The Bulletproof Network

When Jeff White joined Filtrona Extrusion as corporate IT director, the company was operating a single threaded network with mixed traffic mission-critical and non-missioncritical traffic running side-by-side, with no way to separate or prioritize the two. In addition, the company experienced network performance problems and increasing amounts of downtime at its facility in Mexico. Because its manufacturing facilities run 24/7 and do not always have on-site technical resources available when there is a problem, the company needed a better solution.

"You just never know when things are going to happen, from a backhoe digging up a fiber cable or a more significant outage, and these situations were shutting down an entire facility," says White. "Because the network is critical to all areas of our business, we needed to implement a fully redundant network to reconcile problems automatically and ensure we could remain up and running, no matter what the situation."

Filtrona Extrusion is one of the largest manufacturers of extruded plastic profiles, sheets and specialty tubes in the United States. The company manufactures more than 40,000 different products for medical, merchandising, aviation, transportation, traffic, lighting, fencing and custom plastic industries. Its products range from catheter tubes, traffic posts and cones, plastic sheeting for fluorescent lights, air-conditioning ducts in commercial jets, and outdoor furniture.

Network-attached storage (NAS) environments have evolved significantly from the early deployments for limited departmental file sharing. Today, NAS has grown to support key enterprise applications such as databases, financial analytics, design automation, simulation, business intelligence and the majority of scalable Web applications.

The rapid evolution of NAS to support enterprise-wide solutions requires consolidating multiple file systems across storage devices. This technique and implementation is known as a global namespace, where multiple NAS devices can be linked together in such a way that servers only need to access one file system, which may be distributed across multiple devices.

Global namespaces can help NAS users conquer capacity management, but they do not directly improve performance for storage systems. In fact, some global namespace implementations can hamper performance due to ballooning directory structures. New solutions based on centralized storage caching, however, can improve the performance of global namespaces with additional I/O operations per second and low latency response. This provides the advantages of a consolidated file system yielding superior storage capacity, without penalties.

The flexibility of a centralized file system enables the rapid addition of new clients. Early NAS devices, however, could only expand to a finite capacity, and additional storage requirements mandated the deployment of a new device. That device, in turn, had to have is own unique file system, requiring separate management and administration. For many IT managers, the proliferation of unique NAS devices led to an unwieldy number of file systems and a delicate balancing act for storage management. This process is akin to operating a computer with a dozen or more individual disk drives, requiring a search through every drive each time a user wants to find a file.

Understandably, larger-scale NAS solutions were held back by an "island-like" management approach. This dilemma led to the development of global namespaces, which provide an abstraction layer to aggregate multiple unique file systems into a single, coherent, shared file system. Global namespaces can be implemented through appliances within a network environment or as part of the NAS storage layer. Typically, parallel or clustered file systems use global namespaces to aggregate large amounts of storage capacity into an easily managed pool.

Welcome to Communications News redesigned and repurposed Web site. If you've watched and listened to the video above, you have a basic understanding of the many new bells and whistles offered here - and there will be more.

For a longtime print editor like myself, creating that video was quite a challenge. I'm used to being the director behind the scenes of editorial content, not the front man. And although I've stood in front of numerous audiences to make speeches or presentations, filming a video commercial was a new experience.

In fact, convincing me that this blog has a reason for existing also was a challenge. For this task, I conducted some research - and I wasn't impressed or encouraged by what I found.

Case in point: A competitor of ours that recently abandoned print to become an online high-tech Web portal has been offering blogs on its Web site for some time. But when I looked at some of their blogs, it was disconcerting to discover that there had been no entries by the staffers responsible for the blog for as long as six months, and that the feedback from visitors was almost non-existent.

Another case in point: The Web now has directories of blogs, with hundreds, thousands of listings. After checking a representative sampling, it was obvious that the content was generally useless and the visitors usually numbered in single digits.

So my task is to make this weblog something worthwhile and fun for you. And I can use your help.

My thought is that this device should be a two-way conversation with the readers of Communications News and comnews.com.

The hand-held Yellowjacket 802.11b/a/g Wi-Fi analyzer demodulates, sweeps and analyzes Wi-Fi network packets, including 802.11b (2.4 GHz), 802.11g (2.4 GHz) and 802.11a (5 GHz) packets. The analyzer is accurate to within +1 dB and measures RF energy, enabling it to read 2.4 and 5 GHz network WISPs and hot spots. The analyzer can locate and pinpoint rogue APs and STAs, and can detect interference from sources such as microwave ovens and cordless phones. The unit features SNR, multipath, delay spread, channel frequency response, SSID and RSSI for Wi-Fi analysis. Berkeley Varitronics Systems