Enterprise WAN Capacity Planning

Capacity planning or capacity management isn't just for networks anymore. In fact, while enterprise wide area networks (WANs) were once only optimized for transaction processing, it is now harder to find an enterprise WAN that hasn't been optimized in multiple ways to carry voice and video, Internet, and some mission-critical application that replaced a mainframe transaction system. With all of the new and interesting traffic types floating around in the WAN, it's a wonder anyone can keep things straight. Even Internet backbones, which should be application agnostic, are throttling certain applications to protect their own infrastructures. WAN capacity planning must evolve from an effort that network architects undertook alone into an effort that involves coordination among multiple infrastructure groups inside IT.

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