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), the onetime heir apparent to Ethernet that has since faded into obscurity as vendors pushed faster, cheaper Gigabit Ethernet LAN equipment into the market.
Gigabit Ethernet now runs quite well over relatively short lengths of standard Category 5 copper cabling, which by now is pervasive in virtually any office building you're likely to inhabit. This means you can use standard and cheap copper wire to interconnect servers and switches, instead of having to fork out for expensive fibre-optic cable and network cards.
Even potentially more helpful, concerted development around Gigabit Ethernet has brought it the ease of use that makes it viable even in smaller offices.
"Businesses can reduce costs up to 40 percent by running Gigabit Ethernet over copper," says Chris Stephens, product manager with struggling networking vendor 3Com, which has pegged much of its hopes for revival on the technology's acceptance and offers network switches supporting 10, 100 and 1000Mbps flavours of Ethernet. "Our whole focus is on simplicity. When you're starting to build networks, the last thing you want is extremely complex solutions. Auto-sensing, auto-configuring networks are key."
Also worth a serious look are wireless networks, which have emerged from their relative niche status to become a viable option in all manner of offices. If your employees often travel into the field and back again-or if they just like to change their work environs every once in a while-wireless networks can get them online whenever they're in the vicinity. Convergence around the IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi) standard has ensured compatibility between wireless base stations and the interface cards or antennae now being built into many notebook PCs.
That standard runs at 11Mbps, the speed of early Ethernet networks, but by next year you'll also see the launch of faster 54Mbps wireless LANs based on the 802.11a standard (see www.wirelessethernet.org for more information). Be warned, however: that standard is not compatible with Wi-Fi, so you may want to wait to buy the faster equipment if you need that speed.
Your story gets a bit repetitive around paragraph nine in the MAN chapter...