Tag Archives: Information And Communications Technology

As discussed in Part 1, contemporary network design requires meeting the technical and application requirements of ever expanding and evolving IT and business demands.

Part 2 will continue discussing Application Requirements.

Importance of User Expectation

Networks or IT technologies that are unable to achieve a satisfactory level user expectation or QoE (quality of experience) will be considered to have failed meeting an important business goal. As a result, they will be considered a cost, rather than tools that allow a business to succeed.

A network’s design must take into account how a satisfactory level of user experience will be attained. From the point of view of a user, QoE when utilizing services and applications will determine their level of satisfaction.

The deployment of services and applications before taking into account their features and network requirements will result in a failure to achieve business goals.

To illustrate, a financial services company that wants to provide a video communication application to their customer service representatives, but fails to secure enough bandwidth, will likely frustrate their reps and displease their customers when calls are dropped or interrupted because of excessive latency. Thus, their corporate goal of differentiating themselves from their competitors will be a failure until they meet the network requirements of the application.

Evaluation of Application Requirements

Network designers should keep in mind their responses to the key questions below for the evaluation of application requirements:

• What are the application’s features and characteristics?


• What is the length of time the application needs to reset its session or state after losing connectivity?


• What is the amount of network traffic that is required by the application?


• How important is the application to the organization and what is the service level it will require to function properly?


• For its compliance with industry regulations and company security polices, will the application have separation requirements?

Progressive Office Cabling

Founded in 1986, Progressive Office’s success has been a direct result of years of commitment to seeking solutions on behalf of our clients in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas. Efficiently working together, Progressive teams get cabling installed and operating as fast as possible while minimizing disruption and downtime. Call our toll free number (800) 614-4560 today.

As discussed in Part 1, moving often overwhelms staff, and cabling for data, power, communications, and security may not be prioritized adequately. Part 2 will discuss Health & Safety, Flexibility, Future Growth, and Structured Cabling. Consult with an experienced and expert cabling company prior to starting your project to get the best results.

Health & Safety

Consideration should be given to the health and safety of both employees and staff when planning the cabling at your new facility. Wiring that provides connections to equipment and telecommunications and power companies should not endanger the welfare of people by blocking emergency exits, ventilation ducts, and cooling systems.

Ensure that regulatory compliance for securing certain types of sensitive or personal data will be met. This will require locating data storage, servers, and equipment processing transactions properly. Their positions should be considered during the mapping process.

Flexibility

Market conditions can become very fluid, and perhaps only a brief time after moving into a new location will an organization have to make changes in its cabling. Well-designed structured cabling will ensure flexibility that allows a company to make additions and revisions in the most efficient and fastest manner possible to reallocate resources.

Future Growth

The cabling of an organization should give allowance for future expansion of its IT infrastructure. The growth of its business may require the company to seek greater bandwidth, increased communication channels, more electrical power, and additional space. Although the future of a business is often very hard to predict, it is still possible to make projections given the current market and its prospects in the coming years.

Structured Cabling

Having your data, communications, and power cabling installed by several different contractors will work against a properly configured cabling system. This haphazard approach may also result in higher management and maintenance costs. Governed by proven industry standards, a structured cabling system will provide a company an integrated IT infrastructure that allows for ease of maintenance, flexibility, and expansion.

Progressive Office Cabling

Founded in 1986, Progressive Office’s success has been a direct result of years of commitment to seeking solutions on behalf of our clients in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas. Efficiently working together, Progressive teams get cabling installed and operating as fast as possible while minimizing disruption and downtime. Call our toll free number (800) 614-4560 today.

As discussed in Part 1, many users no longer think wired Internet connections are necessary because WiFi has become so commonplace in everyday use. However, hard-wired connections do have advantages for businesses that should not be overlooked. Part 2 will discuss Wireless Advantages and Considerations.

Wireless Advantages

Typically, wireless Internet connections will likely be adequate for the majority of tasks at a workplace. Lots of employees like wireless primarily because of its convenience and mobility, thinking the advantages from a hard-wired connection are not worth the trouble of attaching an Ethernet cable. In addition, advancements in WiFi technology are gradually gaining on . Even though an organization may not require Ethernet’s advantages in speed, low-latency, stability, and security, it should reconsider before going completely wireless.

Wireless Considerations

Make sure that the new WiFi equipment that your company buys features the newest 802.11 AC Wave 2 standard. It will be crucial for the future because it can support several users and handle multiple inputs and outputs (MU-MIMO).

Another benefit of 802.11 AC Wave 2 is that it gives WiFi equipment the capability of supporting multiple inbound and outbound streams. Thus, a company’s WiFi will be able to receive and broadcast data at the same time. As a result, audio and video streaming performance is improved.

The 802.11 AC Wave 2 standard will also allow your organization to implement future technological advancements. The latest devices from Apple can support MIMO over 5Ghz bandwidth, and this will eventually become the industry standard in the near future.

Conclusion

Obviously, an office can have both Ethernet and WiFi. Certain types of organizations require a hard-wired network to handle very large files, and they will also need to provide WiFi for guests, conference rooms, and outdoor areas. Always remember that Ethernet will provide better performance than WiFi for companies that need to process a great volume of data. At the same time, businesses should take advantage of advances in WiFi technology.

Progressive Office Cabling

Founded in 1986, Progressive Office’s success has been a direct result of years of commitment to seeking solutions on behalf of our clients in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas. Efficiently working together, Progressive teams get cabling installed and operating as fast as possible while minimizing disruption and downtime. Call our toll free number (800) 614-4560 today.

In the current business environment, your customers demand that their questions are addressed immediately and solutions for their problems are promptly applied. Business owners cannot permit remote locations and network interruptions from impacting their ability to provide services. This article will discuss four methods for improving data availability in your company’s data center. Consult with an expert and experienced managed IT services firm for the best results.

Disaster Recovery

Disasters that can affect a company’s data availability are not necessarily only from natural causes such as an earthquake or flood. They can be caused by something as common as a power outage due to a technical problem at the electrical utility. Fortunately, you can prepare your company in the event that access to your critical and sensitive business is interrupted by having a disaster recovery plan in place, which may feature solutions such as co-location and cloud storage.

Single Point of Failure Elimination

Your IT infrastructure will be able to eliminate single points of failure by backing up and having alternatives ready. Work with a managed services provider (MSP) to evaluate your company’s network architecture and consider solutions such as clustering, load balancing, redundancy, and virtualization.

Proactive Monitoring

Having a sound recovery plan that is regularly modified and tested is essential for the prevention of data loss. However, proactive monitoring of your company’s IT infrastructure may even be important because it may stop a disaster from occurring in the first place.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Your company’s data availability can be bolstered through the application of virtualization and cloud computing. Securely storing critical IT resources at a service provider’s data center ensures that critical business data is both backed up and available in the event of a disaster.

Progressive Office Cabling

Founded in 1986, Progressive Office’s success has been a direct result of years of commitment to seeking solutions on behalf of our clients in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas. Efficiently working together, Progressive teams get cabling installed and operating as fast as possible while minimizing disruption and downtime. Call our toll free number (800) 614-4560 today.

As discussed in Part 2, Top-Down Logic is used for the process of Preparation, Planning, Design, Implementation, Operation, and Optimization (PPDIOO). In addition, network designers must determine the Scope of Design prior to the collection of data and planning. Part 3 will cover Business Requirements, Continuity, and Elasticity.

Requirements

Figuring out what an organization needs requires having an understanding of its current objectives, mission statement, and future plans. Knowledge of these should guide the business-driven aspects of the network design. Using a top-down approach, a business’s goals, drivers, requirements, continuity, and strategy will determine its business applications, technical and functional requirements, and network infrastructure solutions.

Continuity

Business continuity is a company’s ability to continue doing business after a system outage caused by a man-made or natural disaster that has damaged a data center. An organization needs a disaster recovery plan to develop its resiliency in the face of such disasters. Various parts of its network may need to be more resilient due to regulatory compliance.

Elasticity

Elasticity is an organization’s level of flexibility when responding to business developments. This typically refers to a change in business objectives or conditions, including growth, recession, merger, acquisition, etc. Therefore, a company’s network design must have adequate flexibility in order to fulfill its business requirements and strategic goals. A designer’s comprehension of the overall trends of the organization’s business sector will provide valuable guidance in the design’s features that provide flexibility.

The design of a network must give an organization the flexibility that will allow it to perform integrations with other networks. This will usually be required when mergers and acquisitions take place. It is important to note that during a merger or acquisition, the network may undergo considerable growth during a very brief period. In such circumstances, the most daunting challenge for network designers is having to handle the various design principles, conflicting control plane protocols, and overlaps in IP address spaces of the networks being integrated.

Part 4 will cover “How IT Enables Business Innovation.”

Progressive Office Cabling

Founded in 1986, Progressive Office’s success has been a direct result of years of commitment to seeking solutions on behalf of our clients in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas. Efficiently working together, Progressive teams get cabling installed and operating as fast as possible while minimizing disruption and downtime. Call our toll free number (800) 614-4560 today.

As discussed in Part 1, structured cabling is now considered the foundation of network infrastructure, and organizations and their data centers are seeking ways to improve its efficiency and functionality through several trends. Part 2 will discuss Modularization, Optimization, and Virtualization.

Modularization

New data centers are now being built to support ever-increasing networking demands. Companies are participating by determining which modular data center cabling solutions to implement in order to be future-proofed as this technology grows more sophisticated.

They are also seeking the ability to better scale data and network resources, which will decrease capital expenditure for infrastructure and thus increase the potential for profits.

These organizations are also rapidly implementing virtual data center solutions.

Featuring modules and components that are specially designed, modular data centers are portable, scalable, and containerized. Capable of supporting converged infrastructures, a modular data center requires sound data cabling infrastructure to be effective.

Optimization

An organization that may not be able to build a new data center can still upgrade its existing data cabling. In addition, data center providers are rapidly being chosen as a cost-effective method for optimizing network infrastructure.

Although copper and fiber cabling are considered adequate, there is a growing demand for connectivity that is speedier and more efficient for apps, computers, servers, and storage systems. Optimizing data cabling is the most direct way to obtain this by standardizing components such as cabling, racks, cabinets, etc.

Virtualization

Research has found that more than half of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are now running workloads on virtual machines. In comparison, data center providers are utilizing virtualization at a rate of at least 95%.

Virtualization technology is establishing itself as a proven, scalable, and cost-effective option for networking. Virtualization most commonly functions on computers, networks, servers, and storage systems. The most essential feature of network virtualization is well-designed structured data cabling.

Progressive Office Cabling

Founded in 1986, Progressive Office’s success has been a direct result of years of commitment to seeking solutions on behalf of our clients in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas. Efficiently working together, Progressive teams get cabling installed and operating as fast as possible while minimizing disruption and downtime. Call our toll free number (800) 614-4560 today.