Not all LANs are created equal, with only some capable of successfully supporting future demands for multi-service and converged networking, says Cisco South Africa.
Times have changed, and telephony solutions have changed with them, says Vernon Thaver, Chief Technology Officer at Cisco South Africa. "Traditional IP-based telephony solutions were designed to support voice communications and was predominantly aimed at consolidating infrastructure and lowering costs."
"But, today, advanced sets of collaboration services are available that extend to mobile workers, partners and customers through key services like instant messaging, high-definition video and content sharing, rich media conferencing, recording of video and conferences, enablement of mobile and remote workers, business-to-business voice and video communications, unified voice messaging and customer care. Businesses increasingly need all of these services, with an optimum end-user experience."
Conrad Steyn, Cisco Product Sales Specialist, notes: "Many new collaborative tools have been introduced into the market, building on VOIP and enabling organisations to extend collaboration outside the walls of their businesses. Providing access to collaborative tools for employees outside the office is no longer a luxury; it is mandatory for businesses to stay relevant in today's market.
Today's users expect immediate access to these tools from a wide variety of portable and mobile devices, and many of these tools can also be extended to customers and partners, helping strengthen these relationships. Not long ago, interoperability among collaboration applications was sparse, and applications were difficult to deploy and use. Since then, significant advances have been made in the collaboration space, simplifying deployment, improving interoperability, and enhancing the overall user experience."
At the heart of a growing range of disparate communications systems lies the LAN. "The LAN is the core building block to consolidate communications infrastructure into a single communications infrastructure," says Rick Afonso, Systems Engineer at Cisco. "This allows organisations to bring together voice, video, and data into a single secure IP network to simplify management, lower IT costs, and support effective communications. This converged architectural approach uses a single enterprise-class communications platform to support network demands as well as new devices, applications and services."
But not all LANs are created equal, Afonso notes. "From a basic connectivity perspective, most LANs are fairly similar in terms of the way they are architected and built. The main differences between LANs have to do with the actual hardware on which the LAN switches are built, and the capabilities these hardware chipsets make possible, as well as innovations added in software beyond basic functionality."
He explains: "LAN switches built using standard merchant silicon ASICs, or so called commercial off the shelf (COTS) commodity silicon offerings, allow a vendor to create a LAN switch quickly and relatively cheaply, since there is no need for the engineering time and cost incurred in developing custom ASICs. However, the functions and features embedded in merchant silicon chipsets are usually only the common required industry standards. Use of commodity silicon has a role to play in the industry in the right context and for the right use case, such as: opportunistic strategy, time to market, targeted feature alignment."
Cisco's silicon strategy is anchored on the goals of differentiation through innovation, customer value and market leadership. To achieve this outcome, Cisco development teams focus on a strategic, sustainable product, tailored and optimised performance, development acceleration schedule autonomy and platform feature extensibility, he says.
"Custom ASICs development allows us to add capabilities over and above the common defaults. Many of these capabilities are simply not possible in software or are usually challenged in terms of scale and performance. This can make a significant difference to the successful outcome of a LAN implementation, which needs to be able to support multi-service and converged networking requirements to ensure an optimum end-user experience," says Afonso.
"Moreover, from a bottom-line perspective and in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO), requirements such as simplicity, ease of management, energy management, security and sustainable innovation (ie, investment protection) is best achieved with a custom silicon strategy. Cisco has consistently demonstrated investment protection value across its product portfolio. Consider the Catalyst 6500 switching platform, which has seen sustainable innovation for over the last decade and a bit."
Gawie Herholdt, Consultant Systems Engineer at Cisco, says with the emergence of a host of new capabilities and buzzwords such as software-defined networking, network functions virtualisation, open flow, open compute, openstack, DevOPs and Agile development, there is growing confusion in business about how they work together, leading to sub-optimal approaches.
"As an industry leader, Cisco has taken the initiative to remove complexity for our customers and provide a single unified architecture for the enterprise network, called the digital network architecture or DNA, which embraces this new software-centric paradigm. The Cisco Digital Network Architecture was designed to help organisations rapidly transform their business with an open, software-driven platform that provides programmability, service extensibility, and virtualisation," says Herholdt.
"There is no doubt that every enterprise will be a digital enterprise. The Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) and our fast IT consulting capabilities help enterprises reach their full digital potential, by taking a risk-managed approach to crossing the chasm between the current status quo and the new agile software driven, fast IT world," he says.
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