Adtran Looks to the Cloud Networking Future

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As cloud computing continues to evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that IT organizations need to start acting a lot more like service providers. Of course, what any service provider will tell you is that the quality of the service being provided is only as good as the network that supports it. Within the enterprise today, there is already a mix of wide area networking technologies in place that provide various levels of network bandwidth. Most of those networking transport options are being steadily replaced by Ethernet. But for the time being, IT organizations are still going to have to contend with multiple types of WANs to deliver services that in the era of the cloud are more distributed than ever.

At the recent ITEXPO West conference, Adtran announced the Total Access 900e Gen 3 series of Ethernet and Multi-T1 IP Business Gateways that, in addition to being able to support voice services, provide 100 Mbps along with a Gigabit Ethernet interface. In addition, Adtran followed up this week with a new NetVanta 6250 IP Business Gateway that makes it easier to transition from a T1 network to Ethernet…

On the face of it, these are clearly carrier-class networking products. But as cloud computing ambitions of enterprise IT organizations continue to grow, the line between carrier and enterprise-class networking products is going to increasingly blur. Obviously, not every enterprise IT organization is essentially becoming a carrier. But as Ethernet bandwidth grows, enough of them are that companies with global operations are clearly going to be expanding their Ethernet networks to gain access to higher amounts of WAN bandwidth at a much lower cost…

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