Network convergence gaining steam

Many businesses are facing new IT challenges that can disrupt operations and make it difficult for organizations to keep up with the competition. Network convergence could prove vital in enabling IT leaders to keep up with the many technological changes facing them.

Considering the changing IT climate
If you are an IT manager right now you are probably facing the challenge of taking on a new strategic role in operations. Instead of managing systems, more and more IT departments are being asked to deliver services. This means a new world of strategic operations in the industry. Within this environment, IT leaders have to think more about technology. They have to understand business operations and seriously evaluate what end users need to get the job done effectively. From there, IT managers have to figure out what services and solutions will enable better operations.

This change has been heralded by cloud computing, virtualization, mobile device use and big data. These technological movements are changing the day-to-day role of IT departments and forcing them to deal with data that is delivered from a variety of sources, not just from the internal data center. According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, network convergence is emerging as a prominent solution for IT leaders facing challenges from emerging technologies.

The growing role of network convergence
Frost & Sullivan found that organizations ignoring technological developments position themselves to fall behind the competition. However, such IT advancesalso create major network challenges, including the creation of anespecially complex operational environment.Michael Suby, president of research for Stratecast, an organization that partnered with Frost & Sullivan for the study, explained that simplification is central to the network convergence movement.

"A driving force of convergence is simplification," said Suby. "Through simplification, obsolete and expensive technologies are retired, moving your business forward without risking the bottom line. Convergence represents a compelling value proposition."

Using media conversion to enable network convergence
The problem with converging network infrastructure is that it also means using less hardware to handle more bandwidth. This can simplify the network, but it often requires advanced cabling and equipment architectures. At the least, many organizations could find themselves needing optical cabling infrastructure as backhaul and in storage setups. In such a system, media converters are necessary to support interoperability between fiber and copper systems. Strategic media conversion can enable organizations to maximize the cost-to-performance ratio of their converged network setup.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.