Solutions That Improve Your Network And Are Energy Efficient—It’s Not A Dream

- Mark Alrutz, director of technical sales, services and training for CommScope (www.commscope.com), says:

Expanding service offerings are important for MSOs because they must evolve their networks to keep up with the competition. While they do that, they are also investigating ways to reduce power and fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse emissions and operating costs. Not only do they need the right solutions to maximize and improve their network’s technology, but also reduce their energy costs and improve network efficiency. 

MSOs now have several options to reduce their energy cost, and they can accomplish that partnering with CommScope to implement the right solution for their specific needs. We’ve demonstrated how our energy conservation and alternative energy solutions can help operators:

§  provide reliable backup power using “green” technology

§  improve reliability and reduce energy consumption by reducing active electronics in the network

§  reduce energy consumption in the headend and hut locations

§  lower overall operating expenditures

By deploying a hydrogen fuel cell power solution, operators can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption at hub sites. Unlike diesel generators that emit greenhouse gases, the only by-products of hydrogen fuel cells are heat and water. The Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers installed a hydrogen fuel cell at its corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania in June 2011. It was called into service when the building lost power during Hurricane Irene last summer, keeping its network online and functioning until power was restored.

Installations of free-air cooling solutions in the wireless industry have shown a reduction of approximately 25 percent (estimated $2,000 annually per site in energy savings) in overall power consumption in a variety of climates. By deploying a proper free-air cooling system for a shelter, operators can choose fan configurations and define filter specifications that meet their desired standard for air quality.

By adopting the OneBase InSite® Connect solution, operators now have the visibility and flexibility to more effectively control a number of operational parameters. This simple change to a company’s day-to-day operations can also save money on truck rolls and fuel costs, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and improve security at unmanned locations.

Not only is an all-digital, carrier grade wideband edge QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) vital to supporting additional advanced and next-generation services over HFC networks, but thisinnovative technology is also designed to lower power consumption in headend/hub environments through consolidation of equipment (requires less power for equipment and for HVAC). By deploying the award-winning Universal Wideband Edge QAM solution, this technology’s increased density provides cable operators with the ability to reduce capital and operating expenses by significantly lowering the price per QAM. With a low 0.5 watt per QAM power consumption, operators can now benefit from a dramatic reduction in power and cooling costs.

BrightPath® Optical Solutions (BOS™) provides operators with the ability to  FTTx solution that meets their needs of today while providing a migration path to the technology of tomorrow. It also helps reduce power consumption in the outside plant by eliminating or reducing active components. BOS customers can cost effectively continue to deliver competitive high bandwidth services and fully leverage all of their existing infrastructures, while saving approximately $1,000 per mile, per year, on energy costs using an RFoG network.

By deploying an Intelligent Addressable Tap Solution, operators have the ability to remotely control taps from the system office, headend or technical center. The ability to remotely control individual tap ports yields maximum benefits to operators in vacation areas, campus environments, MDUs and other high churn areas. This flexibility allows operators to reduce truck rolls, thus reducing fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. 

 Are you ready to deploy energy conservation and management solutions?

The Data Center Network: to Fabric or not to Fabric?

- Cliff Grossner, Ph.D.  director of strategic marketing, Alcatel-Lucent (http://www.alcatel-lucent.com), says:

Many Choices, Lot of Risk

2012 has been labeled the year of the data center fabric. However, it’s still early in the standardization and deployment of data center fabrics, and enterprises are faced with a large number of choices that can spell the difference between failure and success. Hype aside, only early adopters have deployed real fabrics to date.

A properly architected data center fabric has the potential to bring the performance, scalability and elasticity to the data center required by today’s virtualized applications and when connecting to Cloud services. Choosing wisely when deploying a real data center fabric can unleash the, as yet, untapped potential from existing investments in server visualization platforms.

The marketplace is abundant with solutions offering vastly different and sometimes confusing alternatives. Choices in selecting a fabric include the technology used to virtualize the network enabling any to any server connectivity, technology for automating virtual machine (VM) mobility, technology for implementing virtual switching (vSwitch), and technology for convergence of storage traffic onto the IP network.

Help With Some Tough Questions

There are many competing technology options to be investigated for network virtualization, vSwitch and storage convergence. Many new standards are emerging to help. Some suggestions for consideration are as follows:

Network Virtualization with Shortest Path Bridging IEEE 802.1aq (SBP) a newly ratified standard that also has undergone a multi-vendor interoperability test in Q4 of 2011. SPB has distinct advantages of being scalable from the very small to the very large, being compatible with protocols already in use in the service provider Cloud and being able to provide the ability to easily shuffle resources within a single data center site or between data center sites to optimize resource utilization and ensure quality application delivery. In effect, using SPB enables creating a cloud-like elastic environment for the enterprise.

Virtual Switching delivered by the top of rack switch rather than on the server leveraging the Virtual Edge Port Aggregation IEEE 802.1Qbg (VEPA) standard, providing a single point of control, management and security significantly reducing management complexity. This approach is also hypervisor agnostic allowing freedom to choose which hypervisor to use or even more than one hypervisor in the same data center.

Storage Convergence enabled with Data Center Bridging IEEE 802.1Qbb, IEEE 802.1Qau and IEEE 802.1Qaz (DCB) standard. Providing DCB enables a choice for the customer concerning storage convergence as to which technology they use (iSCSI, FCoE, or FC) and a choice of “if and when” they wish to push forward with a single network for data and storage.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Award Winning  Mesh: Provide Choice, Reduce Risk

Alcatel-Lucent’s strategy with its data center switching solution, or fabric, is to take a very practical approach. This means that the customer has the choice to set their strategy in the data center and not be locked in by technology choices, such as in choosing when and if to converge their IP and storage network. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent’s solution provides the scalability and associated linear cost model to allow a pay as you grow approach for the customer and also avoids the need for a high risk forklift approach.

Alcatel-Lucent’s vision for the data center is application fluency where the network infrastructure is capable of optimizing resources to ensure the best possible user experience and reduce complexity for the IT team.  To improve end-user productivity, an application fluent network also features automatic controls for adjusting application delivery based upon profiles, policies and context. Application Fluent Networks also deliver streamlined operations through automated provisioning and low power consumption.

An application fluent data center network essentially transforms an enterprise data center into a multi-site private cloud: a single, seamless, highly elastic cloud-type environment. This gives the flexibility to reconfigure data center resources quickly and easily.  Alcatel-Lucent’s data application fluent center network solution can be easily integrated with Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand carrier cloud solution, creating a hybrid cloud model where employees can access a wide array of data and applications anywhere and on any device.

The Alcatel-Lucent Mesh is based upon standardized technology as follows:

• Network vitalization with SPB
• Virtual switching with VEPA
• Storage convergence with DCB

A Prudent Approach

Given the current state of the technology and the market when it comes to selecting and deploying a fabric in the data center, it is best to be risk adverse. Selecting to deploy a fabric that can scale from the small to the large, both in architecture and cost model, will allow your organization to become familiar with the technology and transform the data center in a controlled fashion. This can potentially be done by rolling out a fabric with the migration to 10GigE servers without requiring a forklift of existing infrastructure.

Network Hardening Using Gigabit Ethernet Wireless Solutions

Joe Schraml, VP of marketing with BridgeWave Communications (www.bridgewave.com), says:

IT managers have a tremendous responsibility to ensure continuous network performance for today’s enterprise data centers. The consequences from network down time can have significant financial impact, impeding business processes and organizational productivity. Mission-critical applications such as medical informatics, financial transactions, network storage, and SaaS that support day-to-day business operations require a resilient, hardened network infrastructure. The only way to accomplish this is to create a diverse, redundant path to existing fiber connections, ensuring an always available network. But in today’s cost-conscious business environment, how can IT managers meet this critical network requirement without exhausting their budgets?

The preferred choice for a network contingency plan is fiber, an expensive but very reliable option costing up to and beyond $5,000/month to lease gigabit Ethernet service. Should the fiber be cut, resiliency is lost if the redundant fiber strands are located in the same riser or trench as the main fiber pairs, leading to the need for route diversity. Alternative methods for network connectivity include satellite, free space optics, and wireless broadband services using lower frequency microwave or high capacity millimeter wave systems. Free space optics and satellite serve their purpose, however, there are limitations including atmospheric disturbances, a greater chance of interference and security breach within the network path, and the limitations of these technologies to provide both the speed and capacity necessary to deliver the same carrier-grade performance expected in a data center environment.

Wireless broadband solutions, specifically millimeter wave (60 – 80 GHz) systems, have proven to be a suitable alternative to leasing fiber, providing the same carrier-grade network performance at a fraction of the cost. Advanced security options, including 256-bit AES data encryption, along with a very narrow antenna beam width –inherent in the higher frequencies–provide a ‘virtual pipe’ that offers the highest level of security in network transmission. In the event the existing fiber connection fails, the full-rate, full-duplex wireless gigabit Ethernet solution continues optimal network performance, transmitting bandwidth-intensive applications without network interruption. To the end user experience, there is no difference in speed and latency between a fiber connection and one established using gigabit Ethernet millimeter wave radios.

Packaged in a small form factor, the integrated all-outdoor unit is lightweight and easy to install, eliminating the need for both special equipment and radio engineering personnel. Deployment can be accomplished in a matter of days, opposed to the weeks and months dealing with permits and construction delays needed to implement fiber. Additionally, the high capacity wireless solutions eliminate the monthly recurring costs associated with leasing fiber services, allowing for ROI (return on investment) in a short period of time, typically measured in months.

When a contingency plan is needed to harden an existing data center network, there is no more resilient, reliable, and cost-effective alternative to fiber than 60-80 GHz gigabit Ethernet wireless solutions.

The HTTP 2.0 War has Just Begun

-  Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

RFC 1945 – “Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0” – was published in May 1996. In June of 1999, RFC 2616 – “Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1” was published. In the ensuing 13 years there has been no substantial changes to the HTTP standard. None. Nada. Zilch.

Even as the size and number of objects has ballooned over that time, and the overall composition of web pages grown increasingly complex, still there’s been no substantial efforts to improve upon the now entrenched HTTP standard. Even as sites struggled to maintain availability and performance in the face of exploding usage growth – fueled by mobile device proliferation, increasingly affordable access enabling everything from plants to cows to users to “get online” – HTTP 1.1 remained the standard for web-everything, despite the growing fact that it simply wasn’t the most optimal means of connecting users with the resources they expect and increasingly, demand.

AJAX and Web 2.0 gave us better interactive models that alleviated some of the pain associated with performance problems, but as that model took hold and video became the medium du jour even its advantages have become unable to produce the acceptable results.

And then Google introduced SPDY. The first shot in the HTTP 2.0 war. Now Microsoft has fired back with “Speed+Mobility” and the battle appears about to be fully engaged.

Although SPDY has been out and about for some time, it only recently made it to the status of “Internet-Draft” in the RFC system, being officially published in Feb 2012. Along comes March 2012, and Microsoft has (sort of) countered with Speed+Mobility.

What will be interesting as the battle progresses is to see which other organizations and vendors will side with which version (if not both). Invariably other organizations will want to be able to claim to have been co-authors of whichever standard becomes, well, the standard but choosing sides so early in a war is hardly appropriate, especially when the technical details are still (as of this writing) missing from Microsoft’s proposal.

RIP-REPLACE versus UPGRADE

It’s also not clear how Speed + Mobility will “retain as much compatibility as possible with the existing Web infrastructure” – a noble and laudable sentiment, to be sure – while still adopting most of the core concepts including in SPDY:

HTTP Speed+Mobility RFC

It [the session layer] would maintain the integrity of the layered architecture.

      It would use an upgrade mechanism similar to that of WebSockets.

      This would enable compatibility with existing proxies and

      connection models, without creating a mandatory dependency on TLS.

      [Same as SPDY] The protocol would define two types of frames: data

      and control.

      [Same as SPDY] The session layer would enable negotiation of

      multiple simultaneous streams for HTTP requests with minimal

      overhead.

      [Same as SPDY] The session layer would allow for prioritizing

      delivery of content to ensure highest value traffic is delivered

      first.

There’s not much in the Speed + Mobility RFC on which to base a technical impact assessment on infrastructure (existing proxies and other HTTP mediating devices like load balancers) but what Microsoft appears to be saying is that it wants to leverage the concepts introduced by Google with SPDY (acknowledging their performance and ultimately scaling benefits) without leaving the familiar world of HTTP. That’s actually important, assuming it can be done, because SPDY requires significant changes to existing infrastructure – network and server – in order to operate, and it is not inherently interoperable with HTTP.

Despite this, SPDY interest and inquiries are beginning to become more frequent, which means it’s getting the attention it deserves. Being the only kid on the block to really address the performance issues inherent with HTTP (especially with respect to mobile devices) that’s no surprise as the investment in new solutions to support SPDY would ostensibly see a return in the form of scalability on the server side by requiring fewer server resources to support as many if not more users. 

But SPDY isn’t so far along (see previous note) as to be a clear front runner. It’s still too new despite interest to have garnered widespread support or mindshare, and despite Google’s ubiquitous status as a household term for search, it isn’t necessarily synonymous with web standards. Chrome may be gaining on IE, but in the minds of most users, IE is still synonymous with web browsing. It also has a serious advantage over Google in its relationship with the enterprise and IT, and in its more intimate understanding of data center infrastructure, as is evident from its blog on the introduction of its proposal:

We think that rapid adoption of HTTP 2.0 is important. To make that happen, HTTP 2.0 needs to retain as much compatibility as possible with the existing Web infrastructure. Awareness of HTTP is built into nearly every switch, router, proxy, Load balancer, and security system in use today. If the new protocol is “HTTP” in name only, upgrading all of this infrastructure would take too long. By building on existing web standards, the community can set HTTP 2.0 up for rapid adoption throughout the web.

-- Speed and Mobility: An Approach for HTTP 2.0 to Make Mobile Apps and the Web Faster 

Google, while not necessarily openly hostile to the enterprise or infrastructure vendors who’d need to support SPDY, certainly appears indifferent to the impact of a rip-and-replace protocol model.

That’s not to say Google’s approach isn’t feasible or desirable. Indeed, in some cases a “rip-and-replace” strategy is the only way to clean out the cobwebs that otherwise seem to hang onto technology for years after they’ve been superceded and superceded again. Think COBOL, which in some industries is still under active development, augmented by a hundred other technologies designed to workaround the reality that it’s an aged, outdated technology that for various reasons we are unable to simply walk away from.

TAKE a SIDE ALREADY, WILL YOU?!

Nope. Not gonna take a side yet – if ever. Personal preferences aside (which it’s hard to have at this point without more technical details from Microsoft) the decision whether an organization eventually wants to go with SPDY or Speed+Mobility will not at all impact negatively mediating devices. In fact, the existence of both would not negatively impact such devices because of their strategic location in the network. The existence of all three – SPDY, S+M, HTTP – would actually not negatively impact these devices as long as they were able to support all three, which seems more likely than simply choosing a side.

There will be a need to support both – and likely all three (do I hear a fourth?) – protocols moving forward. Regardless of who wins this particular war and comes out crowned HTTP 2.0 champion, there will still be a need to implement support across infrastructure vendors. There will be a transitory period during which browsers and servers and infrastructure all must “get up to speed” (ha!) and will do so at different rates, making the need for intermediating devices critical. Just as is the case with the migration from IPv4 to IPv6, intermediating application delivery solutions provide the means by which organizations with substantial infrastructure investments to maintain the value of those investments while moving forward to support emerging standards. 

Being able to translate, for example, between SPDY and HTTP today would be a significant boon for organizations, as it requires no changes to what is likely an extensive application and server infrastructure. Similarly, assuming a pilot of Speed+Mobility, if the application delivery tier can support it, it can mediate – translate – and provide an opportunity to support users via either standard without radically disrupting the application server infrastructure. A full-proxy based application delivery infrastructure is full of advantages, after all. 

I like SPDY. I like it’s approach and I actually admire Google’s chutzpah in diverging from HTTP as a solution, recognizing perhaps the inherent tendency to be more concerned with backwards compatibility than with improving upon the model. But I like what Microsoft is saying from an enterprise perspective because honestly, replacing an entire infrastructure architecture to support one protocol out of many is not an appealing option, no matter the benefits. 

Both approaches have merit, and the bigger story is that an overhaul of HTTP is necessary - and long overdue. 

Deep Packet Inspection vs. Deep Content Inspection The Future of Network Security

- Dr. Hongwen Zhang, CEO of Wedge Networks (www.wedgenetworks.com), says:

Network traffic in data centers is growing in volume and complexity; traditional network filtering technologies are unable to keep up with malicious malware sneaking onto the network. Currently, one in every 14 downloads are infected with malicious content that may cause reputational and customer relationship management challenges. According to PwC’s 2012 Global State of Information Security Survey, only 43 percent of security experts believe that their information security strategy is adequate. When malicious content and non-compliant data pass through a network undetected, data centers experience setbacks from information leakage and possible IT infrastructure damage.

With the proliferation of mobile data usage, social media and cloud computing, a new portfolio of security threats have emerged, requiring a different approach to advance current security practices. Traditional inspection technologies that secure data center networks at the packet level, such as packet filtering and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), have limited efficiency and are unable to scale to provide clean and safe usage of the evolving Internet.

Out With the Old: Deep Packet Inspection

Today, Deep Packet Inspection is the most widely adopted solution for monitoring and managing network packet data. DPI matches the IP packet sequences against a library of offending patterns. To be successful, DPI systems must match the packet information to patterns at wire speed, posing two main limitations:

·         Malware that is often embedded in large application payloads may slip through a system undetected. This is because a DPI system is only capable of holding a limited amount of packets at a time for pattern matching. The amount of IP packets required to transmit an application payload often surpass the number of packets that a DPI system can inspect at any given moment, creating a hole for malware to slip onto the network.

·         A DPI system obtains packet data and matches it against known malware threats, however the number of unique signatures available for the system to match against is restricted.

Data centers fail to achieve optimal network security as a result of the limitations of DPI. The growing number of unsupported application types with nested, zipped or archived files, exploit DPI limitations and can slip through security systems that are not qualified to handle them.

In With the New: Deep Content Inspection

A new approach to data inspection is needed that incorporates thorough analysis to address the undetected and emerging threats, Deep Content Inspection (DCI) is an advanced form of network filtering that functions as a fully transparent device at a comprehensive level. DCI examines the entire object and detects any malicious or non-compliant intent, instead of solely checking the body or header of data packets circling through a network. DCI reconstructs, decompresses and/or decodes network traffic packets into their constituting application level objects, often referred to as the MIME objects.

The predominant DCI standard implements full content-based review in real time to understand the intent of data-in-motion. This method transcends the DPI approach of simply matching packet sequences against known patterns and allows DCI to gain a wider inspection scope. This new method of network inspection offers an increased level of security by performing reputation searches and behaviour analyses on structured or packed data. DCI finds and assesses signatures that cross packet boundaries by keeping track of content across multiple packets.

By transitioning away from traditional packet inspection and concentrating on the content and intent of data, DCI provides a comprehensive method of filtering for attacks and malicious content. This approach secures data centers, enterprises, government organizations, service providers and carrier networks against today’s evolving threats.

About the Author:

Dr. Hongwen Zhang is president and CEO of Wedge Networks, a leading provider of remediation-based Deep Content Inspection for high-performance, network-based Web security. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Calgary; a MSc in Computer Engineering from the Institute of Computer Technology - Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing, PRC), and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Fudan University (Shanghai, PRC). With more than two decades of high tech leadership experience, Dr. Zhang is a co-inventor and holder of several patents in the area of computing and networking.

Bringing Content Closer to the Consumer: Event Proxy Cache Technology

- Steve Wilson, director of systems engineering at SuperLumin Networks (www.superlumin.com), says:

A slow Web browsing experience is frustrating, to say the least. Trade shows and other corporate events are all too often case studies in network congestion. The networks and their Internet links are temporary constructs not often up to the load of hundreds or thousands of attendees using laptops and tablet devices at the same time. Even if the initial network performance is good, usage quickly ramps up as the event gets underway. That’s when the trouble begins. As usage ramps up, users will inevitably experience slow Internet browsing, unreliable network connections, and sluggish load times.

While Web performance has quickly become critical to everyday business productivity, new event acceleration technology is helping to improve network speed and enhance the attendee experience at trade shows—evident in a recent case study showcasing the 2012 Digital Marketing Summit.

With almost 5,000 attendees expected at the 2012 Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, network planners faced quite a challenge. Their main concern was to sustain high-quality Internet performance, even though the event featured an agenda full of video seminars to stream, programs to download, and most attendees would be using tablets and laptops to stay in touch with operations back home. 

To provide efficient Internet access to the thousands of attendees, network planners elected to make use of event proxy cache technology. During the Summit, event proxy cache technology alleviated bandwidth congestion by capturing downloaded content and storing it locally—keeping the conference and other content “cached” on the event network. Subsequent requests for all those video seminars and online programs were served to conference participants from the event proxy cache. The results were spectacular.

During the Summit, the maximum number of unique users was 4,752, with a peak of 2,289 concurrent users on the final day. The event proxy service provided bandwidth savings of 215GB, contributing to the exceptional Web browsing and online experience at the Summit.

A fast, reliable event network provides the opportunity to enhance attendees’ overall event experience—enhancing productivity for staff, attendees and guests. By utilizing event proxy cache technology to support the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, network operations were significantly enhanced to the benefit of all conference participants. Attendees enjoyed an excellent online experience and the actual Internet connection never became the limiting factor for network performance. When did YOU last enjoy your online experience at a large trade show or corporate event?

*This graph shows the Internet content accessed by conference participants during a twelve-hour period. The yellow and green area together (above the axis) represents the local bandwidth consumed by actual user HTTP requests. The orange area (below the axis) represents the actual internet bandwidth used to fetch content from origin Web servers. The green area shows the Internet bandwidth that was saved—this traffic represents the HTTP traffic served to users directly from the event proxy cache. By utilizing the proxy service, the average bandwidth savings during the twelve-hour period was 40 percent, with the maximum bandwidth savings of 84 percent.

About SuperLumin

SuperLumin Networks is a subsidiary company of STRATACACHE. SuperLumin Networks provides caching, content acceleration, and application acceleration solutions to enterprises across the globe. SuperLumin products represent state-of-the-art, award-winning technology that is flexible, manageable and affordable.

For more information on SuperLumin Networks, visit www.superlumin.com or follow us on Twitter @SuperLumin.

WAN Optimization – A Transformative Data Center Technology

- Haseeb Budhani, chief product officer at Infineta Systems (www.infineta.com), says:

The “killer app” for WAN optimization ten years ago was file access and sharing. Businesses were tired of maintaining file servers and domain controllers in each branch, and began consolidating file server farms into regional data centers. As soon as file servers were removed from the branch, employee productivity began falling. This was a direct result of protocol (CIFS and TCP) inefficiencies, or a lack of bandwidth between the branch and the data center. Looking back, it was WAN optimization solutions from the likes of Riverbed, Bluecoat and Cisco that helped server consolidation strategies reach fruition.

WAN optimization is now a must-have component of branch infrastructure for verticals as diverse as financial services, semi-conductor and legal. Buying WAN optimization equipment is like buying a branch router for many businesses now – both are on the checklist when IT is bringing a new branch or a new application online.

Today, the “killer app” for WAN optimization is data protection. Out of sheer necessity, and because of information retention mandates, businesses are investing in out-of-region data centers where they can make periodic copies (through high-speed replication and backups) of all critical content to insure themselves against disasters:

• Financial services companies are required to keep all customer records and trading information safe in a remote data center, which could be as far as 2,000 miles away.
• Cloud providers are expected to guarantee strict data retention and availability SLAs to their customers by maintaining one or more copies of all customer data in remote locations.
• Health care companies must store all medical record updates for patients (including large X-Ray or MRI files) in remote data centers to protect against disasters.

At the same time, businesses are trying to reduce costs by consolidating data centers. The U.S. federal government has announced a plan to close 800 data centers by 2015 (1) . A number of companies such as Microsoft have also announced data center consolidation plans. Unless organizations can ensure that the requisite WAN connectivity is complemented with WAN optimization designed to address inter-data center pain points, fewer, larger data centers will adversely impact data protection strategies because more data will now need to be moved, farther.

When it comes to a comprehensive strategy to protect data, many enterprise data centers just aren’t ready. Either they are too far apart for native transport and replication protocols to function at optimum levels, or there isn’t enough WAN capacity available between the sites to support the high replication/backup traffic rates.

So what options do businesses have?

1. Keep buying more bandwidth – Depending on the distance between data centers, this tactic sometimes ends up delivering little to no value.
2. Protect less data – With data storage requirements doubling every two years , this strategy increases the risk of major economic impact in case of a disaster.
3. Adopt next-generation WAN optimization solutions – High-capacity WAN optimization solutions virtually creates more bandwidth (through data reduction techniques) and mitigates the impact of WAN latency (through transport and protocol level optimization techniques).

WAN optimization technologies have had a transformative impact on businesses since their introduction almost a decade ago, when they helped simplify the branch IT infrastructure by enabling hub and spoke designs. Today, IT and network architects need to look at the next generation of WAN optimization solutions that are specifically designed to accelerate all traffic between a mesh of data centers at multi-Gigabit speeds. WAN optimization will be essential as businesses start building private clouds that span multiple data centers, and when they start carrying out VM migrations between data centers to better utilize resources in remote locations. Such levels of data mobility will require high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity that is currently difficult, if not impossible, to guarantee between data centers.

Businesses that leverage next-generation WAN optimization solutions will succeed in transforming data centers from storage and compute silos into nodes in a larger network fabric where data is highly available and eminently mobile.


1. Forrester Research, Inc. May 2010. "The Future of Data Center Wide-Area Networking."

Double Your IP Management ROI in One-Year…Seriously!

- James P. Bergeron, CEO at First To File (www.firsttofile.com), says:

Investments can be scary – however, if done right, they can give your business a huge shot in the arm. For some IP professionals, the benefit of procuring new technology and going digital may seem obvious. But for many individuals working in IP, the thought of letting go of paper and related paper-based systems may seem daunting, if not impossible. Understanding the clear return on investment (ROI) that results from implementing a digital IP management system should help ease the anxiety of going digital.

A recent white paper entitled, “Measuring the Value of Digital IP Management,” and published by my company First To File® (FTF) demonstrates that implementing a digital IP management system can result in a 200% ROI - or better - within the first year after installation. Ian Hayes of Clarity Consulting, an analytically-oriented management consulting firm prepared the results of the white paper based on extensive FTF customer and market research across corporate patent organizations and law firms.

So why do IP practices, in particular, benefit so much from going digital? Most IP law practices are unfortunately hamstrung with outdated paper-based patent prosecution and workflow while they continue to move forward with digital systems that are redundant. Ironically, organizations that are fearful of ‘going digital’ have been developing, exchanging, and sharing digital files for years. Having two systems in place to manage one process dramatically increases costs, decreases quality, and creates avoidable inefficiencies. As the white paper details, with a digital management system in place, law firms and corporations quickly experience a substantial increase in productivity, efficiency, and better use of resources while reducing overhead costs. And while digitizing IP might make some users uneasy at first, the decision to implement a secure digital IP management system quickly becomes obvious when the upside potential is taken into account. Equally as important, FTF’s familiar and easy to use systems ensure the transition isn’t as difficult as many would anticipate.

The growing need for innovation and understanding of a firm’s IP assets, as demonstrated by the Motorola and Nortel IP acquisitions, paired with a global movement to paperless systems and sustainability makes IP visibility and expedient access mandatory in today’s competitive, global environment. This white paper shows that First To File (FTF) is an important and cost effective solution for all companies looking to gain control and effectively utilize all of their IP assets.

To download the white paper, visit: http://www.firsttofile.com/?page_id=105. For any questions, email Kurt Wedel at kwedel@firsttofile.com.
About the Author
James P. Bergeron is the CEO of First to File (FTF), the leading provider of secure IP management services to corporations and law firms. He is a frequent speaker and writer on topics related to IP data management. Email him at jbergeron@firsttofile.com.

Broadband Bonding for the Enterprise Data Center and End User

- Cahit Jay Akin, CEO at Mushroom Networks (www.mushroomnetworks.com), says:

As critical business applications increasingly move to cloud-based web services, Internet usage across the enterprise is increasingly stressed. An additional concern for IT departments is the consistent use of company resources to access non-work related websites, sites that involves streaming of content, which in turn degrades the performance of business applications. For those types of business cloud end users, connectivity performance is critical. When it’s not fast or snappy enough, the whole user experience is degraded. Companies need to discover new methods for managing demand on bandwidth resources because when not managed properly it can be very costly to operations.

Broadband Bonding™ is a solution that allows a business to aggregate various Internet connections into a single high-speed connection with built-in redundancies. It effectively blends the best attributes of different types of connections (DSL, Cable, and T-1, fiber) to reach higher upload and download speeds and lowest possible latency. Most operations still rely on older connection technologies, with employees commonly reporting faster download and application speeds when using their home Internet service. The substantial cost benefit for Broadband Bonding is it can be implemented transparently on existing lines, without any additional software or hardware beyond the bonding appliance.

When used in a data center environment, Broadband Bonding solves a key pain point for enterprises that need to connect various branch offices for VPN, cloud or virtualized computing services. Currently, most branch offices still rely on notoriously slow T-1 lines to connect to the data center. Although reliable, legacy T-1 cannot handle the deluge of real-time traffic and SaaS services that are now commonplace in businesses.

Once implemented, Broadband Bonding enables speedy connections between the office and the data center; it’s a high-availability service that allows faster file transfers, low-latency transport with advanced quality of service capabilities. It works by intelligently and dynamically managing any number of different broadband providers as a single pipe of connectivity. Older attempts at bonding multiple access lines together failed because solutions were not able to account for lines that functioned at varying performance levels, but new networking techniques such as Network Calculus have solved this issue.

Network Calculus is a core technology powering Broadband Bonding, an intelligent method for aggregating lines and optimizing them for specific applications. A research field in electrical engineering, Network Calculus is a unique in that when applied to Broadband Bonding allows for an optimized experience that pulls together the best possible performance matching the application. Network equipment that enables Broadband Bonding will provide features beyond fast and reliable connectivity - including firewall, traffic monitoring, shaping, and filtering.
Businesses with strained data center connectivity should consider Broadband Bonding as an inexpensive alternative for achieving explosive speed and reliability. Simply combining several DSL lines for example will deliver the benefits of services like MPLS or fiber at a fraction of the cost.

Dr. Cahit Jay Akin, is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mushroom Networks, a privately help company based in San Diego, CA, providing Broadband Bonding solutions to a range of Internet connection applications.

How QAM Technology Is Bridging The Gap To CCAP Compliance

- Sunil Frida, global marketing executive with Commscope (www.commscope.com), says:

The world is moving toward an all IP delivery of video and it will be here before you know it.

That means the evolution of edge QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) devices to CCAP is very straightforward, and as the world moves toward an all IP scenario, multiple moving parts are created between legacy products and future solutions. Those parts include the upstream and downstream video network, security, management and configuration and scalability of bandwidth.

It is only a matter of time before MSOs begin to deploy more edge QAM solutions, bridging the gap toward CCAP compliance. The standardization of these moving parts began with Comcast and Time Warner, and was adopted as a standard by CableLabs®.

CCAP stands for Converged Cable Access Platform equipment and has the potential to redefine how operators deploy, scale and manage edge network access. Currently, video QAM and CMTS (cable modem termination system) infrastructures are deployed across separate platforms and edge capacity is managed manually and configured mechanically. With CCAP, controlling new video, voice and data services is more efficient since QAM channels are added in minutes instead of weeks. CCAP integrates the functions of broadcast and narrowcast QAMs, as well as DOCSIS® 3.0 downstream and upstream interfaces with the additional support of PON.

The goal of CCAP is for MSOs to move toward a super dense, power and space saving architecture that combines QAM and the CMTS functions, and puts cable on a path toward a complete IP-based video platform. With higher density, power and space savings found in our current LxS platform, our next generation LxS-16016 wideband edge QAM solution is quickly moving MSOs toward CCAP compliance.

The blending of the video and data portions of the edge QAM’s architecture helps create an access platform that is fully ready for IP video over the coming years. At CommScope we are excited to be once again at the front of the pack in the innovation race for CCAP.

Network versus Application Layer Prioritization

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

Back in the day, before VoIP was common and we were all chatting over Skype, there was a very real concern about how to ensure the network could support it. Jitter was the most common source of issues making VoIP less than desirable, leading to the conclusion that prioritization of voice over data traffic was an essential component to any VoIP-enabled network.
So we tried using TOS (type of service) as a solution. TOS bits – long since obsoleted by the Differentiated Services field – specified parameters for the type of service requested. The belief then was that we could use these bits to prioritize traffic along the same lines as we did customers – gold, silver, bronze. Hence the nomenclature, “coloring bits”.

The problem wasn’t that this approach didn’t work – it did – as long as every network component in the traffic path honored the bits. Obviously you can see the problem with this approach. The Internet is not a single-owner network, and thus getting agreement across backbone providers to honor each other’s prioritization was something of a problem. Quality of service is a differentiator for providers, and prioritizing competitor’s traffic over your own wasn’t exactly going to enable you to sell on the strength of your network.

Being reliant on the Internet for transport with its stochastic behavior and having failed to find a means to prioritize traffic across provider control boundaries, QoS continued to be a source of research and frustration. Prioritization at the network layer had failed to achieve performance nirvana. Not even the adoption of differentiated services really solved the problem for the majority of users, as the same restrictions applied to it that applied to TOS – it still required dependence on the honor system.

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT CONTROL
Even though today’s Internet is much faster and fatter than in the early days of VoIP, there is still a need to prioritize data exchanged between clients and services. What we’re seeing today is a more application-layer focused approach to prioritization that trusts the Internet to deliver data with alacrity and instead focuses on enforcing priority in those pieces of the flow we can control – the application and its supporting infrastructure.

This approach is not a replacement for traditional bandwidth management techniques that address performance issues in the network, but rather the means to address performance issues related directly to capacity and load – processing latency – and in situations where control over the network is not possible or exceedingly difficult. Prioritization of traffic at any layer requires control, something we simply don’t have end-to-end. Thus we leverage other technology to counter that lack of control in conjunction with enforcing priority at the application layer where we have much greater levels of control.

One of the interesting additions to the web comes with SPDY and specifically it’s support for prioritization. SPDY allows specific requests to be prioritized so that, say, the server could be instructed to process dynamic content over static, or requests for streaming objects before images. One of the things that does is allow both the application and application network infrastructure to more intelligently manage requests architecturally to ensure if not a faster at least a more consistently performing application.

It’s not unlike network queuing technologies that honor packet-based prioritization, in that when queues begin to fill, packets with higher priority are pushed to the front of the queue. With SPDY, if load or capacity is in question, the application or application network layer can push priority requests first to ensure processing while allowing other requests to be processed in a more leisurely fashion.

There exists a wide variety of potential architectures based on application layer prioritization, including scalability domains based on priority-based processing. In many ways such an architecture is not unlike the notion of storage tiering, where fast (and more expensive) storage is used for only specified data and slower (and less expensive) storage is used for lower priority data. A tiering-based scalability architecture at the application layer based on request priority enables compute, network, and storage resources to be more effectively provisioned to ensure consistently performing applications.

But it requires control; complete control over the application and application network infrastructure, just as its bit-coloring predecessors required control over the entire network path. Lack of control along the application exchange path at strategic points can have adverse effects including that of negating the benefits of prioritization in the first place. A SPDY-based application hosted in a public cloud environment leveraging rudimentary application routing (load balancing) techniques will not be able to take advantage of the burgeoning protocol’s prioritization facets, effectively negating much of the benefit of enabling priority in the first place.

As we continue to relinquish control over the lower levels of the networking stack, we will need to harness the flexibility and control over the application layers of the stack more effectively. Taking advantage of application layer prioritization through strategic points of control in the network may be one of the ways in which we can improve application performance without relying on an honor system in an environment where such a system works against itself.

Emergent Behavior and the ‘Big Data’ Question

- Scott Paly, co-founder and CEO for Global DataGuard (www.globaldataguard.com), says:

There has been a lot of buzz recently about ‘big data’ and how it may offer hope in catching cyber-thieves as they attempt to invade a company’s sprawling enterprise network. At the recent RSA conference in San Francisco, analysts commented on why and how they believe a market for security algorithms will emerge in response to the math-intensive analysis needed to spot anomalies in the ‘big data’ world of network security.

Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald pointed out that the ‘bad’ attacker intent on hiding his or her actions is an anomaly to the generally ‘good’ behavior of network users inside the network. These cyber-thieves are getting past traditional defenses, such as intrusion-prevention systems, firewalls, and anti-virus software, in order to infiltrate and steal highly sensitive data. Such attacks are often referred to as an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), and are driven by hackers who are able to effectively hide their malevolent presence within networks. According to MacDonald, “we just don't know what ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ looks like in terms of network activity. You have to know what goodness looks like to understand deviations from goodness." In his opinion, ‘big data’ offers new possibilities for security analysis, and he believes that security tools will have to evolve in order to meet this need.

Global DataGuard agrees and is already tackling the APT problem by developing new technology to address ‘big data’ analysis and correlation.

A Challenge for IT Management

Every IT department head that I’ve spoken with agrees that the majority of network security technology available today is reactive in nature, and that most enterprise security systems are comprised of loosely integrated or discrete ‘best of breed’ security offerings that focus on various critical aspects of network security but do not have the ability to retain and correlate suspicious traffic for more than a few minutes. What these individuals tell me they need is the ability to detect reconnaissance activity leading up to an attack – before a breach occurs – and they want a historical context and depth of analysis in order to more quickly detect a breach after it occurs.

Global DataGuard’s response has been to develop an architecture-based security system that utilizes network behavior analysis and correlation to enable IT personnel to manage, monitor, analyze, and correlate discrete security events, alerts, logs, and reports into actionable security threats across application subsystems. The goal is to help a company identify and actively respond to what some analysts refer to as ‘bad’ network activity. Combined with newly developed emergent behavior technology – which I’ll discuss in a moment – this type of unified, network behavior analysis-based system can effectively address the ‘big data’ conundrum.

How Emergent Behavior Technology Works in Identifying APTs

For several years, Global DataGuard has used network behavior analysis as a key component of our architecture-based approach to security, enabling IT managers to identify and respond to security threats that other products may not detect, including Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). APTs are complex systems that mix specialized utilities and human behavior. Hackers understand how systems engineers like to work and use evasion techniques that avoid these common behaviors. For example, systems engineers like to study the behavior of the elements in order to understand the behavior of the system through reconstruction. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work when dealing with non-linear (or complex) systems, and the developers of APTs know this and use it to their advantage.

As mentioned earlier, nearly all network security technology is reactive in nature and comprised of disparate applications and appliances. This is why it is virtually impossible to track the type of low-level network activity that occurs over long periods and may be an indicator of an Advanced Persistent Threat. Here is where emergent behavior technology comes in to play. Although APTs are difficult to identify, the theft of data can never be completely invisible. By using emergent behavior technology within a behavioral-based unified security system, IT managers have at their disposal a tool that can more accurately determine very small changes within complex network relationships that may be indicators of an APT.

Global DataGuard’s emergent behavior technology uses advanced pattern matching across distributed systems to examine the network as a whole and identify bit level changes that are unique to each network. In this way, Global DataGuard’s security system can view the entire network as a ‘flow of bits’ that can be used to find unusual or altered operation of lower-level systems that may indicate an APT. This technology provides the capability of overcoming some of the limitations of signature and anomaly detection methods.

A look at the Future of Network Security

Global DataGuard believes that emergent behavior, as part of a unified approach to security, is a technology ‘next step’ for the security industry. We’ve already seen significant performance enhancements within our own network behavior analysis-based UES system, which is capable of performing predictive analysis by retaining and correlating suspicious raw packet data for a rolling 14-30 days and signature alerts and behavioral profiles for six months or longer, based on a customer’s specific requirements.

Because Global DataGuard’s architecture-based security system is both adaptive and predictive, it can provide IT managers and their staff with easier deployment and management of their company’s network security ecosystem, as well as provide greater efficiency in labor and detection ability, while offering lower acquisition costs than discrete security solutions. These products and services, in essence, are designed from the ground up to address compliance-specific requirements related to the integration of processes, technology, service, and reporting. Using a modular approach, they can be customized based on a company’s specific network requirements – from a few security applications to a complete system – providing IT managers and their staff with greater efficiency in labor and detection ability, lower acquisition costs, and easier deployment and management of their network security environment, whether it’s premise-based, virtual, or a cloud/on-premise network.

The Conflation of Pay-as-you-Grow Hardware with On-Demand

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

The conflation of “pay-as-you-grow” with “on-demand” tends to cause confusion in the realm of networking and hardware. This is because of the way in which networking vendors have attempted to address the demand of organizations to pay only for what you use and to expand on-demand. The premise is that costs grow proportionally with capacity. In cloud computing organizations achieve this. As more capacity (resources from hardware) are necessary, they are provisioned an paid for. On-demand scale. The costs per transaction (or user) remain consistent with growth because there is a direct relationship between an increase in capacity (hardware resources such as memory and CPU) and capacity.

Networking vendors have attempted to simulate this capability through licensing based restrictions, allowing customers to initially provision resources at a much lower cost per transaction. The fallacy in this scheme is that, unlike cloud computing, no additional capacity (hardware resources) are ever provisioned. It is only the artificial limitation on the use of that capacity that is lifted at a price during the “growth” stage. Regardless of form-factor, this has a profound impact on the cost-per-transaction (or user) and, it turns out, on the scalability of performance.

The difference between the two models is significant. A “pay-as-you-grow” licensing-based model is like having a great kitchen that is segmented. You can only use a portion of it initially. If you need to use more because you’re giving a dinner party, you can pay for another segment. The capabilities of the kitchen don’t change, just how much of you can use. Conversely, an on-demand model such as is offered by cloud lets you start out with a standard-sized kitchen, and if you need more room you tack on another kitchen, increasing not only size, but capability. If you’ve ever cooked for a large number of people, you know that one oven is likely not enough, but that’s what you get with “pay-as-you-grow” – one oven with initially limited access to it. The on-demand model gives you two. Or three, or as many as you need to make dinner for your guests.

SCALE of PERFORMANCE
While appearing more cost effective at the outset, “pay-as-you-grow” strategies do not always provide for the scalability of all performance metrics.

This is because licensing restrictions do not impact the underlying hardware capacity, and it is the hardware capacity and load that is always the most constraining factor for performance. As utilization of hardware increases, capacity degrades, albeit in some cases more slowly than others. The end result is that scale-by-license produces increasingly diminishing returns on performance. This is true whether we’re considering layer 4 throughput or layer 7 requests per second, two common key performance metrics for application delivery solutions.

The reason for this is simple – you aren’t increasing the underlying speed or capacity, you’re only the load that can be handled by the device. That means the overall utilization is higher, and it is nearly a priori knowledge in networking that as utilization (load) increases, performance and capacity degrade. The result is uneven scalability as you progress through the “upgrade” of licenses. You’re still paying the same amount per increase, but each increase nets you less capacity and slower performance than the upgrade before.

Conversely, a true on-demand model, based on the same premises as cloud computing, scales more linearly. Upgrading four times nets you four times the performance at four times the cost, because the resources available also increase four times. Cost and performance scale equally with a platform-based model. Licensing-based models do not, nay they cannot, because they aren’t scaling out resources, they’re only scaling out what portion of the resources you have access to.

It’s a subtle difference but one that has a significant impact on capacity and performance.

ECONOMY of SCALE
As has been noted, as utilization of hardware increases, capacity degrades.

When we start looking at the total costs when compared to the scaling value received, it becomes apparent that the pay-as-you-grow model produces increasing costs per transaction while the platform-based model produces decreasing costs per transaction. This is simply a matter of math. If each upgrade in a pay-as-you-grow model increases the overall cost by 1/4, but returns increasingly smaller performance and capacity gains, you end up with a higher cost per transaction. Conversely, a more linear on-demand approach actually ends up producing slightly lower or consistent costs per transaction.

The economy of scale is important as it’s a fairly common financial metric used to evaluate infrastructure as it directly translates into business costs and can be used to adjust pricing and facilitate estimated expenses.

This disparity is not one that is often considered up front, as it is usually the up-front, capital investment that is most important to the initial decision. This oversight, however, almost always proves to be problematic as it is rarely the case that an organization does not need additional capacity and performance, and thus the long-term costs of Pay-as-you-Grow result in a much poorer return on investment in terms of performance than a Platform-based scalability model.

DISRUPTION and CapEx
The arguments against a platform-based model generally consist of disruptiveness of upgrades and initial costs.

Disruption is a valid concern and it is almost always true that hardware-based devices require a certain amount of disruption to upgrade. The lifting of an artificially imposed limitation on the amount of existing hardware that can be utilized, conversely, does not. This is where the cloud computing on-demand (i.e. throw more (virtual) hardware at the problem) usually diverges from the on-demand model used to scale out networking hardware, such as an application delivery controller.

The introduction of virtual application delivery controllers and the ability to seamlessly scale out in a model similar to cloud computing eliminates the disruption-based argument. There do exist models and technology which closely models a cloud computing on-demand scalability strategy that are as non-disruptive as scaling out via a licensing-based model.
This leaves the initial cost argument, which generally boils down to a CapEx versus OpEx argument. You are going to pay over the long run, the question is whether you pay up front or over time and what the return on those investments will ultimately be.
Just don’t let the conflation of cloud computing’s on-demand with pay-as-you-grow licensing-based models obscure what those real costs will be.