Enterprises must make scalability a priority, says Apcon

WILSONVILLE, USA : In today's digital universe of ever-growing data traffic, enterprises are becoming overwhelmed by the volume and increased velocity of information. Many companies struggle to monitor existing traffic, and are hardly prepared for increased traffic, as their network monitoring capabilities are not originally architected for scalability.

Apcon described significant trends in the network operations environment, and steps businesses can take to avoid common network monitoring architecture meltdown. As data centers scale to embrace traffic increases, advanced switching technology supporting non-blocking connectivity, high capacity and maximum availability is vital to ensure smooth operations.

Richard Rauch, president and CEO of Apcon said, "When considering the cost of not having visibility, the reality is sobering. Network outages or slowdowns can quickly cost millions, and oversubscribed servers or monitoring tools can easily lead to dropped data."

"Scalability can't be retrofitted as an afterthought. The network monitoring architecture must be designed to meet the challenges faced by enterprise data centers as they expand beyond 10G to 40G or even 100G. When an enterprise is looking for 100-percent network visibility, building a network monitoring system that is reliable, highly available and scalable must become a fundamental part of a company's network strategy," said he.

All industries today must consider scalability

Network infrastructures are rapidly evolving, a direct result of companies adopting technologies such as BYOD, cloud and SDN. With a growing number of devices on the network, operations and security professionals face daily cybersecurity threats.

Combined with Big Data challenges, all industries face unprecedented constraints due to scalability issues

When encountering microbursts in network traffic, or facing network expansion, companies suddenly must rip and replace older tools to avoid tool oversubscription. Instead of being able to add increased network monitoring capability as needed, enterprises - because of limitations of the switches and architecture used to build their networks - are forced into large-scale and expensive changes.

Advanced switching technology is key

When selecting a switch, enterprises must make scalability a priority. A switch with a small port count can look like an appealing, cost-effective solution, but brings with it port limitations, switch configuration complexity, user interface difficulties and a lack of scalability.

For a network monitoring switch to be truly effective, it must have features such as aggregation, trunking, packet deduplication, packet slicing, and management and monitoring from a central user interface. These features prepare enterprises for increased traffic, and ultimately assure the 100-percent network visibility crucial to meeting business demands.