Networks unprepared for future demands

Most of the networking infrastructure within local organisations will not be able to cope with increased future demands.

This is according to the ITWeb-Dimension Data Application Delivery Survey, which ran online for a fortnight. Attracting a total of 235 respondents, the survey probed the respondents as to how confident organisations are regarding their network's readiness for future increases in network traffic and changing traffic patterns.

Most of the respondents (38.80%) said they will need some incremental improvements to cope with future demands. This was followed by 32.79% who said they believe their network is in good shape even if traffic patterns change and volumes increase.

On the other hand, 19.13% revealed they will need substantial investment into the existing network infrastructure to cope, while 9.29% said they will need complete network redesign or redeployment to cope with future demand.

Michael Abendanon, GM of network integration, Dimension Data, Middle East and Africa, says this finding, at least, indicates that more organisations understand that networks have become far more critical and complex than previously thought. “Many organisations have started to manage network requirements much more effectively, but still often get hampered by the lack of visibility of their networks,” he says.

He also points out that it is essential that organisations continuously manage the lifecycle, functionality and performance available on the network infrastructure. “The network needs to be updated to ensure that it is capable of not only delivering all the applications and services required, but that this is also done most efficiently with the correct SLAs [service level agreements], optimal configuration and, therefore, at the right cost.”

The study also asked the respondents how they would rate their network's overall performance on a scale of one to five, where one is excellent and five extremely poor. The majority (44.26%) rated their network performance with a three. This was followed by 21.31%, who gave it a four. Some 20.77% gave it a two and only 7.65% said it is excellent. On the other hand, 6.01% said it is extremely poor.

Abendanon says network confidence is not so strong because SA, historically, has had limited bandwidth available due to the historically high cost of Internet access and WAN bandwidth, which has limited application performance over the WAN or the Internet.

Furthermore, he explains, the network always gets blamed first, most likely because it's the common thread of infrastructure and, therefore, the perception is often that it is most likely the network that is at fault.

The survey also affirmed that network capability is the most pressing infrastructure challenge that affects application delivery, cited by 28.42% of the respondents. This was distantly followed by business applications (14.21%).

Says Abendanon on the finding: “If one uses the analogy of road infrastructure being the network and motor vehicles, bridges and toll gates being applications and servers and other IT infrastructure, one starts to understand the critical role that the network plays.”

He explains that just as roads are required for users to get from point A to point B, the network is the platform on which applications (motor vehicles) run and to which most, if not all, IT infrastructure (bridges, tollgates) is connected.

“Often infrastructure and applications are deployed without considering the impact on the network or without upgrading, redesigning and configuring the network to support these new deployments. You can imagine the impact if all of a sudden without no warning, or additional lanes being built, double the amount of vehicles had to use the same roads, or if we all got stuck behind a slow car on a single lane road.

“Similarly, not preparing the network to support new demands placed on it can lead to failure of newly deployed services or applications resulting in additional unplanned costs that could/should have been identified upfront.”

Asked about the biggest application delivery challenge that their organisation currently faces, the majority (34.43%) revealed that mobile workers experience slow application responsiveness when connecting through 3G or ADSL. This was followed by 21.86% who indicated that they experience a high level of latency when users access an application over the WAN.

Commenting on this finding, Abendanon says applications traversing networks today are much richer in content in the form of images, video and sound.

“Organisations are trying to optimise the use of networks and have voice, data and video traversing the same network. More than ever before, application data has to traverse extended networks, not only the corporate LAN. Users are becoming more mobile or accessing application data from various locations all over the world,” he explains.

In summary, he adds, all of this has implications for network and infrastructure performance requirements, including changing data traffic patterns, combined with increasing traffic volumes, which ultimately affect application delivery.

“Considering that these are challenging in a corporate environment, it is even more difficult for WAN and Internet service providers to prioritise traffic that they do not have direct control or visibility of, especially over shared infrastructure such as offered to consumers at a much lower price per month compared to dedicated bandwidth provided to corporates,” Abendanon notes.

He reckons there are various optimisation techniques that can be applied to infrastructure across the application delivery chain. “However, you cannot manage what you cannot see and, therefore, it is essential that organisations understand their data traffic patterns and in which way their networks infrastructure needs to be redesigned in order to deliver the application most effectively.”

Abendanon believes once the network and infrastructure have been optimally designed and configured, acceleration and compression techniques can be used to optimise the performance of the application across the infrastructure.