Infrastructure gear is a bare necessity, but try convincing those ROI-obsessive types holding the purse strings. It's difficult to map a direct link from a beefy new switch to business benefits like cost savings, customer satisfaction or new revenue-producing services. Still, IT pros know the bottom line: If your network is not fast and reliable enough, the applications that enable all the above simply aren't going to work.
Even after you've established that building a reliable infrastructure is good business, it's likely that the money spigot will still be set at a trickle. So it's vital to plan for future needs carefully to wring every bit of benefit from your infrastructure dollar. In fact, through 2005, 80 percent of enterprises attempting to add real-time capabilities to their networks will seriously underestimate networking requirements and will have to make last-minute additions, upgrades or modifications, according to a March 2003 Gartner report.
Top-notch, innovative gear is out there--all our Well-Connected Infrastructure winners use raw power, intelligence or a combination of the two to make sure your network keeps humming along.
When it comes to LAN power, the IEEE continues to make once-theoretical connectivity upgrades a reality--802.3ae, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard, is proof. Moreover, vendors like Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks have proved that 10 Gig isn't merely possible, it's practical, albeit still a little pricey. And if you're monitoring your backbone, as you should be, it's good to know that help is there when your Gigabit Ethernet connections run out of steam.
Often, just adding some intelligence to your network can improve performance markedly. Such is the case with F5's Big-IP 4.5, with its ability to distribute content requests among Web resources even more intelligently than its predecessor, which was our 2002 Infrastructure product of the year. And, when you combine raw power with intelligence, you get the DataPower XA35 XML Accelerator, which impressed us so much we named it this year's Infrastructure product of the year.
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