The Lippis Report

July 1st, 2003

The Web Data Center or WDC is one of the most important services that an IT department delivers to its
corporation or public service organization. WDCs are both public and private facing, meaning they serve customers,
suppliers, partners and employees with information and transaction services they all need to collaborate and create
value. In short, the WDC is the center of a corporation’s ecosystem. As the WDC has grown in its importance to
profit drivers, so too has its complexity. WDCs are built with a plethora of computing, storage and networking
equipment. Storage houses content; computing and applications manipulate that content and populate data bases
while networking links that content to partners, suppliers, customers and employees.
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June 30th, 2003

Over the past several years our industry has been distracted, yes distracted by the dotcom bust, telecom crash, global recession, bankruptcies and executive scandals. During this period, the networking industry has continued to innovate and produce new technologies and products. While we had or heads down working hard reacting to external pressures and threats, the networking industry changed. Over the past three years the networking vendors have financed billions in R&D investment. What we got for that investment is network security products, IP Telephony, wirelesses LANs, 10G Ethernet, storage area networking and broadband. All these new technologies are now reshaping enterprise networks in ways that were unanticipated. For example, a new two-tier LAN structure made up of smart workgroups and a distributed core backbone is emerging.
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June 24th, 2003

Network services have always been the value added to business networks. There is a wide range of network services to help manage and control network bandwidth or transport. Examples of network services are quality of service, directory services, power over Ethernet, device configuration, device monitoring, billing, security, traffic shaping, route control, web caching,
Virtual Private Networks or VPNs and Virtual Local Area Networks or VLANs, etc.
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