Stepping Up To 10G

What's Driving Upgrades
Why upgrade? Network upgrades tend to occur in four- to five-year cycles as customers replace old equipment for newer and faster devices, Labatt-Simon said. Age is an important consideration because vendors eventually stop supporting obsolete equipment.

Applications, though, are the true driver for backbone upgrades. Whiteley said enterprises are seeing 100 percent growth in network traffic year over year.

Applications have become truly distributed, which means that as the hardware they run on becomes faster and more powerful, the network becomes more of a bottleneck. Video is a common example.

Although video servers have gotten much more bandwidth-efficient by using multicasting and compression to keep throughput down, video that is viewed simultaneously by a large number of employees can still strain the network.

This is particularly true in on-demand situations where multicasting is not possible. If there is not enough bandwidth, only a subset of employees will be able to see the video, said Tony Stramandinoli, vice president of marketing at SMC Networks, Irvine, Calif., a networking vendor. Images may be jittery and file transfers may take longer.

"It's not just e-mail anymore. There's streaming video, video over network, voice over IP," he said.

Customers may be interested in deploying other applications such as large file transfers, networkwide backups, systemwide application launches, increased network storage or document imaging, which make greater demands on the network.

Business-continuity and disaster-recovery solutions also are driving interest in upgrading the backbone, Whiteley said. Outages are costly in terms of productivity and replicating data means companies can be up and running faster.

Even without a pressing need, companies may consider upgrading portions of the backbone to 10G if they are putting in new construction, renovating existing space or moving to a new location. With the cost of 10G dropping, customers are more willing to invest in 10G to "future-proof" their networks, Whiteley said.

Next: Spotlight On 10G