Eric Krapf, editor of No Jitter, leveraged Netcordia's 2010 Predictions of Top Causes of IT Headaches into a discussion on how virtualization can impact IP Telephony. I totally agree that voice will be one of the key applications where solid management was hard enough before virtualization, but with a new dynamic environment, the challenges grow exponentially. Besides having real-time requirements, VoIP is likely the highest-profile app any network manager will see.
In traditional best-effort networks, delay and jitter were probably only a concern if the measurements were in the minutes, not like how milliseconds is the primary measurement with VoIP. And if there is a problem with the phones, people will notice and they will complain.
Eric discussed several of the pretections and how they are hot buttons that will be addressed at VoiceCon. These include:
* The IT specialists responsible for voice/UC/real-time traffic must work much more closely with those who plan application and datacenter strategies.
* The underlying network that supports communications is dynamic, and its ongoing changes will affect the delivery of communications services--negatively so, if enterprises don't stay on top of this issue.
* The level of enterprise understanding, and vendor education, on issues relating to the cloud, virtualization, and SOA, is often inadequate, according to Tom Nolle. Tom's survey of enterprises suggests to me that there's high potential for the kind of trouble that Netcordia foresees.
At Netcordia, we see many of the new technologies (such as VoIP, virtualization/cloud, data center consolidation and new applications) all have a common criteria - even though the underlying network infrastructure is often overlooked, it is a critical component to success of new rollouts and ensuring service assurance from an organizational point of view. Without a good understanding of the network infrastructure, new deployments will likely fail and incur cost overruns.