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Is your network in need of an efficiency overhaul? Whether to enhance customer service or create a smoother business flow, improving network efficiency can lead to cost savings, simplified resources and higher functioning across the company. Among the many approaches to increasing network efficiency, virtualization and switch technology are two solutions you might be considering. Both approaches can result in greater overall efficiency.
Virtualization takes you further with less
One of the hottest trends in the IT industry, virtualization can bring efficiency, simplicity and flexibility to your networks, along with lowered costs, simplified resources and the freedom to choose the hardware or software users want to operate. That's why more companies are employing virtualization software to reduce their hardware, software and ongoing management costs.
 Virtualization can also help you to avoid capacity waste, which hampers efficiency from both a management and production standpoint. Consider the fact that average server utilization rates for the standard IT department have been found to be approximately 5 to 10 percent. With utilization rates that low, lots of expensive compute capacity is sitting idle — and potentially creating network inefficiency. Your IT department can reduce the costs of maintaining, upgrading and managing these underutilized systems by deploying virtual servers.
A first step to reducing these costs is physical consolidation of smaller servers onto high-performance rack-mounted and blade servers. If your company physically consolidated 10 servers, for example, each running at 10 percent or lower utilization onto a single server, that $7500 lifetime cost would only have to be spent on one server versus 10 servers (representing a cost savings of $67,500).
Where energy conservation is concerned, virtualization is estimated to have saved billions of kilowatt-hours of power. Space-wise, virtualization enables more efficient use of data centers through consolidation. Server virtualization is only one way to save space; when paired with storage virtualization, it brings companies even more efficiency and savings.
To achieve true cost benefits, however, virtualization must be part of your ongoing strategy for operational efficiency by reducing the costs of underutilized servers, which generate expenses through IT staff labor, software license updates, warranties and service contracts.
Enhance your network with switch technology
Next-generation switch technology offers increased security, streamlined data flow and application optimization functions such as Web acceleration, server load balancing and wide-area network (WAN) optimization — features that keep your network processing as efficiently as possible.
In addition to embedded security functions like firewall, Secure Sockets Layer virtual private network (SSL VPN), and intrusion detection and prevention systems, the latest switches give you built-in port safety measures that allow access only to specified media access control (MAC) addresses that can either be "learned" or specified.
Switches can also be programmed to lock out configured particular MAC addresses. Authentication methods such as the IEEE 802.1X standard provide a browser-based environment in which to verify clients, while source-port filtering allows only specified ports to communicate with each other. With tight security in place at the switch level, fewer resources are required to monitor traffic and prevent any breach that might otherwise occur.
From a management standpoint, today's switches can provide you with a deeper level of knowledge about your network. The best switches are "smart" — engineered not only to examine units of data and deliver them appropriately, but also to examine whole application streams, or flows of packets, and take appropriate action on them. The right high-performance switch will allow you to establish traffic prioritization through assigning priority levels to data traffic. Using deep packet inspection, for example, a switch may examine HTTP headers and XML schemata to route them accordingly.
Switches increase efficiency through consolidation as well: robust switches can incorporate the functionality of a variety of appliances — compression devices, for example — simplifying an enterprise's network. And switches often include stacking capability that enables single IP address management for a virtual stack of switches.
More companies are turning to virtualization software and switch technology, whether to provide extra network security, make better use of existing network resources or streamline network traffic. Discover how these tools can make a difference for your network efficiency, too.
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