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Friday, February 2, 2007
Today's communication networks have evolved from simple data connectivity architectures to business enablers, supporting mission critical applications and processes. With increased need to share and consolidate information across intranets to extranets, the dependency on advanced communication infrastructures has increased.
Functional consolidation concepts revolve around building next generation elements that offer more functionality per equipment than traditional elements at no performance penalty. Branch-in-a-box is an extrapolation of the said concept that aims to consolidate disparate communication elements in a branch office onto one functional appliance.
Branch-in-a-Box infrastructure consolidates various traditional branch office networking elements like routing, switching, http/smtp proxies, firewalls, data encryptors, VPN concentrators, as well as VoIP gateways into one single functional hardware element, streamlining operations, reducing cost of ownership and easing solution maintenance.
Application overview
As more and more business applications are deployed as client-sever architecture, there is a transition in terms of service expectations from customers. Today's demands are business availability rather than infrastructure availability. With mission critical applications driving businesses today, extreme infrastructure availability expectations are not unreasonable. The challenge the market faces is to keep pace with the customer's growing availability demands while still offering services competently.
With branches engineered to distribute elements and dedicated appliances to do routing, switching, firewalling and encryption, the number of failure points increases subsequently at every extra-distributed element integrated in the set-up. As businesses connect to their value chains expanding beyond geographical boundaries, through various media consolidating services at the central or corporate office. With each branch having different individual devices, it becomes a challenge to manage, needless to mention the cost of implementation and support increases.
Branch-in-a-box limits the number of communication elements per branch to just one, thereby limiting the suspected failure elements to unity.
As newer business avenues emerge, branch-in-a-box will find seeming applications across all market sectors, and the ones showing the most promise are banking finance and insurance sectors, travel operations, hospitality service reservation sectors, manufacturing and retail value-chain systems.
-Amandeep Singh Head-Internet Business Solutions, Asia Pacific, Allied Telesyn
Source: DQ Channels
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