CAIRO, Egypt, 4th September, 2015:
How old is the equipment running the organization’s IT network? Older
than 5 years? Do recurrent network outages occur? Is there a struggle
with poor quality voice and video communications? Is it too costly to
maintain the organization’s legacy equipment? Is there trouble scaling
up the network to accommodate new business needs? If the answers to any
of these questions is “Yes”, it may be time to upgrade the
organization’s campus network, says Yarob Sakhnini, regional director,
MEMA at Brocade. Yarob has put together a list of the five telltale
signs that CIOs in Egypt need to pay attention to that indicate that
it’s time to upgrade the campus network.
1. Frequent equipment breakdowns causing network outages
As with all electronic
equipment, as switches age they are more prone to failure. Power
supplies and fans reach the end of their life span, old optical
transceivers/links will increasingly fail and require more frequent
maintenance. A switch or a link going down can result in network outage
in older network architecture lacking redundancy.
2. Performance can’t keep up with latest campus applications
The latest campus
applications like web based video conferencing, Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure (VDI), IP based video surveillance, automated cloud based
backup, to name a few often require more bandwidth and lower latency
than most legacy networks were designed for, causing users to experience
delays and poor application experience. Additionally, the latest
network powered devices such as high performance wireless access points
and Pan Tilt Zoom security cameras require more PoE power than legacy
switches can deliver.
3. High maintenance cost
Old network equipment
is notoriously more expensive to maintain than the latest generations.
Often vendors charge a percentage of the equipment list price as yearly
service and support fees, since prices of new network switches have come
down over the years so did service and support fees. Additionally,
vendors tend to increase service and support fees for end-of-lived
equipment to amortize the cost or maintaining old technology. Last but
not least, many newer network switches include a lifetime warranty
reducing the cost of support.
4. High power bills
Over the years,
customers have become increasingly concerns about energy consumption and
cost. A few networking vendors have developed more energy efficient
products and each generation of new network switches consumes
significantly less power than the previous one. Additionally new
technology and standards such as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) has
been developed to reduce the power consumption of idle ports.
5. Too much time spent managing the network
Older legacy networks
offer very limited support, if at all, for consolidated management and
automation. Typically older switches are either standalone only or offer
basic stackablity with limited stacking bandwidth and short stack
height. This results in network administrators having to manage each
switch individually, spending precious time replicating network policy
changes manually across the network.
