You'd scarcely know it by measuring the relative health of April's NetWorld+Interop and this month's Supercomm show, but broadband service management is returning to the enterprise. The frenzy of overbuild in public networks at the end of the 1990s made many OEMs forget their roots. Now they're going back home, to the LANs and SANs that were familiar territory all along. As Supercomm opens this week, it will be interesting to see how many equipment and component suppliers try to move carrier-oriented products back to the enterprise, recognizing that corporate IT departments may be the only near-term equipment buyers.
You can scarcely blame some companies for shifting into carrier markets a few years back, when Ethernet framing became the sole language of the LAN and the only issue of concern was when to shift from 100-Mbit to 1- and 10-Gbit Ethernet. How much fun are powers of 10, if the core MAC and switching fabric stay the same?
Late last year, I suggested in this space that the enterprise would get interesting again, since complex clusters of storage servers and Web servers would require the type of Internet Protocol flow management that was originally designed for Internet service providers. Add more use of corporate voice-over-IP and videoconferencing, and fancy quality-of-service hardware would soon become standard.
That predicted day is now. During the spring, the big shots in Layer 3 switching, including Foundry, Riverstone, Extreme and Force10, introduced platforms that brought not only 10-Gbit speeds to the corporate data center but also management of IP flows once thought appropriate only for public networks. With the arrival of grid computing and metropolitanwide SANs, such companies find they are selling systems to corporations that manage services across campuses, cities and sometimes even multistate regions.
At N+I, Ixia Communications showed retargeted broadband traffic-generation and performance-monitoring test tools for an enterprise audience, and more of the same is expected from Agilent, Spirent, Anritsu and other players. I'll be keeping a sharp eye out at Supercomm for network-management software companies that move complex tools from the carrier space to the enterprise. After all, if the Simple Network Management Protocol migrated from LAN to WAN to simplify control of all-IP networks, why can't corporate data centers take back the control that moved to the service provider?
The last companies to grasp this, of course, are the service providers themselves. Four or five years ago, they were touting managed services at the customer premises of all kinds of broadband controls that should have been in the hands of the enterprise. Today, the tables are turned. The value-added flow management is being picked up by the enterprise, even when it crosses WAN boundaries, leaving the carrier with just the commodity movement of bits. No wonder Standard & Poor's predicted in late April that the carrier crisis is still far from played out.
Loring Wirbel is editorial director of Communication Systems Design and the editorial director for CMP Media's Communications Initiative. He can be reached at lwirbel@cmp.com.
