P IS FOR PEER-TO-PEER (P2P)

Exinda has announced a new layer seven heuristics engine which gives the Australian company P2P classificatio. Exinda's Nikolouzakis said the engine lets users detect, classify, restrict or block encrypted P2P apps such as BitTorrent or Skype as well as sites such as MySpace and Facebook - allowing users to manage these increasingly popular but also risky applications. "What we want to do is to be able to restrict them in a fashion that doesn't impede business-critical applications," Nikolouzakis said.

Q IS FOR QOS

Most resellers are well aware of the crucial role played by quality-of-service (QoS) in a voice and data network. Networking hardware increasingly needs to support QoS, which determines which packets to prioritise for the information to make sense when it arrives at the other end. Voice services need QoS, and when video or unified communications are added to the mix, the ability to process packets of information in a prioritized way becomes even more critical.

R IS FOR REMOTE ACCESS

Business users are increasingly mobile and want seamless connection to the work network anywhere, any time. The move to remote working is giving rise to demand for a range of remote access and routing solutions. Exinda's Nikolouzakis said remote access involves critical changes to business networking. "Organisations will need to be able to deliver applications remotely at a certain service level," he said. "People want their mobile device to be able to be integrated into the enterprise," Nortel solutions manager, Mitch Radomir, added. "They want it to be continuously linked, so there's one number, one directory, and no one can tell the difference."

Microsoft's Gregory said Longhorn offers VPN and dial-up access to the business network via branches, software routers and shared intranet connections.

S IS FOR SESSION INITIATION PROTOCOL (SIP)

Everything is going SIP: if it didn't support SIP before, it will soon have to - something of which hardware vendors such as Nortel are well aware. It will launch the CS1000 5.5 in February or March offering boosted support for SIP, 3G, multimedia conferencing, fixed mobile convergence, full geographic redundancy and dual/single mode wireless networking. Nortel is also working on a product that will work with IBM Sametime and Microsoft's Office Communication Suite. "The other thing is support for the new SIP phones coming out," Radomir said. "Call centre applications and some of those other things are moving to SIP as well."

T IS FOR TCP/IP

Microsoft's Gregory said Longhorn will offer a next generation TCP/IP stack that will support better network auto-tuning and optimisation. Receive Window Auto-Tuning will determine the best receive window size per connection by measuring the bandwidth-delay product. The optimal receive window size will be automatically adjusted regularly. Compound TCP (CTCP) works with auto-tuning and optimisation to boost link use and performance for large bandwidth-delay connections such as from satellites.

"With better throughput between TCP peers, utilization of network bandwidth increases during data transfer. If all applications are optimised to receive TCP data, the overall utilisation of the network can improve," Gregory said.

Longhorn's TCP/IP stack will also support PMTU black hole router detection by default, dead gateway failback, network diagnostics, explicit congestion notify cation, and a windows fiitering platform that will let third parties create TCP/IP stack applications and services. "That allows you more efficient ascending traffic," Gregory said.

U IS FOR UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

3Com's Tezel said Unified Communications - presence, voice, data, video, messaging and conferencing components on one interface, enabled by VoIP - will hit its straps soon, affecting existing data applications on the network. "We're hoping to see a huge growth in unified communications in SMBs next year," he said. Again, it's all about consolidation and collaboration. "Organisations of all sizes want a robust, cost-effective voice and data network to maximise productivity," Tezel said.

3Com is coming out with branch-in-a-box solutions to target this need. Soon, IBM's Sametime, Domino and similar will perform click-to-dial, drag-and-drop conferencing. "We want different best-of-breed solutions from all different vendors integrated on the network infrastructure," Tezel said. "We're working with voice vendors but there are now opportunities with the likes of SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft."

Alcatel-Lucent enterprise solutions consultant, Mark Magill, said forthcoming mid-market products such as its Business Integration Communication Server, due out in April, aimed to facilitate unified communications through centralised application consolidation.

V IS FOR VIRTUALISATION

Gartner's Johnson said VMware virtualisation will continue as the big thing in infrastructure, with increasing focus placed next year on hypervisors and multiple OSs that will drive asset consolidation, economy and performance.

Riverbed's Dixon agreed and predicted thin client technologies would gradually be replaced by virtualized offerings, such as VMware's VDI, and more Webbased applications up front.

W IS FOR WAN OPTIMISATION

Riverbed's Dixon said networking is all about getting more and more data from one place to another. Large data files - whether voice, video or documents - make network optimization solutions of various sorts critical to an efficient organisation. The old 5MB limits to email will soon disappear, in favour of supporting email transfer of files of up to 100MB each. On top of that, unified messaging and unified communications are operating in environments where there is increasing centralisation of critical data over distributed architecture. "And you've got to back it all up and protect it and a whole lot of other things," Dixon said.

Exinda's Nikolouzakis called WAN optimization the application fl uency layer - ensuring the increasing number of applications delivered over the network operate fluently.

X MARKS THE SPOT ...

... where you don't have to be any more, when the application integration and remote access advances far enough, Riverbed's Dixon noted. "We know the laptop is now enabling people to have a much more effective workforce," he said. Even the IT manager doesn't need to know exactly where you are on the network.