Taming the wide area beast
[Good article on the rise of WAN importance]
internettelephony.com
May 11, 1998
Network managers face an uphill battle, but help is on the way
ILAN RAAB
One network manager I know sarcastically refers to his wide area network as "my
unmanageable beast." Each month he spends more and more money on the care and
feeding of his WAN. Despite the ever-climbing expenditure, he is unable--much to
his chagrin--to ensure his CEO's videoconference will go off without a hitch.
Like many network managers, my friend realizes that no matter how unreliable and
costly, the WAN beast has become a necessary evil. Without it, his company
couldn't order the parts needed for products or conduct electronic commerce.
Managers couldn't track inventory . The company would lose hundreds of thousands
of dollars, since customer service reps would not be able to process customers'
orders.
Since the company's Human Resources Department uses applications over the
WAN to record everything from vacation time to pay raises, this network manager
wouldn't even get paid if it weren't for the WAN. Network managers at service
providers face this problem times 10, as they try to figure out how to slice up limited
WAN resources for multiple corporations.
Indeed, a WAN beast prowls the wide area links-and it's here to stay. But as a
new generation of companies are proving, this unruly creature can be tamed.
How The Beast Was Born
A mere five or 10 years ago, a network manager used WAN connections in a very
limited way: to transfer files or update a large database at the headquarters office at
the end of the day. There was not a lot of continuous, heavy traffic crossing WAN
links.
At the same time, the LAN was undergoing exponential growth. A PC on every
desktop became the mantra of the times-and soon it became imperative that each
of those clients be able to share spreadsheets, graphics and presentations, and
ultimately run sophisticated applications like Microsoft Office.
Localized e-mail evolved, creating a high volume of LAN-based traffic. LAN users
began to experience a bandwidth crunch as they all attempted to tap into the limited
capabilities of the local area network.
With so much action on the LAN and so little on the WAN, it's no wonder that
network managers and vendors alike focused nearly all of their energies on whipping
the LAN into shape. The LAN landscape evolved from token ring and Ethernet to
Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet.
Sophisticated switches and routers were developed, only to be replaced by even
better routers and switches six months down the line. Vendors created LAN
management applications to control LAN traffic. Everything relating to the
LAN-PCs, switches, routers, network interface cards (NICs)-got faster, cheaper
and better overnight. LANs developed in an isolated, but highly efficient, way. The
WAN toiled (albeit intermittently) in relative obscurity as the LAN took the limelight.
A few events happened in parallel to bring the WAN into the forefront. Frame relay
was adopted, bringing once-prohibitive WAN usage prices within reason for many
corporations. Then the Internet came into being, allowing for the fast transmission of
information and creating a situation where everyone in the organization wanted to be
-then needed to be-online.
At the same time, a more agile corporate world emerged, requiring a steady diet of
real-time (and bandwidth hungry) data. In this new business world, communications
is crucial.
This ability to share spreadsheets and graphics with the person in the next cubicle
was no longer the main goal. Now the pressure was on to share and access
information on a global basis. Travel agencies around the world wanted to tap
directly into airline booking records to offer real-time seating availability to clients.
Plugged-in investors wanted to rearrange their fund allocations with a click of a
mouse. Corporations wanted to process just-in-time orders for their manufacturing
plants. Help desks wanted to direct global customers to the web server for technical
issues, to place orders, to get the latest installation guide.
The WAN's days of obscurity and low-intensity usage were over.
The Beast Grows Up
Virtually overnight, the WAN became the infrastructure of modern business. The corporate network, tasked with new services such as inventory tracking, remote Internet commerce, Intranet-enabled, mission-critical applications and voice over data networks, relied upon the WAN to transport more business-critical data than any other medium, be it paper, phone or fax. Once viewed as a simple connectivity tool, the WAN became a strategic, worldwide resource.
At this point, the WAN beast reared its ugly head. Suddenly, a small- to mid-sized global corporation could not function efficiently with only two WAN links, it needed
20. Even though WAN access prices had dropped, the network's operational cost
now skyrocketed. While the LAN had gotten faster, cheaper and better quite
quickly, WAN speeds stagnated at 1.5 Mb/s or T-1.
Future Burdens
This fact will come as no surprise to anyone involved in a large corporation today:
Network managers will be faced with ever-increasing WAN usage as we approach
the millennium.
Corporations are adding web-based applications on an almost daily basis, requiring
round-the-clock bandwidth. Documentation support, company policy manuals, job
postings, electronic signatures-it's all web-based and bandwidth intensive.
Additionally, companies are mulling the integration of voice and data over the same
line. This change will save on long-distance calls, but also will eat up precious
bandwidth.
Organizations will increasingly depend on global apps to keep inventory and ordering
systems running. Meanwhile, as developers work to make these global apps more
interactive they will become even more graphic-intense-and therefore more
bandwidth-hungry-than ever. When news broke in February that AT&T faced a
T-1 line shortage and was delaying orders throughout the country, it became clear
that this problem was here to stay.
More and more enterprises want to integrate voice and data telephony into their growing intranets or virtual private networks. They are looking to better use their investment and looking to save money wherever possible on their telephone bills. Service providers are looking at ways to add these integrated services as customers start to see this support as an obvious, standard service offering.
At the same time, no one is expecting to see the WAN make the quantum speed
leaps that the LAN did when it occupied the spotlight. Why? Simply because the
effort needed to create a new standard for the WAN is monumental in comparison.
For instance, a group of entrepreneurs were able to push for a new standard for
gigabit Ethernet and now it's a reality.
To create a new WAN standard, though, those entrepreneurs would have to get 50
carriers to agree. Governments, telephone companies and other carriers, Internet
Service Providers and customers would all need to be involved in the planning
process. Frame relay and asynchronous transfer mode technology are helping, but clearly we shouldn't hold our breath while waiting for overnight breakthroughs in WAN speeds.
Taming the Beast
The coming years are sure to bring with them new technologies and advances that
will allow network managers to tame the WAN beast. Here are a few of examples of
what network managers and service providers can expect:
Consolidation: We are already starting to see the industry consolidate and this trend will continue. In recent months, Bay Networks absorbed WAN access technology company New Oak; Cisco acquired last-mile technology start-up NetSpeed; Digital Link purchased certain assets and technology from security management and VPN solution provider Semaphore Communications.
This will, in the end, make users' lives a little bit easier. For instance, WAN access
products will be bolstered with security features, eliminating some of the hassles
related to managing multiple point products.
Multiservice platforms: The logical solution to bring order to the chaos the many
diverse issues the WAN brings with it is to provide multiple WAN solutions in one
box. While consolidation and mergers bring companies one step closer to realizing
this goal, much of the industry still has a great distance to travel before they truly offer
full WAN control from one platform.
The first of these WAN control platforms is WiseWan, launched by NetReality in
January at ComNet. It currently offers integrated on-the-WAN monitoring and
shaping, which allows network managers to get a true baseline measurement of their
wide area links, to allocate bandwidth based on corporate policies and to adaptively
shape bandwidth according to those policies. In the future, multiservice systems like
this one will serve as a control center, from which monitoring, shaping, security,
accounting and many more WAN services can be integrated.
The "New WAN": We'll soon see the WAN become an integrated medium for transferring data, voice, video and everything else required for day-to-day communication. This change will be a major benefit for businesses, which will save millions as multiple network infrastructures converge.
The transition, however, is sure to be a bumpy one. The "new WAN" will experience all the growing pains that telephone companies suffered through years ago: Problems
like voice quality, roaming, connected calls, audio/video integration, audio/data
integration, quality of service and billing are all going to resurface (although many
have already been solved in the voice world) as data and voice integrate. In this new world, Cisco's main competitor will not be Bay Networks or 3Com; it will be Nortel.
Clearly, WAN technology will not evolve as quickly as its LAN counterpart. WAN control will be among the biggest issues on network managers' minds for a long, long time.
But necessity is the mother of invention, and vendors are ready to step in with
solutions to help network managers win the battle. Just as "a PC on every desktop"
was the mantra of the early 1990s, a new mantra will be heeded as we reach the
millennium: "Conquer the WAN beast before it conquers you."
Ilan Raab (iraab@nreality.com) is Founder and CEO of NetReality, Inc.,
Sunnyvale, Calif., and Tel Aviv, Israel. Before founding the company in April
1997, he was a key executive with Bay Networks' Optivity Network
Management System unit. He is an expert in the field of networking. The
WiseWan product was the winner of the ComNet New Products Achievement
Award this year.
Visit the NetReality website.
Any Comments?
Send them to Karen Murphy at msblues@earthlink.net.
www.internettelephony.com
InFocus May 11
c1998 Intertec Publishing Corp., a Primedia company
All Rights Reserved.
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