Migrating to an all-IP enterprise network adds simplicity but also create challenges

The notion of an all-IP world for the enterprise has tended to be thought of as Nirvana--a move that would solve the complexities of marrying communications technologies in the analog world by moving all communications on one IP platform. Despite this advantage, the all-IP enterprise network has spawned entirely new challenges.

"IP is the only protocol that matters today," said Craig Mathias, founder of the Farpoint Group. "It's difficult to imagine someone deploying infrastructure and not making it all IP. I see in the future WLANs (wireless local access networks) handling voice, data and video as well as cellular over IP to complete the picture."

While IP networks have become a strategic network in the enterprise, the complexity has grown at the same time, said Phil Morrison, director of product management for network and performance management for Alcatel-Lucent's Enterprise Communications Applications group.

"Everyone thought IP was a great way to converge applications, but as more and more mission-critical communications converge over IP infrastructure, the need for visibility and monitoring aspects such as quality of service and service level agreements has grown," Morrison said. "IT managers are moving traffic off TDM networks, where things were predictable, to an IP infrastructure that is traditionally less predictable in nature. Voice is migrating to SIP-based [session initiation protocol] infrastructure, and that complicates things even more."

Throw in an increasingly distributed workforce and the complexity is compounded. "Network congestion has brought mobile workers and remote employees to a virtual standstill, stalling productivity and efficiency," wrote The Yankee Group in a report.  

As such, performance management of IP networks has become an essential part of enterprises' network management tools, Mathias said. "It's important to have a single point of decision-making," Mathias noted. "You don't want to make, for instance, voice services independent of the rest of the network. The whole IP world is based on interoperability."

This is especially true as IT budgets are shrinking. Mathias said many of his company's clients are reporting at least a 10 percent reduction in IT budgets.

Putting the issue into a numbers perspective, Enterprise Management Associates found that the average organization suffers 61 hours of downtime each year, which translates into 99.3 percent uptime--still not a good number considering the mission-critical traffic that many enterprise networks carry.

Downtime costs vary widely by industry, application and organization, but industry analysts peg the cost of downtime to be anywhere between $50,000 to $1 million per hour.  Even when the cost is toward the lower end of the range, 61 hours of downtime can be a major detriment to the bottom line. And the network doesn't have to be down to cause revenue and productivity losses--performance degradation is rampant and can wreak havoc on employee productivity and customer satisfaction.

Hence the notion of wide area network optimization has gathered steam the past two years as the enterprise faces the challenge of supporting a growing distributed workforce while running a plethora of business applications across the corporate WAN with the demand that these applications perform like the wired LAN, said The Yankee Group.

"The notion of utilizing WAN optimization techniques to achieve bandwidth savings is worth considering," The Yankee Group said. "The economic benefits of bandwidth utilization could be significant. It helps enterprise IT minimize expenditures on bandwidth requirements, but more importantly, it enables corporate IT to deliver the level of performance and reliability required by remote employees without spending millions of dollars on infrastructure upgrades to boost productivity--not to mention the administrative costs that could be saved for ongoing IT support and maintenance."

Alcatel-Lucent offers theVitalSuite, which gives enterprises a single interface solution to manage the network. The offering measures network and application delivery along with providing visibility into network aspects such as devices, vendors and geographies. Morrison said a return on investment for such a WAN optimization solution can come in a matter of three to six months. Other vendors offer similar enterprise-specific network solutions.

"This also de-risks a number of projects," Morrison said. "A large enterprise may have several thousand IP telephony handsets and is looking to migrate from one vendor to another. One thing we have in our product is the ability to simulate traffic across the IP infrastructure and map out how an IP network would behave in a real-world scenario."