The trend is clear: in order to further lower the costs of IT while adding new and more application services infrastructure technologies and business application software have to be looked at together for cross technology layer optimizations.
The last decade we saw data center consolidation, outsourcing of running business applications and now a starting trend to run business applications in “Clouds”. While that happened the number of business application users grew and evolved from working at a company’s headquarter datacenter location to working from anywhere in the world. Users now exchange their desktop or laptop computers increasingly for mobile devices. And more and more IT automated business processes in between companies and in between a company and their customers are being used.
A key enabler for these trends is the network, or to be more precise: a number of network technology layers from pure physical lines to very intelligent network services. The most intelligent upper layers of the network technology stack interact very closely with the business application technologies and thus are one example of a piece of infrastructure, which should be optimized together with the applications.
The globally interconnected business world demands reliability, high performance and security for their business activities and those 3 requirements can only be fulfilled by the application and network technology layers being optimized together. Consequently, it is no accident that a lot of the most advanced network technologies are sitting at the “edges” of the data centers, branch locations and end user devices themselves. They sit in the network traffic path between the application servers and the end-user or application client.
Due to the importance of those “Network Edge Services” (NES) for overall application reliability, performance and security SAP cooperates and co-innovates with its network vendor partners for a few years now. SAP certifies NES solutions, provides Best Practices born out of prove-of-concepts projects in SAP’s Co-Innovation Lab and more.
To learn more about NES we recommend you visit our session:
ALM209 Modern Network Technologies for SAP Applicationsat SAP TechEd 2010 in Berlin and Las Vegas.
I f you’d like to discuss your needs and experiences with modern network technologies you might also join our expert sessions in:
Berlin EXP474 Modern Network Technologies for SAP Applications, Wednesday 10/13/2010 2.30pm
Las Vegas EXP475 Modern Network Technologies for SAP Applications, Thursday 10/21/2010 3.30pm
I am looking forward seeing you at SAP TechEd 2010.
