Virtualization and systems management software could help ease the pain of users deploying voice over IP (VOIP) on standard enterprise networks, predicts Mark Lewis, chief development officer of EMC.
Speaking at Pacific Crests Future of Computing Conference in Boston today, Lewis underlined the challenge facing firms as they roll out their VOIP infrastructures. Users, he explained, are relying on standard networks with any old type of switch, any old type of router. These infrastructures, he added, are certainly not the hardened networks, used by telecom firms.
Against this backdrop, hardware failures are a very real possibility, according to Lewis, who urged users to think about how this could affect their storage arrays and disk drives. When you have a complex environment like this and a switch fails, all of those systems will start reporting errors.
But could systems management software really make sense of this mess? Lewis thinks so. If I have a switch, or an array, or a disk drive, I need to understand all of the relationships, he said. All of the apps that could and would be impacted.
Of course, there was some method in Lewiss madness today. Earlier this year EMC ponied up $260 million for systems management specialist Smarts which correlates data on disparate devices in a network. (See EMC Gets Smarts and EMC Buys Smarts.)
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