Unifying your wired and wireless networks is a smart move, with all kinds of great returns. By treating the network as a whole, you can greatly improve your users’ experience and provide wireless users with an experience on par with what they get while on a wired network. You can minimize complexity and streamline network operations (check out this video for a quick view of the benefits of a simpler, unified network with HP Converged Campus Network, such as reducing TCO by up to 47% and accelerating new service delivery by up to 83%).
But the power of HP Converged Campus Network goes far beyond unifying your wired and wireless networks because, unlike any other solution of this kind, it’s enabled with Software-defined Networking that can adapt the network to business requirements. With access points that are SDN-enabled, you can evoke SDN functionality in your environment for security, quality of service, and a host of other enhancements via any HP or third-party SDN apps that you choose to deploy.
HP Network Optimizer is a great example of this kind of SDN application. These days, more and more of us are using high-bandwidth applications to do our work. It may be Microsoft Lync or just-launched Skype for Business for unified communication and collaboration. Or, in an engineering company, it could be 3D modeling exercises on a product you’re designing that you want to view and modify online. Or it could be using a host of video applications, like Youtube, as many people do nowadays for their daily work.
When you’re running voice, video or other high-bandwidth applications, latency can quickly become an impediment. The packet has to arrive at the exact time and in the exact required order (which is not the case with, for example, email). When you are consuming real time content, if the packets start dropping off at the wrong time your video may start to look scrambled, or the voice connection may get choppy. HP Network Optimizer helps ensure that the all of the packets get to the right place, at the right time, in the right order, so that consumers of the information can very quickly do what they need to do.
We have made our SDN eco-system open, based on the OpenFlow standard that powers SDN. With our Software Development Kit (SDK) and open APIs you can develop new Optimizer apps that enhance the functionality of other voice or video-based apps.
