Changing platforms [Enterprise IP network]
Engineering & Technology · 2008
Enterprises now depend on their networks and the systems that drive them more absolutely than ever, demanding the level of availability and QOS (quality of service) formerly found only in carrier voice services. Increasingly, enterprise IP networks carry voice anyway but on top of that they have to support multiple services at ever higher speeds reaching 10Gbps today, increasing to 40Gbps and then 100Gbps-over the next few years. As a result, the switches and routers providing the fabric of enterprise networks are caught in a spiral of increasing data throughput, reliability, scalability and complexity. There is also a trend towards switching at the level of applications or content rather than just IP packets, in order to improve security, manage traffic better, and provide differentiated levels of service.