The route-balancing market is maturing--you'll find a several vendors offering route balancing in an appliance or as a service. This functionality does not come cheap, but vendors are starting to offer low-end versions of their products for smaller organizations and branch offices. Route balancers usually let you route by cost as well, giving you better control over usage-sensitive links.
If you haven't caved in already, expect to find lots of pressure from vendors telling you to connect your desktops at 1 gigabit. They are looking for another purchasing cycle and they'll mention enticing selling points like Dell is shipping some of its PCs with gigabit cards. They might even tell you that their mothers have 1 gigabit to the desktop. Don't listen. The fact is that most applications will do fine with 10-Mbps connections. Think about it--many of these applications are designed to run well for telecommuters and road warriors who have a few megabits per second in bandwidth available to them at best. The bandwidth available to wireless networks can be even lower. There will always be the exceptions, but if you're not running collaboration software or editing digital movies, the ROI (return on investment) for desktop gigabit is questionable at best.
Prices are coming down fast for wiring-closet switches, however, so if you are upgrading anyway, can get a low enough price per port and have good quality Category 5 or Cat5e, go for it. Upgrading now could save you the cost of doing it later. Expect cable vendors to push the Cat6 wiring solutions that were approved by the EIA/TIA in June of 2002.
If you are upgrading cabling or working on new construction, consider putting in the absolute latest standard but otherwise, you shouldn't even be thinking about it. Currently, there are no electronics even in the planning stages that can take advantage of the higher bandwidth capabilities of Cat6 and it will cost a lot more to install. Additionally Cat7 is on the drawing board and will involve lots of shielding and even greater corresponding costs. You may hear some rumblings about Cat8 as well, but that's designed for residential wiring.
Power to the Closet: UPS 802.3af
As VoIP and wireless LANs increase in popularity, the benefits linked to powering these devices over the Ethernet cable (from the switch in the closet) also increases. Switches that provide power via each Ethernet port provide the flexibility to locate the AP (access point) where you need it without worrying about power requirements.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
