To the Desktop....MARCH !!! IP to dominate in 1999 and beyond
December 28, 1998
InfoWorld Electric:
The relentless march of IP is conquering more desktops and
devices every day and in 1999 will break out into an all-out
assault on the communications world.
Standards near completion by the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) will simplify data-storage systems in
enterprises and ease the use of the protocol over satellite
links. IP will also come to television, both cable and
broadcast. These technology advances will come even as
IP steadily gains market acceptance for voice and video
communications and for the mainframe applications that
enterprises once trusted only to IBM's Systems Network
Architecture.
One IT manager notes the growing ubiquity of IP.
"IP is our direction, and we're moving away from all other
protocols and migrating as quickly as we can," says Virgil
Palmer, director of telecommunications at Air Products and
Chemicals, in Allentown, Pa.
"Over time, we're replacing everything with IP. And the
year-2000 problem is helping to accelerate that: We're
having to replace equipment with year-2000-compliant
equipment, which is also IP-based," Palmer says. "It's the
Internet standard and allows us to communicate with any
of our suppliers and vendors."
With IP everywhere, observers say, network cost and
complexity will plummet and more services will be available
on more devices than ever before.
"Having one network protocol means that from anything,
you can talk to anything," says Fred Baker, chairman of the
IETF and a Cisco Fellow, in San Jose, Calif.
IP's increasing dominance has come about as the Internet
has become more pervasive, and that dominance has fed
on itself, observers say.
"Think of the Internet as a gigantic post office," says
Michael St. John, a network architect and chairman of the
IETF's IP-over-cable data network working group. "You
standardize on what should be on the envelopes and what
the envelopes should look like, and then any post office in
the world can carry it."
One IT manager at a large packaging manufacturer says
that when his company phased out a legacy WAN two
years ago, there was no question about where to go from
there.
"[IP is] the protocol that is dominating, when you look at
the applications," says Garry Weaver, a network manager
at Smurfit Stone, in Alton, Ill.
Businesses are converging on IP because having a single
protocol brings significant benefits. For IT managers in
those enterprises, a long protocol nightmare is over. They
are waking to a new world where voice, video, and data
can be combined over virtually any transport system.
"This is like taking what we've been doing for the last 30
years and hitting it with a sledgehammer," says Frank
Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects,
a consultancy in Washington. The alphabet soup of legacy
protocols, notably SNA, Novell IPX, Digital's DECNet, and
AppleTalk, is fast becoming a thing of the past, he says.
As all types of traffic become IP flows, a single toolset is
emerging to manage and prioritize everything that runs
over the LAN and WAN. Multiple queues in LAN switches,
the precedence field in IP headers, and the emerging
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) standard will work
together, Dzubeck says.
Quality of service in IP is still in its infancy, with the critical
MPLS not expected until late 1999, by Dzubeck's
estimation. But progress is being made in ensuring that
voice and other types of traffic can be carried
appropriately over IP.
Although voice-over-IP equipment does not currently
interoperate among most vendors, this is changing.
Ascend, Cisco, Clarent, Dialogic, Natural MicroSystems, and
Siemens earlier in December joined an initiative to support
the upcoming iNow, or interoperability Now, agreement,
which was developed by VocalTec, Lucent, and ITXC, and
will be published in January. The purpose of iNow is to
make gateways and gatekeepers that are used for IP
telephony interoperable.
The array of new IP technology coming in 1999 will bring
benefits all the way from enterprise data centers to WANs.
One area of enterprises in which IP has delivered significant
benefits and promises future gains is in data centers. Many
companies have migrated mainframe connections toward IP
from legacy technologies such as SNA, and emerging
standards may make it easier to connect other types of
data centers.
The IP over Fibre Channel standard, expected in 1999, will
let enterprises use the same Fibre Channel hardware to link
servers to both storage devices and networks. Fibre
Channel is a 1Gbps technology now used for SCSI
connections.
One user says having one type of I/O device will simplify
his company's networks.
"Instead of Ethernet and SCSI cards, I can just have Fibre
Channel I/O adapters, and I'll run IP over them to talk to
the network and SCSI if I want to talk to a SCSI device,"
says Eric Kuzmack, a senior analyst at Gannett, a media
company in Silver Spring, Md.
Also under development is a specification for running IP
traffic over IEEE 1394 connections. IEEE 1394, also called
FireWire, is designed for connecting storage devices to
desktops at speeds of 200Mbps and faster.
WAN initiatives for IP are expected to add to the rapidly
expanding options available to enterprises for
higher-bandwidth, lower-cost WAN services.
IP over satellite also holds promise that is expected to be
unleashed soon.
"It's natural to layer IP over satellite -- the main
advantage being that it's universal," says Burt Liebowitz,
chief technology officer at Loral Orion, a satellite company
in Rockville, Md.
"And application packages that use IP as the underlying
protocol allow for more off-the-shelf solutions for IT
managers -- and that should also drive costs down,"
Liebowitz says.
On the downside, the delay caused by the huge distance in
a satellite round-trip can create problems in
communication. The IETF recently completed a set of Best
Current Practice recommendations for TCP/IP-over-satellite
software to work around those delays. The
recommendations will be implemented in a future version of
Microsoft's TCP/IP stack in its operating systems,
according to one IETF official.
Cable TV networks also are being looked at as an optimum
technology for IP. The IETF is currently working on a
standard for managing cable modems.
"The advantage of cable is ... it is ubiquitously deployed,
and it has a huge pipe," says Michael Harris, president of
Kinetic Strategies, a consultancy in Phoenix.
Harris says IP over cable will allow for "turnkey
telecommuting solutions, allowing remote connectivity to
corporate LANs, as well as PBX voice so that your business
extension can ring at your house."
IP also is being carried over the vertical blanking interval
(VBI) of analog TV signals. This unidirectional technology,
which uses the lines that are off the TV screen, is used for
encoding data and then used for sending additional
information that is not part of the picture. One current use
is closed captioning, but in the future, industry observers
predict broader uses.
"It can be used to provide Web URLs in conjunction with a
video broadcast, " the IETF's St. John says.
However, analysts note that although analog TV will be
around for a while, it will also be replaced someday by
digital TV, so VBI is considered as more of an intermediate
system.
Aside from the growing pains expected with new IP
technologies, the emergence of a single network protocol
also poses other concerns to enterprise IT departments.
"The breadth of your network will extend to devices that
didn't used to be IP devices," says Dave Passmore,
president of NetReference, a consultancy in Sterling, Va.
"You have to be able to scale your network to handle huge
growth." Converting all the phones in an enterprise to IP
telephony could easily double the number of IP clients, he
points out.
Passmore also advises companies not to sign any long-term
contracts with service providers, because service options
will change rapidly.
The advent of the new world of networking also will
demand some education, others say.
"IT managers need to make sure any device they get is
IP-capable, identify which aren't, and figure out how to
replace or upgrade them," St. John said. "They also need
to get smart about IP and understand how to get the right
set of talent to build the internal network." |
