Networks Now Being Fine-Tuned To Carry Real-time Apps

Alamuri Sitaramaiah, director, Sales and Marketing, Fluke Networks (India), talks about network management and pertinent issues relating to it.

What are some of the major network issues being faced by enterprises?

Enterprises have a plethora of management issues related to networks. On the one hand, IT is becoming more critical to business for seeking competitive advantage and lowering transaction costs, speeding customer fulfillment and widening the customer reach. Business processes are becoming increasingly IT-enabled, thus adding users, offices and applications (which increasingly seek to add voice) to the network. The focus is now on business service enablement through successful delivery of enterprise applications, as against network uptime alone.

With an increase in UC adoption and usage of network-demanding technologies, how are enterprises dealing with optimisation?

There are a lot of performance issues when it comes to network operations in supporting applications beyond data. Unified communications are seeing an increasing voice and video deployment alongside data applications, and these applications have varied performance requirements from the network. While VoIP and video are real-time applications and cannot suffer delays and packet losses, data applications can.

Networks have since long been designed and optimised to carry data applications and are now being fine-tuned to carry real-time applications. CoS and VLAN settings of devices along network paths, throughput, delays, packet losses, and jitter are some issues that plague the successful deployment of UC.

What is the importance of making the network work quickly and economically for enterprises?

A quicker network helps in faster delivery of applications, which in turn leads to satisfied end-users of business applications. This helps see through more user transactions on the enterprise network and helps reduce unnecessary network upgrades and costs. It also reduces user complaints and saves time and effort of IT teams, thus ensuring more productive IT teams to engage in transformational projects that deliver the value of IT more meaningfully to management and organisations.

What are the latest testing, monitoring and analytical solutions that have come into the market?

The first one, a reactive approach, is aimed at network engineers, who face the network and are responsible for uptime of the network by troubleshooting network problems reported by users. Fluke Networks’ Portable Network Analysers help test and troubleshoot the network for its ability to support data as well as real-time applications. Fluke Networks also provides Distributed Analysis tools that can simulate VoIP calls and analyse the quality of the calls delivered across a network to verify performance. These tools can not only be deployed to test performance of UC on networks that currently support UC applications, but can also be used for pre-deployment assessment of UC applications to understand and eliminate bottlenecks that can limit the successful deployment of UC.

The second approach, which is a proactive approach, helps to proactively monitor and reactively troubleshoot the network, using actual user traffic (as against mostly synthetic tests and test data in the first approach). Such an approach is focused on actual end-user experience of UC applications and helps network managers and executives to manage the network using performance SLAs and to identify opportunities for continuous improvement of performance.

What trends do you see emerging in this space?

As enterprises increasingly call upon IT to drive business processes, IT infrastructure management practices are looking more and more towards solutions that help formally manage the IT infrastructure – pre- and post-deployment of applications. IT infrastructure managers are no longer willing to consider hotch-potch solutions but are increasingly seeking frameworks and tools that help support efficient management practices.

What are Fluke Networks’ latest offerings in the network management space?

Fluke Networks offers a framework for enterprise IT infrastructure managers and engineers. Fluke Networks solutions help:

o Network engineers to test and troubleshoot networks,
o Network managers to test, analyse, design, manage and plan network capacities, and
o Network Executives to set up and manage SLAs and deliver value to the management.