Intelligent Switches Address Today’s Challenges

In today’s increasingly complex business environments, the network is facing new challenges and must offer more services than ever before. Applications, and the network infrastructure of switches and routers that transport them, are crucial tools for enhancing user productivity and increasing an organization's ability to grow and remain competitive. Large enterprises, small businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies alike must optimize their network switching. This entails these organizations deriving the greatest value from their existing infrastructures while positioning themselves to take full advantage of such technological innovations as IP telephony and wireless LANs.

Instead of purchasing point switching products, organizations can use a systems approach of data switch and wireless switch equipment, to build integrated, secure, resilient networks that incorporate intelligence. This approach helps them to quickly and easily deploy new applications and communications systems that merge wireless, voice, video, and storage capabilities.

Organizations are investing in providing greater access to advanced applications across extended geographies, which creates new network infrastructure demands, including requirements for:

• More network switch capacity to support bandwidth-hungry applications
• Converged services support including IP telephony, voice over WLANs, and video services
• High availability and uninterrupted access to information assets enterprisewide
• Greater protection against internal and external security threats
• More manageable solutions as IT administrators seek to reduce cost and complexity of network switches

The operational gap between IT staffing levels and the requirements that companies are placing on their networks continues to widen, especially in small and medium-sized organizations where resources are typically limited. Organizations must use network switches with more intelligent features and functionality to:

• Ensure the availability of bandwidth-intensive applications
• Enable greater simplicity in terms of automating time-consuming IT tasks
• Provide new functionality to allow people to get the most value from their applications

As organizations continue to invest in and broaden access to complex business applications, they run the risk of losing scalability and functionality if their networks are rigid and cannot support more advanced requirements.