Five Signs it’s Time for a Network Upgrade

Posted: January 10, 2018

How old is the equipment running your campus network? Older than 5 year? Do you experience recurrent network outages? Do you struggle with poor quality voice and video communications? Do you pay too much to maintain your legacy equipment? Do you have trouble scaling up the network to accommodate new business needs? If you said “yes” to any of these questions, it may be time for a network upgrade. We’ve put together a list of the five telltale signs it’s time for a network upgrade.

  1. Frequent equipment breakdowns causing network outages
  • As with all electronic equipment, as switches age they are more prone to failure. Power supplies and fans reach the end of their life span, old optical transceivers/links will increasingly fail and require more frequent maintenance. A switch or a link going down can result in network outage in older network architecture lacking redundancy.
  • The latest Ruckus ICX switches offer redundant power supplies and fans and support the latest HA technology for active-active link redundancy
  1. Performance can’t keep up with latest campus applications
  • The latest campus applications like web based video conferencing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), IP based video surveillance, automated cloud based backup, to name a few often require more bandwidth and lower latency than most legacy networks were designed for, causing users to experience delays and poor application experience. Additionally, the latest network powered devices such as high performance wireless access points and Pan Tilt Zoom security cameras require more PoE power than legacy switches can deliver.
  • The latest Ruckus ICX switches deliver non-blocking performance, high bandwidth 10GbE and 40GbE uplinks and Full POE+ and PoH to support the latest network powered devices such as security cameras and video conferencing equipment.
  1. High maintenance cost
  • Old network equipment is notoriously more expensive to maintain than the latest generations. Often vendors charge a percentage of the equipment list price as yearly service and support fees, since prices of new network switches have come down over the years so did service and support fees. Additionally, vendors tend to increase service and support fees for end-of-lived equipment to amortize the cost or maintaining old technology. Last but not least, many newer network switches include a lifetime warranty reducing the cost of support.
  • The latest Ruckus ICX 7000 series switches come with a lifetime warranty and some models come with 3 year access to TAC
  1. High power bills
  • Over the years, customers have become increasingly concerns about energy consumption and cost. To address their needs, Ruckus has developed more energy efficient products and each generation of new network switches consumes significantly less power than the previous one. Additionally new technology and standards such as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) has been developed to reduce the power consumption of idle ports.
  • New ICX 7000 series switches consume a fraction of the power used by legacy switches and support the latest green standards such as EEE
  1. Too much time spent managing the network
  • Older legacy networks offer very limited support, if at all, for consolidated management and automation. Typically older switches are either standalone only or offer basic stackablity with limited stacking bandwidth and short stack height. This results in network administrators having to manage each switch individually, spending precious time replicating network policy changes manually across the network.
  • Ruckus New ICX 7000 series switches stacks up to 12 switches across a distance of up to 10Km with Ruckus’ unique long distance stacking technology. Brocade Switch Port Extender technology goes even further and simplifies and automates network management for 1000s of ports.


Future proof your campus network with Ruckus’ latest ICX 7000 series switches.
With market-leading stacking density of up to 12 switches per stack, the Ruckus ICX® 7250 and ICX 7450 combine chassis-level performance and reliability with the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and ‘pay as you grow’ scalability of a stackable solution. Get a network upgrade today with Brocade+Ruckus!

 

Want to transform your network when you get a network upgrade? Download our free white paper, “Transform the Network with Brocade Campus Fabric“.

 

WAV, Inc. is a full service distributor of LTE, wireless broadband, networking, and Wi-Fi equipment. Located in Aurora, IL, WAV provides its partners a competitive edge by offering extensive product knowledge & unmatched technical expertise, support for multi-vendor solutions, product availability, as well as professional value-added services for its VAR & WISP communities, including (but not limited to): technical support, predictive analysis services, FCC coordination and installation & diagnostics. “We Make the Internet Work”. For more information, call (800) 678-2419 or visit the web at: www.wavonline.com.

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