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Today's communication networks have evolved from simple data connectivity
architectures to business enablers, supporting mission critical applications and
processes. With increased need to share and consolidate information across
intranets to extranets, the dependency on advanced communication infrastructures
has increased.
Functional consolidation concepts revolve around building next generation
elements that offer more functionality per equipment than traditional elements
at no performance penalty. Branch-in-a-box is an extrapolation of the said
concept that aims to consolidate disparate communication elements in a branch
office onto one functional appliance.
Branch-in-a-Box infrastructure consolidates various traditional branch
office networking elements like routing, switching, http/smtp proxies,
firewalls, data encryptors, VPN concentrators, as well as VoIP gateways into one
single functional hardware element, streamlining operations, reducing cost of
ownership and easing solution maintenance.
Application Overview
As more and more business applications are deployed as client-sever
architecture, there is a transition in terms of service expectations from
customers. Today's demands are business availability rather than
infrastructure availability. With mission critical applications driving
businesses today, extreme infrastructure availability expectations are not
unreasonable. The challenge the market faces is to keep pace with the customer's
growing availability demands while still offering services competently.
With branches engineered to distribute elements and dedicated appliances to
do routing, switching, firewalling and encryption, the number of failure points
increases subsequently at every extra-distributed element integrated in the
set-up. As businesses connect to their value chains expanding beyond
geographical boundaries, through various media consolidating services at the
central or corporate office. With each branch having different individual
devices, it becomes a challenge to manage, needless to mention the cost of
implementation and support increases.
Branch-in-a-box limits the number of communication elements per branch to
just one, thereby limiting the suspected failure elements to unity.
As newer business avenues emerge, branch-in-a-box will find seeming applications
across all market sectors, and the ones showing the most promise are banking
finance and insurance sectors, travel operations, hospitality service
reservation sectors, manufacturing and retail value-chain systems.
-Amandeep Singh Head-Internet Business Solutions, Asia Pacific, Allied Telesyn Page(s) 1
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