Content area
Full text
For many enterprise customers, it's 1 hard to get excited about managing the quality of service (QOS) of their premises data networks, much less implementing the elaborate policy-based overhauls that have been suggested over the past few years. Until voice and video make their way onto these networks in earnest, there's little reason to tackle the complicated QOS and policy decisions that will have to be made to support them. Besides, prices for LAN bandwidth are at an all-time low, so adding more still looks like an easy way out.
But it's a different story for wide-area connections, where a mix of data traffic types alone can justify careful attention to QOS and policy management. Consider that more than 50,000 enterprise customers are using frame relay networks today to carry various combinations of delay-sensitive SNA and transaction application traffic, plus routine client/server exchanges, email and Internet access. Most of these networks are configured as logical stars, with up to five remote sites connecting into the central location, according to market research firm Distributed Networking Associates (www.webtorials.com).
These are the customers Sitara Networks (www.sitaranetworks.com) is targeting with its QoSWorks appliance. CTO Manickam Sridhar told BCR several hundred units have already been sold into this market since the product first shipped in early March. In May, the company announced additional software and capacity enhancements, plus a 30day, money-back satisfaction guarantee. "The customer will see increased network optimization, increased performance of applications and decreased bandwidth costs," he said. "If they don't see that, they get their money...