Nortel Buzzboard

Building to scale — admittedly it’s not really that exciting of a topic.

It doesn’t bring out the debate and controversy that, say, energy efficiency comparisons do. But “building to scale” turns out to be really important, and not always that easy to do.

Twitter’s recent downtime shows the difficult goal of network scalability and reliability.Twitter - the current hip and trendy messaging application - is figuring this out firsthand. This week Twitter has had recurring issues with downtime and application reliability, which in part looks to be caused by an overloaded system that can’t scale to meet user demand.

It is becoming an all-to-common problem in today’s online world where “going viral” can mean a tidal wave of users that the network or application isn’t ready to handle. But while past outages by eBay, Skype, Facebook, Vonage, and others might make you think this is “just an Internet thing,” it’s a critical current issue for enterprises as well.

Real-time services like VoIP, video and unified communications - as well as the influx of personal communications applications like IM, SMS and social networking - are putting similar scalability and reliability strains on today’s enterprise networks.

Last month Nortel issued this press release highlighting 50 enterprise customers that had moved to a Nortel enterprise data solution. The four customers quoted in the main release all highlighted scalability and/or reliability as a reason for choosing Nortel.

Then a few weeks ago during our day with the bloggers in Ottawa, the topic came up again. The point made during one of the more application-centric demos was that building a “cool application” was one thing — but building it to reliably scale as demand and users grow required a level of insight and experience that many of today’s Web 2.0 companies didn’t possess.

Nortel, of course, lives by the rules of scalability and reliability - thanks in a large part to our long history building networks for service providers and carriers. Whether it’s 40G optical, PBT, VoIP and UC, or enterprise data - scalability and reliability are qualities that you’ll hear Nortel talk about over and over. While it’s not normally a sexy topic, the failure to build a scalable and reliable network is sure to grab the headlines.