Moving on up: Essential guide to LAN upgrades

There is an old adage in data networking that says you can never have enough bandwidth. But while that may still be true in the mobile broadband or wireless space, it is less applicable to many enterprises’ local area networks (LANs). Research suggests that most organisations’ LANs can more than handle anything their users throw at them, thanks to investment over the past few years in high capacity wired Ethernet connections.

Mark Fabbi, who leads the enterprise network infrastructure team at research company Gartner, says that these days most spending on LANs tends to be driven more by a need for configuration and management improvements rather than capacity issues.

“The reality is that most organisations have over-spent on their IT infrastructure - buying a bunch of things just in case, but just in case almost never comes,” he says. “In the datacentre things are very different and there is a lot of innovation there - buyers have to be more careful about how they deploy technology.”

Emir Halilovic, European programme manager for networking and infrastructure at rival research company IDC, argues that the LAN switch market is ticking over nicely, as evidenced by the volume of equipment being sold with 1Gbit/s and 10Gbit/s ports, with 1Gbit/s predominantly being used in campus and branch office LANs, and 10GbE in datacentres.

What is not clear is the extent to which those switches are replacing older equipment, or being used to extend LAN coverage within existing premises or to fit out new offices from scratch.

Both experts agree that the need to extend wireless LAN connectivity is often the catalyst for wider infrastructure upgrades, especially where those Wi-Fi networks are being used to support mobile devices, as well as voice over IP (VoIP) and IP telephony.

“Enterprises did not used to have Wi-Fi, or if they did, they saw it more as nice to have,” says Halilovic. “But the ones in the nice-to-have mode are now becoming reliant on it and are starting to move from 802.11b/g to faster 802.11n networks.”

The “consumerisation” of the enterprise space - namely the rapid proliferation of personal mobile computers and smartphones that employees are bringing to work with them - is also affecting how IT departments configure and manage their networks. An increased focus on security measures designed to authenticate mobile devices attaching to the network, and to safeguard any mission-critical or sensitive commercial data that may be accessed by or copied to those mobile devices, is especially prevalent.

Network managers have tended to take various different approaches to the same problem, one of which involves installing network access control (NAC) platforms or appliances that assess the devices requesting a connection to the network for security vulnerabilities before forcing upgrades or limiting access, for example.

“Another trend is towards merging wireless controllers with switches and adding more sophisticated authentication and security [into those switches] to handle those devices, but we are not sure if this is a selling point or not,” says Halilovic. “The main network security worries tend to be around securing data around virtualised environments in the datacentre, especially with a move to the cloud.”