NEW YORK, Dec. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Dimension Data, the $5.8 billion global ICT services and solutions provider, today announced the availability of a network assessment service that helps organizations review the traffic patterns, flows and volumes they have running across their networks to improve visibility and to accelerate business performance.

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Available globally, the Network Optimization Assessment involves technical interviews, and deploying an appliance on the client's network for a defined period of time - typically 7 to 14 days - to collect data and a wide variety of information about the network.

Larry Van Deusen, Dimension Data's director of Network Integration says, "In addition to the dramatic growth in traffic volumes on networks the type of traffic is changing, and the number of networked devices are exploding. This is making high end-to-end performance difficult to achieve, given changes to underlying ICT infrastructure such as mobility, virtualization, consolidation, and cloud."

Dimension Data's new Network Optimization Assessment provides clients with a detailed traffic discovery of all voice, video and application traffic flowing over the network, as well as all information relating to protocols, ports, VLANs, traffic direction, and active hosts. The company's experts in protocols, networking, data centers and applications provide a detailed report and are able to make recommendations on how the network performance can be improved. This is critical as organizations ready their networks for the emerging trends of video, mobility and cloud.

Cloud computing is the most network-centric computing paradigm and it would simply not be a proposition without a resilient, stable, high performance network underpinning it. According to Cisco's Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010–2015 Report, Cloud IP traffic will grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 66% between 2010 and 2015. In addition, Cloud IP traffic will account for 30% of organizational data center traffic by 2015.

Van Deusen cites a global shipping company that Dimension Data performed an assessment on:  "The client took action on the recommendations and was able to consolidate a significant portion of its branch infrastructure into centralized data centers, with no performance degradation. This resulted in savings for the client across its 200+ branches while maintaining the end user quality of experience when connecting to applications."

The business case for a performance optimization project is compelling and the payback period on a typical WAN optimization project is between four and eighteen months. A Network Optimization Assessment provides a good starting point, some of the benefits include:

• Provides visibility into and breakdown of existing network traffic patterns
• Provides accurate performance statistics on how the existing network is performing
• Identifies top network resource consumers (users and applications)
• Identifies network performance problems
• Enables more informed network planning, e.g. reviewing the network for voice, video or even cloud computing
• Allows for better selection of performance optimization and network performance management solutions, e.g. which  areas of the network would benefit from WAN optimization or application delivery

About Dimension Data
Founded in 1983, Dimension Data plc is an ICT services and solutions provider that uses its technology expertise, global service delivery capability, and entrepreneurial spirit to accelerate the business ambitions of its clients. Dimension Data is a member of the NTT Group. Visit us at www.dimensiondata.com and www.facebook.com/DimensionDataAmericas or follow us on Twitter: @DimensionDataAM.

SOURCE Dimension Data