Enterprise Networking! Everything you need to know ! Introduction to Enterprise Networking ! During! the past 35 years, the acceptance and growth of high-performance corporate network systems and infrastructures have been prolific in South !Africa - as they have been in the all countries. We’ve seen the development of open, standards-based networks that first made connectivity available to everyone. And we’ve experienced the rise in importance of the Internet followed rapidly by the advancement of social media from consumer fad and business pariah to corporate necessity for the mobile executive driven by massive strides in wireless !network technology. Today we’re witnessing the adoption of cloud computing, one of the fastest growing trends in business whereby shared resources, software and applications are consumed by organisations ‘on- demand’ from cloud-based service providers, much as we consume water or electricity supplied !by a public utility company. On-demand cloud services, including online collaboration tools and social networking platforms, are able to deliver speed, efficiency and marketing advantages to businesses over and above the !obvious cost benefits which are said to be as high as 20 to 30% of total IT expenditure. Many of the changes to the Information Technology (IT) industry have been chronicled in the past two editions of Enterprise Networking, a book that was first written some fourteen years ago. Since then, the book has been updated a number of times. The first revision was launched in South Africa in 2003. Eight years on, a second revision became available and now, in 2014, a third revision – the fourth edition - highlights and charts the changes experienced by those in the IT industry in recent times. I was delighted when it becoming a standard reference work, found on many IT manager’s e-readers and other devices. I was again pleasantly surprised when it !assumed the role of an introductory text work in many technical colleges around the country. For example, I am constantly amazed at the speed with which devices can communicate today compared to just a few years ago, boosted by ever-increasing bandwidth requirements of servers, !routers, switches and applications. Ten gigabits-per-second (Gbps) wired speed was considered ground breaking in 2003, but nowadays, out-the-box networking components can be configured to deliver speeds of around !100 Gbps in wireless form across the most complex corporate-wide network infrastructures. And as technology presses ahead, the cadence of the drumbeat to which it is marching is quickening. Already, all-optical computer chips promise a future computing world based on light speed. In just a few short years we’ll be measuring network speeds, even in garden-variety LANs, !in terabits-per-second. One terabit equals 1000 gigabits. Is this the next frontier? Over the past two decades, a new generation of technologies has been born underlying the importance of decreasing latency, which is today as urgent as increasing speed. Peer-to-peer !messaging, cache-friendly algorithms and now real-time analytics. Effective data gathering, its analysis and the subsequent application and interpretation of business intelligence makes it possible for planners and strategists to reveal unseen trends linked !to issues such as customer behaviour changes, operational patterns and future business trends. It is able to help organisations reduce operational costs, pinpoint new business opportunities and react quickly to retail demands. It could also identify outdated or inept business methodologies !ready for upgrade or redesign. Gaining business intelligence is often about asking the right questions to amass data. In this light, organisations are increasingly turning to new vehicles to amass bigger and more assorted data !sets which can be converted into better-quality knowledge with appropriate analysis. One of the keys to obtaining this level of business intelligence is the strength of the corporate infrastructure and the business processes and systems underpinning it. A challenge common to all organisations committed to data-driven decision making is to obtain the most appropriate data !from their computer systems. One of the most fundamental and all-pervasive business systems is the corporate network. It has !the capability to help power business innovation using its own infrastructure as a basis. In this light, network reliability is gaining importance and relevance. Now 99.999% uptime is considered the average network benchmark. Time is money. What’s more, new virtualised infrastructures and cloud-based revolutions have changed how servers, switches and client !computers behave on the network, making management ever more challenging. And the challenges keep on coming. Today, there is a growing army of mobile workers that demands access to every networked and Internet-based service from anywhere on the planet using their latest PC tablets, smartphones and laptop PCs. The ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) !movement is well established and growing exponentially. Because BYODs are able to sidestep the physical, logical and personnel security controls associated with traditional corporate networking management functions, the spotlight continues !to focus on security. What exactly are these security issues? Privacy heads the list. It includes secure access when connecting to cloud services and it encompasses authentication/ authorisation and endpoint !security validation. Despite these uncertainties, overall security provided by cloud computing hosts and their associates has the potential to be as good as - if not better than - the security barriers common to !most traditional computer systems, if addressed correctly. Against this backdrop, hardware life-cycles are becoming increasing shorter thanks to modern innovations. In order to launch new, more secure network services, investments continue to be made by vendors in a variety of hardware appliances which not only compete for space and power in the data centre, but add layers of complexity in order to meet deployment, integration !and application objectives. The problems are particularly evident in telecoms and service provider networks where they are compounded by the increasing costs of energy, capital investment challenges and the rarity of skills necessary to operate increasingly complex hardware-based appliances in burgeoning data !centres. As a result, data centres have been steadily evolving to become virtualised, along with their server and storage infrastructures. Virtualisation is changing the footprint of the in-house data centre, shrinking it in size and scope along with the need for physical servers and large storage !repositories. Although applications and storage are moving to the cloud, the on-site data centre remains a critical cog in the corporate IT wheel, particularly in terms of application delivery to the !enterprise user. Today, the data centre is tasked with seamlessly interweaving cloud and terrestrial applications, services and cloud components - notably networking, server and storage infrastructures - while !supporting the management of mobile virtual machines (VMs) and end users. At the same time, corporate IT departments are challenged to deliver greater data centre efficiency while orchestrating better operational processes to support, for example, multiple !virtual servers and networks demanding more bandwidth. System managers are having to cope with the congestion resulting from increased traffic flows across the network, often caused by processes and procedures that were once the province of a single server but which are now distributed across the data centre on multiple servers many of !which are virtualised. With virtualisation changing application architectures - by separating application layers across multiple virtual machines (VMs) on multiple physical servers - it’s time for next-generation !thinking when it comes to data centre offerings. Perhaps it comes in the form of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), a new-generation technology with the potential to advance significant change in the way networks are built, !operated and managed. NFV is expected to enable a wide variety of eco-systems and encourage openness. For example, it will open the virtual appliance market to pure software entrants, small players and academia, encouraging new services and new revenue streams to be optimised more quickly and at much !lower risk. A key benefit of NFV is its potential to radically alter the way service providers design future networks as they strive for increased flexibility. In this light, service providers expect the accelerated adoption of NFV to significantly reduce both the cost of building their networks and the cost of network operations. However, for the adoption of NFV to take root on a broad scale, it will have to explore and optimise the symbiotic relationship that potentially exists with software-defined networking (SDN) !technology. Researchers point to the possibility that NFV and SDN could revolutionise communications service providers' businesses as they primarily impact carrier network infrastructure and data centre markets. Both NFV and SDN have burst upon the telecommunications scene in the past year, representing the culmination of efforts to break up vertical proprietary stacks in telecom technology. The principles underlying both began to appear in network standards and software recently, effectively priming the market for change. Today, making a smart IT decision means knowing a lot more