Interview with Jun Kohara

Jun Kohara has over 21 years' experience at Allied Telesis. He has been a board member of Allied Telesis Holdings since 2010, and is responsible for global product marketing including solution planning, development and implementation.

In line with the recent report from Gartner, we asked our VP of Global Product Development the following questions:

Q: We understand that to optimally serve the business, network architects need to shift their thinking from technology to users and business processes. How are the Allied Telesis network architects meeting this requirement?

A:The network design is critical to efficient business practices across all enterprise organizations, and it is an impossible task to design network solutions without considering business processes, either internally or externally. A typical example of this would be cloud applications. At Allied Telesis we have invested in the delivery of cloud-ready networks (www.cloudreadynetworks.eu) to ensure our customers will always benefit from resiliency, scalability and easy management. Moreover, Allied Telesis provides support services and solutions that are optimized for customer needs, based on its advanced technical capabilities, which come from being a specialist producer of network equipment. As a team of network specialists, we can draw on network design and implementation know-how, built up from many years' experience in the field, to provide comprehensive solutions. These extend from system diagnosis to monitoring and assessment of existing networks or consulting, design, configuration and project management for new system installations. Our core value is simple. We help customers to meet complex IT requirements while offering investment protection, cost efficiencies, and the scalability to meet the ever-changing business application demands.

Q: Understanding the applications running on the network is an important aspect of network design. How has Allied Telesis been able to demonstrate their network architects have taken account of customers' particular application network needs?

A: Allied Telesis has extensive experience of building mission-critical networks in a variety of industries and markets. For example, in the healthcare sector, we have created solutions with superior features such as bandwidth control technology to ensure that large volumes of image data can be sent and received smoothly, together with redundancy and fault recovery capabilities to prevent problems before they occur. In the enterprise market, as growing use of ICT leads to increasing volumes of voice, video and data applications being sent across corporate networks, there are cases where the level of investment exceeds the network requirements. Allied Telesis has provided one-stop solutions unavailable from any other supplier, with offerings that extend from products able to adapt flexibly to different types and sizes of business; through network design, implementation and operation; together with consulting services for determining the appropriate level of security for a company.

Q:  In addition to the user experience, one of the prime factors for any enterprise in the choice of a network is the level of investment.  How is Allied Telesis taking account of value considerations for businesses?

A: Allied Telesis has recently introduced integrated network management through AMF and the immediate benefit for Enterprise users is reduced network complexity, time and expertise required to manage the network, resulting in delivering a lower Opex. Powerful features like centralized management, auto-backup, auto-upgrade, auto-provisioning and auto-recovery, plug-and-play networking, and zero-touch management are the first features to be implemented within AMF. From a CAPEX point of view the Allied Telesis active-active solution enables the implementation of resilient networks (99,999% uptime) without the need of investments on redundant or stand-by equipment. The key to achieving high network uptime is for resiliency to be a prime criterion when designing the network.

With Allied Telesis solutions, the aim is not merely to eliminate single points of failure, but also to extract maximum value from the equipment that is installed. Whilst simply doubling up switches and links in redundant pairs will remove single points of failure, it also results in a lot of equipment that sits idle 99% of the time. A consistent theme in the high availability solutions from Allied Telesis is that as much of the network as possible should be active all the time. Active-active backup solutions provide true resiliency. Active-passive backups simply provide redundancy. High network uptime is an essential requirement for any organisation.

Q: Most businesses now have a Green Corporate Strategy and need to demonstrate their corporate social contribution. How would an Allied Telesis solution contribute to any customers' initiatives in this area?

A: Allied Telesis produces some of the most secure and "green" solutions, enabling the lower TCO for businesses. One of the key challenges we see in networking today is the amount of resources that are required not only for initial purchase of equipment but also for ongoing running costs. Allied Telesis has been able to improve the full range of the portfolio, and cut the power consumption by as much as 76%. In addition to this, Allied Telesis provides end-to-end fiber infrastructures. The Fiber network market is constantly growing for a variety of reasons, but the most important are the intrinsic security and low environmental impact, plus the economic advantages provided by the longer guaranteed life of fiber optic cabling and the steadily increasing price of copper. Data sent over metal wires consumes significantly more energy than it takes to send a light signal over fiber; fiber network architectures are less complex with fewer nodes and longer expected lifecycles since fiber optic cables virtually never degrade. By deploying less equipment, less energy is required and the network maintenance costs are consequently reduced. An Allied Telesis FTTD solution is ideal for networks such as government, security, healthcare and defense, thanks to fiber having the inherent ability to balance the bandwidth and security needs with budgetary concerns.