The best WAN advice of 2012

What were the most popular tips for network engineers and IT managers dealing with enterprise wide area networks (WANs) in 2012? We took the top five advice articles from SearchEnterpriseWAN.com to give you a countdown of the year’s most pertinent tips:

No. 5: Calculating mobile application bandwidth requirements

It’s no secret mobile devices have infiltrated enterprise networks, whether through the consumerization of IT or through BYOD policies. In turn, IT managers have seen more network traffic coming from mobile applications. How can IT calculate the bandwidth requirements for these mobile applications? Tip writer Michael Finneran takes you through the calculations in this top tip of 2012.  

No. 4: Three ways to optimize TCP/IP

Despite the hype around video conferencing and other real-time based applications, a great deal of network traffic is still based on TCP/IP. In this tip, WAN optimization expert Henry Svendblad offers three ways for enterprises to optimize TCP-based network traffic.   

No. 3: Measuring network throughput using iPerf

As cheap as bandwidth has become, it’s still a huge enterprise expense. Often times, the bandwidth enterprises pay for is not what they are getting in terms of network throughput. That’s why we asked network testing guru Kevin Tolly to give us tips on how to measure wide area network throughput. In this article he shows us how to use free networking tool, iPerf, to accomplish this. 

No. 2: Deciding between hardware and software WAN optimizers

Since the term “virtualization” was coined, the tech industry has gone to great lengths to virtualize just about everything imaginable — including WAN optimization controllers (WOCs). While at first virtual WOCs performed less efficiently than their hardware counterparts, that no longer speaks true today. Nemertes Research Principal Analyst John Burke presents these tips to help IT decide between hardware and software (virtual) WAN optimizers.

No. 1: Choosing the best WAN connectivity option

More than measuring network throughput, calculating bandwidth and choosing WAN optimization controllers — IT managers have wanted nothing more than to make the right telecom service decision. The most popular WAN connectivity options have included Ethernet and MPLS. Experts Johna Till Johnson and Paul Kirvan explain the benefits and drawbacks of each and list them neatly in this tech comparison chart.

In the words of the company: “The name no longer fits the company, nor the markets we serve, so a change was needed.”

The fact that I even call it a “network security” market speaks to how the market has converged. Information security and IT networking markets are merging as a result of centralizing data and holding it accountable. Take “network access control” for instance — a term popular up until maybe 2008. It has since been replaced by “data loss prevention” (DLP).

The company began in the optical encryption market, hence the former name “cipher” — a key to a secret — and “optics” (optical). Now that the company has made its mark in network encryption, it only made sense to shed ”optics” and replace it with “networks” — a new company strength.

It turns out the name Certes Networks doesn’t stray too far from CipherOptics. The company likes to point out that “certes” is an anagram for “secret” — linking back to its roots. “Certes” comes from the word “certain” meaning “true.” Certes Networks aims to protect data in a network using network access control, or data loss protection/prevention, I should say — hence, Certes Networks’ 10 Gbps variable speed network encryptor announcement.

It should be the aim of every network engineer to understand where data is and how to secure it. Likewise, a security engineer will be hardpressed to secure a network they don’t understand.

Experts in the industry have learned tricks along the way to help you spend less time troubleshooting and more time implementing techniques to keep your company competitive. Respected IT pros Jim Metzler, John Bartlett and Brent Chapman plan to share their tips with you in our free virtual seminar, entitled “Optimizing and Managing the Dynamic Enterprise Network.”

Join me Wednesday, June 23, in any or all of these three sessions:

Sign up for this virtual seminar to speak with experts in live Q&As, network with your peers in our virtual lounge, and/or watch vendor product demos, all from the comfort of your own desk… Plus, one lucky attendee will win an iPad.

I hope you can make it, and I really look forward to meeting you June 23!
Tessa Parmenter

This is the case with Uplogix, Inc., a Texas-based provider of automated network management solutions that recently launched a promotion campaign that offers a free t-shirt to promote its technology that reportedly extends network management capabilities to the very edge of your wired and wireless architectures. The solution claims to reduce the cost and complexity of managing networks by offering the ability to automate the process of remote management and recovery even when the network is down. The promotion debuted late last month at Cisco Live! in San Francisco (Uplogix is a Cisco partner).

All very well and good and important, but I have to admit I sort of like the striking black t-shirt, which boldly states ‘Keep Your Edge’ on the front. It could be referring to personality, or maybe one’s management skills — although I am sure Uplogix wants to keep its automated network management solution top of mind. The t-shirt is available free from Uplogix to anyone who takes the time to write in and tell the company about their best ‘life on the edge’ experience.

The company’s t-shirt promotion doesn’t stop there, however. If you send in your edge-estential story Uplogix will enter your name in a drawing for a Rovio Wi-Fi-enabled mobile Webcam with streaming audio and video. This is a really cool device that can be remotely controlled via computer, cell phone, PDA or game console from anywhere in the world. With it, you can wander through your home or office and use the built-in video camera and microphone to see and hear everything in its path. The device even has an LED headlight for dimly-lit locations, which might very well be the career path of anyone who uses it to spy on people at the office or spends too much time using it during business hours.

Once you get your t-shirt, the company invites you to upload a photograph of you wearing it in the most unique or clever location. Photos are posted on the company’s official t-shirt Web site, although I have to admit many of them look like mug shots from a cable access version of CSI. A number of t-shirt wearing people also seem to be having way too much 100% pre-shrunk cotton fun.

Remember the good old days, when t-shirts were simply given away at trade shows, or maybe shot from one of those cannon devices into an audience? The times, they are a changin’, and hopefully the t-shirts once they are worn a little too long.

While spending on green IT projects has slowed, along with everything else, these efforts are still top of mind when it comes to project priorities, says market researcher Gartner, Inc., noting that 2009 will most likely be a ‘gap year’ for initiatives. This is a term familiar to Europeans that refers to a period of time taken by a student before attending university to reflect on life, get involved in volunteer services, and oh yeah, have a bit of fun.

In the corporate sense, however, it means keeping a low profile to avoid short-term cost cutting and hopefully survive to budget another day.

Gartner is pretty optimistic about the future of green IT, pointing out that more than one-third of the 620 organizations it surveyed earlier this year (46% in Europe, 38% in Asia/Pacific and 36% in the US) expected to spend more than 15% of their IT capital budgets on green projects.

Gartner also asked organizations that had a specific capital expenditure budget for green IT (22% of respondents), what proportion of total IT capital expenditure this represented. Overall, more than one-third of respondents (46% in Europe, 38% in Asia/Pacific and 36% in the US) anticipated spending more than 15% of their IT capital budgets on green IT projects.

While the true proponents of the green movement are reluctant to admit it, most companies get the okay for projects from upper management based on the expected cost savings from an initiative that may result in a leaner and monetarily meaner IT and network structure. For telecom carriers, for example, this might mean evaluating a go no-go decision based on a 12-24 month return on investment (ROI) formula.

Says BlueCoat Systems senior VP of operations David Cox, “It’s all carbon reduction, land fill avoidance and other issues. But, also about risk mitigation, brand recognition and ROI.” In short, one executive’s green passion is another’s pursuit of the greenbacks, or at least saving them to improve the bottom line.

Coverage of the green movement will continue on SearchEnterpriseWAN.com, especially as it applies to cutting network and telecom costs, as well as being politically and ethically correct. Meanwhile, let us know your thoughts on the greening of IT and its impact on network operations, planning and quality of services in your organization.