Opinion: George Atrash DiData

He tells CRN what customers were asking you for five years ago is very different to what they ask for today and how virtualisation has played a bit part in that.

'In the past five years, we have seen a dramatic shift in the composition of traffic on our enterprise networks - not just in terms of volume, but also the types of packets flowing and the ways in which it is being accessed. 

At Dimension Data, we see four key drivers in the market for organisations seeking network optimisation solutions.

Prioritisation of different traffic types is one.

The convergence of voice, video and data, and the trend towards centralisation and consolidation of data centres and applications, is forcing organisations to distinguish between different traffic types and behaviours.

Voice and video traffic require quality of service to be functional, and there are business applications where performance is critical.

This is complicated by the trend of organisations moving servers and storage out of the branches and into a central data centre.

All of a sudden, the applications and data that users were accessing locally now have to be reached over the WAN.

End-to-end performance is two.

Network managers need to be more aware of performance at all points on the enterprise, down to the end user.

The important point to note is that it is not just a question of speed - users are looking for consistent performance from the applications and services they are accessing at their desks.

The added complication is that organisations also need to distinguish different forms of web-based traffic.

With more enterprise applications being accessed via browsers, users will be expecting that the performance from these web-based applications will be much better faster than standard Internet browsing.

Security is three. Rogue traffic from spam, viruses, worms, file sharing applications and other non business-related applications such as Skype or MSN can potentially comprise up to half an organisation's network traffic.

It's important to be able to identify these traffic types both to stop or limit the spread and impact of malicious payloads, and to ensure that "recreational" stuff does not compromise the performance of business-critical traffic.

Bandwidth limitations is four. Particularly for organisations with a wide geographic spread or with remote operations under-served by communications infrastructure, there are physical limits to the size of the pipe they have to access network services.

There is simply no way that you can solve performance problems by throwing more bandwidth at it.