STRATEGY - Communication and the pursuit of knowledge

One of the theories put forward for the rise and eventual triumph of Cro-Magnon Man over his Neanderthal cousins is that Cro-Magnon Man had both the ability to communicate and a thirst for knowledge, which gave him a strategic and tactical advantage over the Neanderthal's lack of organisation. (Or he was forcibly evolved by a giant black monolith, if 2001: A Space Odyssey is to be believed, but that's another story).

Anyway, if you think about it, this is exactly what the IT industry is all about - communication, that is, not alien intervention.

Coming back down to Earth, IT in general is about storing and accessing data, and then analysing and manipulating it - the pursuit of knowledge - whereas the networking industry is about communicating this information and ensuring it gets to where it is needed.

However, recent developments are blurring this distinction. We've all heard about convergence and CTI: but this is more about methods of communication coming together. Within the next decade, the transport methodology will be irrelevant: networks will become a heterogeneous mixture of copper, fibre and wireless, allowing the building of Wans to become far easier.

This month, Network News' David Rae investigates the advances that have been made in the wireless networking arena.

Possibly more important, however, is what is sent over those cables, fibres or lasers. With bandwidth the bugbear of network managers everywhere, one might be tempted to alleviate the problem by simply chucking more bandwidth at the network. But this is simply the hardware equivalent of the so-called 'Mongolian Hordes' approach to programming: however much bandwidth you add, it will still end up as clogged as the M25 on a Friday evening.

One solution is to manage your bandwidth more intelligently, and Alan Clark looks at this in his Focus on Packeteer, whose products aim to get the most out of your available bandwidth. Another solution is to pick and choose what is sent over the network in the first place. The emerging technology of Storage Area Networks is covered in our first benchtest, where Steve Broadhead investigates two of the first companies to bring Sans to the marketplace. A San creates a network behind your existing network to manage storage and retrieval. This means your primary network can get on with what it is best at: analysing information.

The next few years will be critical for IT in general, and networking in particular. As more and more bandwidth is required, it will cease to be a question of asking for more ... and become a question of doing it all more intelligently.

I wonder what sort of operating system the 2001 monolith used.