Until recently, a prediction thatWiMaxwould gain traction in 2008
would have seemed pretty likely. But then,Sprint Nextelpulled its deal with
US-based company Clearwire, which would have seen a country-wide
network of towers supporting the wireless metropolitan area network
technology.
WiMax struggles on, but the utopian dream of ubiquitous access
supported by advocates such as Intel seems to be fading, says Carmi
Levy, senior vice-president in strategic consulting at Canadian
analyst firm AR Communication.
In the meantime, Long Term Evolution (LTE) is gaining support
from the industry. The update to the GSM-based UMTS 3G standard is
a 4G competitor to WiFi, and it has the official support of the GSM
Association. Verizon in the US has also announced that it will
pilot a network based on the standard in 2008.
LTE supports cell sizes of tens of kilometres, and can provide
download speeds of up to 100 Mbits per second. "This time last
year, I do not think LTE was positioned as a viable alternative. It
was not on the radar of most enterprise users or carriers. But
then, WiMax got bogged down in ratification and suppliers did not
come on board very much," says Levy.
Campuses and business parks may find themselves attracted to a
technology such as LTE or WiMax, especially those that have delayed
wired deployments in their own sites, preferring instead to wait
for a wireless standard that requires less investment in equipment
than a meshed WiFi network. But the 4G metropolotan area network
standards must battle it out first, and Levy does not see them
shaking out in 2008. The pilot activity and political jockeying
will be fun to watch, but we will have to wait longer than a year
for 4G to really capture the market's attention.
Wan optimisation will increase
Wan optimisation will be a growth area in 2008, says Neil
Rickard, a research vice-president at Gartner. This product
category, currently enjoying 10% to 20% market penetration, covers
a multitude of different technologies. It focuses on improving the
performance of Wans through techniques including the modification
of existing protocols such as the common internet file system
(CIFS). These protocols, which can often be unnecessarily chatty,
do not cause major problems on a local area network because of the
high-bandwidth, low-latency environment. However, on
bandwidth-constrained wide area links, they become a problem.
"Cisco is getting into that space, and so the area is undergoing
tremendous growth," Rickard says.
Application delivery controllers will continue to hit
the mainstream
Companies are rapidly realising that applications and networks
do not exist independently of each other. If the applications are
to function effectively, then the network must handle its traffic
in an appropriate fashion for the application. This requires more
intelligence in the core of the network, which must understand the
nature of the traffic that it is carrying.
"Suppliers have different straplines in this space, but the idea
is that the network is no longer just about moving IP and Ethernet
packets from A to B. It will play a more active role in
accelerating the application," Rickard says. In the case of
application delivery controllers, that means taking some of the
work traditionally done by the computing server and handling it
independently. "It is about pulling stuff out of the application
servers that would previously have been performing many of these
functions pulling the mundane run-of-the-mill processing activities
into the network."
An example of such a device is the Big IP appliance from F5
networks. A modular system, it can compress web traffic, prevent
browsers from making repeated and unnecessary requests to the
server, and will also implement traffic shaping in shared
environments. "A server should not be setting up thousands of SSL
sessions," Rickard points out.
VoIP will reach its tipping point
Voice over IP (VoIP) has been available for years, but for many
companies, other projects have taken precedence. Jason Bremner,
research director for infrastructure hardware at IDC Canada,
believes that 2008 is the year when the market will finally see
aggressive adoption of the technology among business customers.
According to IDC's Canadian figures, almost one respondent in three
said that their company would have completely installed or will be
in the process of rolling out a voice over IP system during 2008.
35% could be either acquiring a system, piloting one, or at least
considering the technology, leaving just a third of companies with
no plans in that area.
Bremner hopes that this will be a stepping stone for more
advanced services. "Realistically, you build the infrastructure
first, and then you supply extra functionality on top," he says.
"Cost is the primary reason that organisations jump in to IP
telephony up front. They buy the IP telephony platform, they save
some money, and then they take that and turn it into financing for
some of the more sophisticated unified communications systems."
However, the numbers suggest that companies are much more
cautious about
unified communications. Just 15% will have installed or be
rolling out a unified communications project next year. 25% would
be acquiring or piloting the technology, leaving 60% with either no
plans or no knowledge of their strategy in that area.
Green networking will become a central
focus
If 2007 was the year of the
green datacentre, then 2008 could be the year of the green
network. Jon Collins, an analyst at Freeform Dynamics, says that as
companies finally get to grips with introducing energy efficiency
into datacentre environments, they will begin to look further
afield for other potential areas of improvement. This will
inevitably lead them out into the network infrastructure, creating
opportunities for efficient equipment both in the core and at the
end point. Energy demands on network equipment will increase as it
is required to do more. As network speeds increase and devices ship
with more intelligence, devices required to analyse packets at wire
speed require more power.
Bremner's prediction of a tipping point for VoIP is particularly
relevant here. Collins says that a rising demand for IP phones
could create its own power-consumption issues. Many such devices,
with their advanced processing capabilities, are essentially
miniature web servers. They draw more power than a conventional
telephone, which can be powered by the phone network alone. Driving
energy efficiency into such devices will be a difficult challenge
which companies may find themselves facing as they begin to embrace
these technologies.
Application-level network services will increase in
importance
Just as companies are realising the benefits of
application-aware devices inside their core networks, so they are
gradually embracing the idea of similar services in the cloud.
Rickard says that application-level services on the internet will
have a significant impact on the way that companies send traffic
through public networks.
Akamai is one example of a company that is refining its services
to appeal more to enterprise customers. The company, which caches
content for faster delivery to consumers, has long supported the
faster delivery of enterprise web applications. In October, it
launched a service designed to accelerate the performance of
non-web, IP-based applications behind the corporate firewall but
over the public internet. Now, SSL sessions, Citrix-based
application access, and VoIP can all be accelerated using the
company's service.
This could herald a shift in network procurement policy from a
capital expenditure to an operational expenditure model, as
companies begin to realise the benefit of buying in services from
others who really understand the subject area. "Technology
offerings from service providers are maturing to the point where it
is not second best to buying an appliance," Rickard says.
AR Partners' Levy says that such services will continue their
extension into other areas such as network security.
Google's acquisition of managed security firm Postini in 2007
indicates where the market value will lie. "There is less of a
focus on buying a firewall at a set price," he says. "Instead, you
work with a partner who has a core competency. Maybe they will give
you the firewall as part of a broader service agreement. So in 2008
we'll continue a trend away from go-it-alone security to
partnerships with third-party suppliers for delivery of
subscription security services."
Gradual acceleration in the uptake of XML-aware
appliances
XML routers have been around for years now, but according to
Gartner's Rickard, they are still far from a mainstream product. He
expects the gradual adoption of this technology to continue for the
next two or three years before it becomes a mainstream
category.
Companies that pursue XML processing in the network stand to
reap some unique benefits, says Rickard. "If I had an application
where I got a message every time someone sold something in a
supermarket, I could aggregate all those messages. When the number
of messages reached a certain threshold, I could go and tell a
restocking application about it," he says. "And whenever another
threshold had been reached, it could tell the marketing
department's application. And you could put the rules into the
network to control that."
Because network equipment that can process XML relies heavily on
applications that can produce and consume these schemas, the
development of this product area depends on the development of the
application portfolio. This in turn is closely linked to web
services and service oriented architecture concept, both of which
have taken time to get off the ground because of the complexity of
redevelopment. But 2008 will continue to see companies embrace the
technology
2008 may not be a watershed year for any particular networking
technology, but it will see the continuation of several exciting
trends, along with a flurry of activity among some relatively new
ones. Look to the coming year for an indication of larger
developments, such as 4G, which will gain traction in the
mid-term.