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When WANs Aren't Wide Enough

By Jeff Merron

CIO Magazine's recent tech poll revealed something that may not be surprising to corporate network managers: Spending on networks has eclipsed computer hardware as the top IT budget category. What is surprising is that this isn't due to an increase in the local area networks (LANs) that now run in almost every company office. Even though LANs are beginning to show their age, experts agree the existing technology can still supply plenty of bandwidth and hasn't required much new investment. The budget buster is the corporate WAN, or wide area network.

"Organizations are much more distributed," explains George Hamilton, the director of Yankee Group's enabling technologies enterprise group in Boston, Mass. "They've got a lot of branch offices and mobile users, and there's a big push to make enterprise applications that you would normally be able to use sitting at a desk in an office available to users wherever they are, whether they're at an airport or a hotel or their home PC or in a branch office. So you need to empower the network to be able to support those types of applications."

But while users are more distributed, data centers are becoming more centralized. According to Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, in Sanibel, Fla., "HP is going from 85 data centers down to six. The state of Texas is going from 31 to two." As a result, data has to travel farther to get to any particular user.

Boosting WAN Capability
If WANs provide a future solution, they also pose a present problem. LANs carry traffic over 10/100Mbps Ethernet cables, says Hamilton, while WANs trudge along at a stodgy 1.544Mbps. Many companies are speeding up those WAN (article continues)

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