5 S's to Enterprise Network Hardware

By: Darwin Redshield
Submitted: 2009-04-16 17:54:55
Print this article | For publisher | Social Bookmarking
Rating:
 

There are several large network hardware vendors out there, and it can often be confusing to decide which brand to buy.  Do you want a Cisco router, a Juniper router, or a Nortel router?  What brand network switch or sever should your company purchase? Each specific company provides a huge amount of detail/advertising on why you should pick their solution.  I decided to congeal some of these product details and provide an overall list of features that  your company should be looking for in their enterprise networking hardware.

No matter what type of business vertical you are in, or where you are running your company from, networking hardware is a critical aspect of your business.  The five key features your network hardware and network infrastructure should provide  are:

  • Simplicity: A network product and OS that is extremely simple, logical, and easy to operate will make everyone's life easier.  Network hardware that is simple in installation and execution, but provides the infrastructure for complex company communication, is a must have.
  • Security: Your enterprise data is your company's most valuable resource.  Whether it be client data, financial data, or intellectual property data, it is extremely important that your network provides the protection and access control for this data.  Your brand of Network hardware can mean the difference between an occasional  security breach and a perfect record of protection.
  • Speed: It is vital that your enterprise network is running at the speed of your business.  It should never hinder your company's work flow, whether it be accessing data within your company's network or at global access level.  The network equipment that you utilize is the engine that runs your entire company's network infrastructure.
  • Scalability: It is very important that your network be scalable with your company's growth and downsizing.  A network that is not scalable can incur unnecessary cost for your company and unwanted hardship on enterprise efficiency.    Scalability means a network infrastructure that offers open source flexibility- the ability for your company to not be locked-in to one specific solution, but instead posses the capability to utilize the best market technology available.
  • Savings: Maintaining a network infrastructure can often be a very costly process, and can tip a company's earnings in one direction or the other.  Finding network hardware that is both cheap and reliable is quite the difficult task.  Depending on where you look, buying a used cisco router or refurbished cisco switch can sometimes mean the difference in simplicity, security, speed AND scalability.  However, it is equally as important that you don't break the bank building up your company's network infrastructure.  The key is to find a reliable network hardware vendor- whether it be a used network hardware reseller or a direct seller, make sure that they are clear-cut and trustworthy.

Beyond this list, there are basic consumer guidelines that you should follow when purchasing network hardware.  One of these components is a vendor's warranty- make sure they clearly state that they offer a warranty on your network hardware purchase so that if your requirements change, you don't end up paying the cost.

I'm here to discuss the ability for an enterprise to improve its efficiency and savings in purchasing networking hardware. An enterprise network provides several integral components of a business- from data security to the speed of communication. Finding the right vendor can be a daunting but important task.

used cisco
refurbished cisco

Article source: Expert Articles

Most Recent Articles in Wireless Networks category

  • Network Application Architectures - By: Imran Rashid
    Before diving into software coding, you should have a broad architectural plan for your application. Keep in mind that an application's architecture is distinctly different from the network architecture. From the application developer's perspective, the network architecture is fixed and provides a specific set of services to applications. The application architecture, on the other hand, is designed by the application developer and dictates how the application is structured over the various end systems
  • Networks Under Attack - By: Imran Rashid
    The field of network security is about how the bad guys can attack computer networks and about how we, soon-to-be experts in computer networking, can defend networks against those attacks, or better yet, design new architectures that are immune to such attacks in the first place.
  • Wireless Access - By: Imran Rashid
    Accompanying the current Internet revolution, the wireless revolution is also having a profound impact on the way people work and live. Today, more people in Europe have a mobile phone than a PC or a car. And the wireless trend is continuing with many analysts predicting that wireless (and often mobile) handheld devices -- such as mobile phones and PDAs-will overtake wired computers as the dominant Internet access devices throughout the world. Today, there are two common types of wireless Internet access.
  • Messages, Segments, Datagram's, and Frames - By: Imran Rashid
    The physical path that data takes down a sending end system's protocol stack, up and down the protocol stacks of an intervening link-layer switch and router, and then up the protocol stack at the receiving end system. As we discuss later in this book, routers and link-layer switches are both packet switches.
  • History of Computer Networking and the Internet - By: Imran Rashid
    You should know enough now to impress your family and friends! However, if you really want to be a big hit at the next cocktail party, you should sprinkle your discourse with tidbits about the fascinating history of the Internet.
  • Network Application Architectures - By: Imran Rashid
    Before diving into software coding, you should have a broad architectural plan for your application. Keep in mind that an application's architecture is distinctly different from the network architecture.
  • ISPs and Internet Backbones - By: Imran Rashid
    We saw earlier that end systems (user PCs, PDA's, Web servers, mail servers, and so on) connect into the Internet via an access network. Recall that the access network may be a wired or wireless local area network (for example, in a company, school, or library), a residential cable modem or DSL network, or a residential ISP (for example. AOL or MSN) that is reached via dial-up modem. But connecting end users and content providers into access networks -is only a small piece of solving the puzzle of connecting the hundreds of millions of end-systems and hundred of thousands of networks that make up the Internet.
  • File Transfer Protocol: FTP - By: Imran Rashid
    We have just learned that network processes communicate with each other by sending messages into sockets. But how are these messages structured? What are the meanings of the various fields in the messages.
  • How Do Packets Make Their Way Through Packet-Switched Networks? - By: Imran Rashid
    Earlier we said that a muter takes a packet arriving on one of its attached communication links and forwards that packet on to another of its attached communication links. But how does the router determine the link onto which it should forward the packet? This is actually done in different ways by different types of computer networks we will describe one popular approach, namely. The approach employed by the Internet. In the Internet, each packet traversing the network contains the address of the packet's destination in its header.
  • Upgrading your Network Hardware Infrastructure - By: Darwin Redshield
    Just like you want to learn about a date's likes and dislikes to see if there is potential for long term compatibility, you also need to carefully plan the integration of new and updated network hardware into your older structures.