What Drives Enterprise Network Upgrades?

Today's networks are under siege. Infrastructure and operations teams worry about security upgrades, application rollouts, and new virtualization architectures that are stressing networks beyond their capacity. As the network manager, you once toiled over the business case for 10 Gigabit Ethernet but now find the technology deployed throughout your data center. However, as you begin to increase network usage, your gating factor is not bandwidth — it's latency. As a result, you'll need to bifurcate network investment and upgrade both packet delivery (i.e., transport) and application delivery (i.e., performance) equipment. This provides the necessary bandwidth and latency enhancements, respectively, to prepare you for another three years of application and content growth. But be careful, all this gear comes with two challenges: 1) accelerated equipment refresh cycles, which are now every two to three years; and 2) the need to invest in skills so your engineers can take advantage of new network-embedded security and application features.