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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (1353)	9/21/1998 5:58:00 PM
From: Phil Jacobson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Outstanding list of links Steve! Thanks so much for forwarding. Phil

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (1353)	9/22/1998 9:32:00 AM
From: Stephen B. Temple	Respond to of 3178

1) Today's Focus: How the management tail can wag the infrastructure dog ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In most of my previous newletters, I've focused on systems and network management technologies and products. That approach assumes users have an ad-hoc collection of network technologies, products and vendors; need to improve the associated quality of service; and are in search of that management solution that can result in service improvements without breaking the support budget. In these cases, the infrastructure dog wags the management tail. As a result of a recently completed network design project, however, I found the management tail can indeed wag the infrastructure dog. In this particular engagement, my client was struggling to gain internal consensus on the implementation of an ATM-based metropolitan-area backbone. Two primary reasons for the lack of consensus were uncertainties about what current ATM products could do and the vendor positioning of alternatives such as Gigabit Ethernet and Packet over SONET (PoS). At the end of the day, however, we concluded that transport technology was not the core issue. The real issue was how could cell and frame technologies be combined into an integrated metropolitan-area network that provided the required capacity headroom, end-to-end QoS guarantees and clean technology boundaries that would facilitate an effective distributed support model. These practical considerations excluded the viability of more advanced technologies such as PoS. For this user, frame and cell technology will need to coexist due to cost and capacity considerations. More important, however, product and vendor choices will be driven by the vendors' ability to support end-to-end QoS management as well as their ability to effectively support interworking with one another. Initially, the latter consideration may sound like apple pie and motherhood, but in the case of frame-to-cell mapping, practical issues regarding LAN Emulation (LANE) and Multi-Protocol over ATM (MPOA) service and management interworking - as well as proxy frame-to-cell QoS mapping between the base technologies and the supporting vendor products - are anything but trivial. As it turned out, this issue was critical, given that network availability was the No. 1 issue for this user. Yet these are the exact issues that need to be resolved if a network of "IP Dialtone" with end-to-end QoS is to become a practical reality. Every now and then, implementation insight and business value can be gained by having the management tail wag the infrastructure dog. nwfusion.com