Thought Leadership:
Managing your networks needn’t be complicated

The IP network is recognised to be the foundation of a modern Enterprise which values increased efficiency from investments, environmentally sustainable IT, reduced costs and a reliable system that supports business critical applications. Networks need to be flexible, easy to manage and able to adjust to new innovation.

The Enterprise demands additional value from their network. Some of the drivers for growth that we see include conducting business over ever increasing distances, consolidation of dispersed datacenters, convergence of applications and technologies, the advent of unified communications and cost reduction.

Cloud-based and other hosted computing environments are becoming increasingly attractive, yet to provide true benefit place more reliance than ever on the underlying network infrastructure. The network applications are typically managed to aggressive Service Level Agreements, often with tight management indicators of operational performance and associated financial penalties if they are not met.

With the advent of more convergence of technology collaboration tools are becoming more common in the enterprise allowing people to work more effectively wherever they happen to be located. This drives cost saving but places more demand than ever when the network is used for voice, video, application sharing and conferencing. The network is now the place where all this new functionality needs to compete with existing services, and it will need to deliver.

All of these factors mean the IP network is more important than ever to the enterprise, the hosting provider and the enterprise user.

At Computacenter we work with customers to define strategy, design, procure and implement IP networking technology . Our Network Technology Optimisation services allow us to understand your IP networking requirements and drive network efficiency to improve service levels, reduce costs and align the IT communications services more closely to the business requirements of our customers. Most importantly we are well versed in helping our customers to mitigate the risk of transition through the use of tried and tested services and solutions.

When looking at choosing specific technologies a traditional player for the enterprise IP network infrastructure is Cisco Systems. Cisco have a long standing heritage providing the levels of IP network availability required for highly available datacenters, mobile and desktop environments. The market breakdown of IP networking vendors confirms Computacenter’s experience; Cisco Systems are regularly measured to be providing equipment for 50% to 70% of the various IP networking segments.

One of the new challengers for the Ethernet aspect of the IP networking market is Hewlett-Packard with the HP Procurve networking range, focusing on the more niche requirements for high density, ultra high speed ports.

HP Procurve was brought into HP’s Technology Services Group in late 2008, we view this change as strategically significant for HP Procurve. HP’s move into Enterprise and datacenter networking is exemplified by the introduction of high specification chassis switches and new ultra high performance 10Gb switches like the 6600 series. The HP 6600 is a top of the rack solution and is a clear statement of HP’s future aspirations

Computacenter understand not only the solutions from a single vendor, but how these will integrate with other environments. We cover core networking, IPT, VoIP, structured cabling, unified communications and security, and can offer all levels of support. The range of services has been developed such that there is an HP packaged service offering that can fit into all stages of the sales cycle i.e.

Planning services - e.g. Capacity planner, Thermal Assessment services, Storage Assessments
Deployment services - Installation & start up services
Support - range of support packages to suit customer need, including renewal care packs
Proactive services - range of proactive support packages for customers where downtime would have a serious impact on their business e.g. Deutsche Bank - Proactive 24
Education services.

Storage Solutions

Thought Leadership: Managing your networks needn’t be complicated

Thought Leadership:
Managing your networks needn’t be complicated