Archive for the ‘network’ Category

Will Video Kill The CIO?

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Image Credit Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Enterprise Video?

Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Enterprise Video?

The world of IT is changing fast and CIOs can easily get surprised when their world is turned upside down. When you become CIO, you are going to have a entirely new set of issues to deal with because of the arrival of one technology that we don’t often associate with IT: video.

Here Comes Video, Are You Going To Be Ready?

Sure we are all used to receiving and interacting with video in our personal lives, but up until the past few years video didn’t play a major role in the enterprise. In case you’ve missed it, that’s all about to change.

The market research company WinterGreen Research tells us that the worldwide market for enterprise streaming video was worth approximately US$2.8 billion in 2008. They are predicting that it will grow to be a US$14.4 annually by 2014. This market is defined to include everything including videoconferencing, virtual tradeshows, digital signage, etc.

Now you might be scoffing saying something like “video’s been around forever, this is no big deal for CIOs”. Ahh, but you’d be wrong — high-definition (HD) video has changed everything. HD has arrived and it’s taking over: reports from the field say that well over 50% of the enterprise videos that are being produced are being filmed in HD.

The Problem With HD

As a CIO, you’re going to be spending a lot of time thinking about HD video. It’s not just because it looks so good, but rather because it’s going to potentially take up so much of your available network resources.

In the old world of standard definition video (SD) a video stream required 1 — 2.5 Mbps. In today’s new world of HD video steams, you’re going to need 4 — 7 Mbps per stream depending on the codec being used and the resolution of the images. Don’t even get me started on what this is going to mean for your data storage needs.

How CIOs Are Going To Have To Deal With HD Video

How can I say this simply: your current network is not going to be able to deal with this kind of bandwidth hog application. However, there’s a very good chance the problem of how to transport multiple HD video streams over your enterprise network is going to sneak up on you. First there will be one stream, then two, then ten. Before you know it, you’ll have a problem on your hands.

Your enterprise HD video users are going to be a demanding bunch. The days of putting up with choppy postage-stamp sized video images are over. Instead, what your customers are going to want will be full-screen smooth video. Monitoring end-user quality of service and having the IT department be able to provide video service-level agreements will become the norm.

High quality video assumes that you have a reliable infrastructure on which to provide it. That means that your IT team is going to have to devote time and energy to finding ways to overcome the two gremlins that haunt video streams: packet loss and jitter as the video information flows over the enterprise network.

What All Of This Means For You

In the old days, a CIO could assume that the here and now was taken care of and he / she could spend their time focused on the future. The arrival of video into the enterprise as well as HD video is creating problems right now.

The surge of bandwidth and network resources that HD video needs will require CIOs to have to quickly react to dynamically changing network conditions. Since the quality of the delivered product is so quickly apparent, a portion of your IT staff will be required to focus on managing video quality metrics.

The challenge of dealing with video on your network is one that you must solve when you become CIO. The solution won’t be easy, and since the amount of video that your network is carrying will continue to grow, you will need to be constantly adapting to a changing situation in order to stay on top of it.

Now that you know what you have to do, make sure that you don’t get surprised!

Do you think that your company will double its use of video over the network by the end of next year? Why?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The next time that you are at one of those cocktail parties that they throw for up-and-coming IT staffers who will someday become the CIO (you go to those don’t you?), do me a favor and listen very closely. I suspect that you’ll overhear a number of pretentious CIO-wannabes throwing around the phrase “virtualization”. Don’t worry about these showoffs, I’ve got something bigger and better for you to throw out there: database virtualization.

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How To Accurately Predict The Future Of IT Networks

Monday, December 14th, 2009
Image Credit U.S. and Japanese Researches Are Defining What Tomorrow's Networks Will Look Like

U.S. and Japanese Researches Are Defining What Tomorrow's Networks Will Look Like

When you become CIO, almost instantly everything that you know will quickly start to become out-of-date. Just to make things even worse, as the CIO one of your jobs is going to be to accurately predict the future. Just how are you going to go about doing this? It turns out that when you need insights into what the future of IT is going to look like, it helps to sit down and have a talk with the guys who are busy creating it…

Meet The Yodas of IT Networking

Where can we find such researchers who spend their days peering into the future of IT networks? Well, it helps when they come together. This happened when the U.S.-Japan Workshop on Future Networks was held in Palo, Alto CA.

The purpose of this workshop was to allow network researchers from both Japan and the U.S. to sit down together and discuss what the future holds. Those of you who want to eventually become the CIO should pay attention.

The future remains murky to even these guys, the best and the brightest of the research community. However, they’re smart enough to acknowledge this and so the purpose of the workshop was to identify both the research challenges as well as the areas for collaboration between the two countries. In the end, they identified three major areas where CIOs will be seeing the greatest changes.

Network Fundamentals

I think that we can all agree that IT networks are complex systems. If that was all we could say, then we’d just have to call them chaotic systems. However, due to a property that IT networks exhibit, called Emergent behavior, it turns out that how all of the smaller parts interact defines how the entire network behaves. The researchers identified five areas that need to be studied to learn more about this type of network behavior:

  1. What methodologies can be applied to future network designs. The thinking is that the fields of electromagnetics, biology, economics, game theory, etc. also have complex models that may hold the key to better network behavior understanding.
  2. What metric can be used to define the “goodness” of a network model? Anyone can predict how your network behavior is going to change when you make a change to it, but who is going to be most correct in their predictions?
  3. How can we do both network design and performance modeling at the same time? Today’s networks are too large and too important to use yesterday’s “build it and we’ll see what happens” approach.
  4. How can a common language be created that will allow us to describe all of the inputs, outputs, and metrics for our large complex IT networks?
  5. Will we be able to use self-organizing systems to create IT networks that have desired behaviors?

Network Architecture Design

If there are any sacred cows in IT, then they probably live in the domain of the network architects. We’ve been building networks pretty much the same way since we started and it’s only now that the researchers are starting to take a look at things and ask some probing questions about how we’re doing it.

  1. Is layering really necessary? From the days of the OSI model onward this has been the accepted approach to creating a network architecture. However, has the time come to start to do things a different / better way?
  2. What network design principals and abstractions do we really need? Things like identify management are causing us to rethink the way that we’ve done things before.
  3. Is the end-to-end argument still the way to go? If it isn’t, then what changes do we need to make in order to support tomorrow’s network-centric applications?
  4. What will the impact of emerging technologies be? Wireless is changing the world everywhere. How will tomorrow’s IT networks operate in that world?

Socio-Economic And Environmentally-Aware Network Services

Like it or not, when you are CIO you are going to have to live in a world that is much more “green-aware” . This means that your IT networks will have to be designed to live in that world also.

  1. How are today’s ongoing social, legal, and economic changes going to impact the overall design of tomorrow’s IT networks? The arrival of Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. has changed networking forever and you are going to be impacted.
  2. What changes need to be made to such things as network protocols, network services, traffic management, etc. in order to make your IT network more environmentally friendly? Reducing the power that your IT network consumes is a good first step, but what will your next step be?

What All Of This Means For You

Bad news, there is no magic wand or crystal ball that you’ll be handed when you become CIO that will allow you to accurately see what will happen in the future. Instead, you’re going to have to find ways to stay on top of what changes are coming your way.

The best way to do this is to tap into the research community and track what they are working on. What exists in university labs today, will be in your networks tomorrow.

The recent Japan — U.S. future networks workshop is a great example of what you need to be following. This group of researchers have identified three major areas where they believe the greatest amount of change will occur in your networks in the future. Study what they will be working on and you’ll have your best snapshot of what future IT networks are going to look like.

What do you think is the single biggest technology that will change your IT networks in the future?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The world of IT is changing fast and CIOs can easily get surprised when their world is turned upside down. When you become CIO, you are going to have a entirely new set of issues to deal with because of the arrival of one technology that we don’t often associate with IT: video…

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Posted in network | No Comments »