The Daily Network Monitor

Have now been in sunny Barcelona for a few days now. Cisco networkers show has been very interesting from several perspectives. First, the number of people attending. The show was sold out with over 6,000 attendees from all over Europe.

Second, was the level of interest in network monitoring. Many people that we talked to were proactively seeking network management and monitoring solutions. Most interesting were the number of organizations that were going to or are currently implementing VoIP. It seems that VoIP has finally come of age. Consistent with this was hightened interest in not only bandwidth management but ensuring device availabililty for these types of services.

More tomorrow.

In an earlier entry, Back into the Fray, I listed what has changed and has not changed after I left enterprise networking and I joined Ipswitch. One of the items that changed was VoIP. VoIP seems to have fallen under what is now termed unified communications.

Both Microsoft and Cisco have staked places at the unified communications table. But what does unified communications really mean. Is it VoIP? Is it IM? Is it collaboration? Is it email? Or is it all of these things melded into one?

What ever it is, it means only one thing to network managers. How much effort is it going to take to manage?

From this one question we can deduce a number of other implications to an already saturated infrastructure and the ability to manage yet another cool technology someone just had to have.

If it is server centric, read Microsoft, this means more server focused hardware to manage. How will this server based infrastructure be managed? Not only is there additional server hardware to manage, but also license management (read CALs) to ensure EULA compliance. 4000 IP phones, means 4000 CALs, unless Microsoft is changing their licensing model.

Or networking gear centric, read Cisco, this fits nicely with most existing installed infrastructures and most of the management capabilities are already in place.

QoS management for VoIP is key to the whole effort of unified communications, QoS is network centric not server centric.

I’m not trying to take a slanted view of one company over another, just what make sense for an organization. If it was a network that I was responsible for, I would choose the network centric approach over the application centric approach every time.

Cisco over the next five years plans to radically change how it sells and delivers router and switch software, in part by making that software more virtualized and modular.

Cisco’s intention is to decouple IOS software from the hardware it sells, which could let users add enhancements such as security or VoIP more quickly, without having to reinstall IOS images on routers and switches. The vendor also plans to virtualize many of its network services and applications, which currently are tied to hardware-specific modules or appliances.

This shift would make network gear operate more like a virtualized server, running multiple operating systems and applications on top of a VMware-like layer, as opposed to a router with a closed operating system, in which applications are run on hardware-based blades and modules. Ultimately, these changes will make it less expensive to deploy and manage services that run on top of IP networks, such as security, VoIP and management features, Cisco says.

High-level details of the road map were delivered in a session at Cisco’s C-Scape analyst conference last week in San Jose by Cliff Metzler, senior vice president of the company’s Network Management Technology Group.

Read the whole story here.