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NETWORK OPTIMISATION
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Sharon Gaudin ’ s recent Computerworld article ‘ 7 warnings to heed before a cloud migration ’ cites Eric Geiger , Vice President of IT Operations at Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago . Geiger emphasises that CIOs need to have a good network connection in place because network performance can make a significant difference to a company ’ s ability to operate effectively and efficiently . He also says that connecting to the cloud through a virtual private network is fine , “ But if you have offices in Chicago and you ’ re connecting with Virginia , that latency can become frustrating .”
Latency can become obnoxious , so he advises organisations to pay a lot of attention to the networking component before migrating to the cloud . In many cases a connection to the cloud might already exist , but even then it ’ s still advisable to heed his advice , and particularly if you ’ re accessing cloud services via the internet or another kind of wide area network ( WAN ). The problem is that the article also suggests that old hardware shouldn ’ t be re-purposed – perhaps Gaudin is referring here more to storage rather than network hardware and infrastructure , but there is traditionally the temptation to replace what doesn ’ t actually need to be refreshed because it ’ s old .
Big pipe , latency remains Investing in a new and higher bandwidth network connection , or ‘ pipe ’, won ’ t necessarily reduce the impact of latency . Traditional WAN optimisation is usually the answer that most organisations fall back on to tackle the network slowing effects that latency creates . “ The value of the WAN optimisation market is between $ 7bnto $ 9bn – nobody really knows , but if you are going to the cloud you will need some form of WAN optimisation to make it efficient .” Says David Trossell , CEO of data acceleration vendor Bridgeworks .
His colleague , Claire Buchanan , Chief Commercial Officer at Bridgeworks adds : “ CIOs should be persuading their CFO / CEOs to invest in solutions that are inter-operational and which cater for on , as well as off premise requirements , such as migration , moving big data for analytics or for co-location for back-up or disaster recovery .” In addition to the pressure to invest in technologies to mitigate latency ’ s effects , she says that US regulators are putting a huge amount of pressure on data centres to locate outside of any circle of disruption – particularly areas which could be affected , for instance , by a natural disaster .
Budgetary pressures Budgets are under pressure too , much owing to the fact that the US Presidential Elections have only just taken place . “ If you look at some of the political situations spending tightens during an election year , and the same factor applied to the UK ’ s General Election in May 2015 , and there is also the spectre of interest rate rises in both the US and the UK next year .” She explains . With these pressures in mind , she thinks that organisations should be looking to more with what their existing network infrastructure rather than spending on larger pipes that may not generate the expected returns .
“ It ’ s horses for courses because traditional WAN optimisation is good for application performance scenarios , and yet people use it for the wrong thing ,” she adds . In other words WAN optimisation was never built to manage big pipes ; the technology struggles to cope with them . Therefore they should be looking for a tool that can enable them to do the right job without having to purchase more costly and
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