Open standards propels growth in ICT business landscape – Banuso

The rise of open standards, frameworks and architectures, and a shift from proprietary models would give way to new solutions with prospect to networking in the Nigerian business landscape, says the Enterprise Business Manager at Dell Nigeria, Mr. Akin Banuso.

Speaking in Lagos, he informed DigitalSENSE Business News that three networking paradigms exist that are shaping the business landscape across the world today, to include convergence, distributed networking and software defined networks.

“These topics are not new to the table, but having been discussed for some time, they are now beginning to hit the mainstream in terms of the maturity of the technology and where they are on the corporate agenda” he said.

According to him, ‘Networking Big3’ for instance, shapes the industry via Convergence, adding ‘’It’s not wholly a networking issue but its impact on the way networks are managed and – just as importantly – who manages them, should not be underestimated. Previously IT functioned in silos, with server, storage and network admins going about their business relatively independently. When someone within the organisation wanted a new resource provisioned, working across these silos to make that happen could be a painful an unnecessarily cumbersome experience.”

Software defined networking, Banuso said, is the next of the ‘Networking Big3’ stressing though the technology is still in its infancy, software defined networking (SDN) is widely touted to revolutionise network infrastructures on the same scale as virtualization in the server market. Traditional networking has been unable to offer the flexibility that networking managers require today.

He elucidated that distributed networking is another Big3 networking shaper of industry, pointing out that there is a shift from traditional to distributed architectures; several developments have rendered the traditional centralised, monolithic chassis-switched network unfit for the modern business’ requirements.

‘’Firstly, the workforce has become extremely disperse and mobile. Secondly, virtualization and cloud computing have resulted in much higher server-to-server traffic flow than before. Finally, enterprises now have vastly larger volumes of data to process, store, and analyse than was previously the case,” he said.

  

Banuso insisted that there are many useful new technologies and emerging one of which is the Dell Virtual Network Architecture (VNA) Portfolio, which he said, could deliver up to 10 times greater application performance for decision support and business intelligence workloads.

Remmy Nweke

... Making SENSE of digital revolution!