Network solutions
IT specialists are used to approach system construction by starting from servers, workstations, printers and other manageable devices. Until the network structure was relatively simple and there were not many systems in a network, computer users had a similar approach to systems. By now, the number of devices in a network has increased and everything has become much more complex, so that users are only interested in network services – printing, surfing the web, economic software, etc. IT standards ITIL, ISO 20 000 and ISO 27 000 are also based on this principle.
The producers of system management tools are slowly starting to adopt a similar approach. For the market leader of network systems – Cisco Systems –, a network has, for a long time, clearly been the main channel for making the services of an information system available to users. For Cisco, IT systems are simply service production points in different branches of a network, and the co-operation of these branches and availability to customers must be guaranteed by the network.
Smart network nodes
A new view on the way networks are built adds considerable input to all devices responsible for network connections, be that a switch, a router, firewall or even connection panel of cables. As users view computer network as a medium for using information system services, then network devices have to focus on services and check the availability of services while guaranteeing secure services. Network monitoring systems have to detect all convergences and divergences, detect users and check their access to services. Network systems also have to be able to identify allowed and malevolent patterns of using services, and avoid attacks against services and users.
IPv4 and IPv6
Internet protocol IPv4, developed thirty years ago, is slowly becoming exhausted. Although new allocated addresses will be depleted in summer of 2011, then by re-allocating address fields, the period of use of IPv4 can be extended for years. Nevertheless, it is high time for starting to use parallel IPv6 protocol whose address field is much bigger.
There are several reasons for the success of IPv6 in this race. The most explicit reason for people outside IT sector is the spread of smartphones, tablet computers and television sets connected to the Internet. There are not enough addresses for all those devices which would meet the old standard, and most of these devices already support IPv6 standard today. The problem is there are not enough services supporting the standard. Today, Google is one of the few service providers who take IPv6 standard seriously; definitely, the provision of services to Android platform devices largely explains it.
The introduction of IPv6 standard is not easy and straight-forward. As of now, IPv6 does not replace IPv4 standard; rather, these two will work in parallel for at least 20 years to come. Due to the size of IPv6 address field, every device has a “public” address which places tougher demands on security. Many old software solutions do not support the new standard, and even if the networks are completely transferred to IPv6 standard, there will still be systems which need “translation portals”. New principles for configuring network devices set additional demands to specialist skills, and here, Net Group specialists can help you to transfer computer networks to IPv6 standard.
Converged Network
The data communication connections of a server room typically look like that: there are twisted-pair cables for the computer network, and fibre cables for connecting servers to disk systems. Transition to cloud architecture has showed that this is a non-flexible construction and sets various limits which inhibit higher availability and performance. Earlier in cloud computing systems with high density of virtual systems, the main limitation was the applicable memory space. This limit has been lifted by the rapid growth in processor speed and memory space, but the number of network interfaces and their speed has become a new limit. In a converged network, both network interfaces and disk system interfaces are connected at the speed of 10 Gbit/s. You can define 147 physical network connections or disk system connections to every interface of a converged network. In this way, the networks of virtual systems can be reasonably segmented to guarantee a secure network and sufficient speed for all virtual systems. Transition to a converged network means that the focus shifts from the management of physical systems to that of a cloud system whose central system is the commutator of a converged network, not some server.