Switched on

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“Enterprises are very keen on cost cutting.” Rabih Dabboussi, systems engineering director at Cisco.

From higher performance to lower TCO, the new age of LAN technologies seem to offer everything that a CIO and their organisation would need, and the industry believes that increased regional adoption is just around the corner.

In the complex arena of networking, nothing might seem more routine than the technologies associated with Local Area Networks (LAN). However, the advances that are being made in the various components of LAN technologies, including the likes of cabling, switching and routing, have the capability to change the way enterprises operate and to add significantly to their bottom lines.

“Most of the developments in LAN technologies over the last 12 months have been around the area of data centre routing switches. This includes switches supporting Terabit architecture, high density 10G ethernet deployments, virtualisation and advancements towards 40G/100G ethernet backbones,” said Sari Ayoub, enterprise engineer at Nortel.

Almost all developments in the area of LAN technologies over the past few months have been fuelled by increasing demand for high performance, especially around bandwidth and associated applications.

“The physical layer as a whole has seen the most developments, mainly because the demand is actually driving it. Applications like the ones in triple play, which include IPTV, IP telephony and data, virtualisation, web 2.0 and video-on-demand – these are driving the entire physical layer to be pushed to the limit. One major part of this, the switching layer, I would think has seen significant improvements in the last 18 months,” explained Aziz Ala’ali, regional director MEA at Extreme Networks.

Samer Shaar, regional director at Juniper Networks for Middle East, Central Africa and Pakistan agreed: “LAN technologies in general, are now ready for high performance and this has been driven by market demands. The switching market is valued at US$17bn in 2009 and we can say 50% of this spend will be coming from Global 500 enterprises. These are the large companies that have one thousand and more employees. The public sector, including federal and state governments, and the education sector are also considering high performance networking across the switching platform as a standard requirement within their infrastructure.”

Naming improvements

Most of the major vendors that dominate the Middle East market have translated this growing demand into research and development around the switching area, which has resulted in new lines of products, that do more for less cost than their predecessors.

“The first component of our strategy with the new line was to simplify management, which we have done by enabling Junos as the single operating system across our solutions,” said Shaar.

“Our chassis-like software module, a concept called the virtual chassis, also simplifies network design by integrating virtual components. Resiliency was another important requirement, so was flexibility and scalability as well as low power consumption. These together form the value differentiation that we offer with our new switching products,” he added.

Reducing the power consumption of networking gear has also been a major focus of a lot of the innovations of the past 18 months.

“Extreme’s idea of going green started more than three years back,” commented Ala’ali. “The R&D was focused towards that aim and we started seeing the results a year and a half back. Today, due to the efforts we put in, our switches take just a third of the power that competitive switches use. All our switches in the field have this functionality.”

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