The Importance of Programming an ADC

June 12, 2013 by Leave a comment

Mike Fratto

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

  • Application delivery controllers are an integral part of your application stack.  They need to be treated as first-class citizens and incorporated into any hybrid cloud strategy.
  • Matching an ADC, supported cloud service and platform, and integration strategy is critical to enabling applications that can run anywhere with ease.

One of the motivating factors for virtual application delivery controllers (ADCs) is the ability to include the entire set of servers and services that make up an application into a logical group that can be moved easily from physical and virtual servers to a public cloud.  If you take the time to tune your ADC for a particular application running in your data center and you want to move it to a cloud service, your only options for an ADC are limiting yourself to the cloud services that can run your virtual ADC or using the cloud provider’s load balancing service, which may even be using products that are far more capable than the features exposed to customers, but the result is basic load balancing as a service and not much else.  Running a vendor’s virtual ADC in a cloud environment requires that the vendor supplies a VM built and tested on that cloud service and offered through the service’s application store. Read more of this post

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tw telecom’s Intelligent Network Third Phase Takes Shape: Constellation Platform to Connect Resources to Customers On-Demand

June 12, 2013 by Leave a comment

Brian Washburn

Brian Washburn

Summary Bullets:

  • tw telecom is gearing up to release its Constellation Platform, promising click-and-connect links to third-party data centers and resident cloud providers.
  • Constellation Platform details are still under wraps, but tw telecom will likely succeed in raising the bar for customers’ on-demand service expectations.

When it comes to cloud services, the largest U.S. incumbent network providers are all-in: AT&T with its Synaptic line of services, Verizon with its acquisition of Terremark, and CenturyLink with its acquisition of Savvis. Many smaller providers by contrast are split on their cloud services approach. Windstream and EarthLink Business are examples of network providers that are developing data centers and cloud services in-house. Sprint’s entry into the cloud has been through a partnership with CSC. However, there are also competitors such as tw telecom and Lightpath that choose to stay away from building and selling in-house cloud services: They would prefer to be impartial agents serving a large audience of third-party data center and cloud services providers. Of these, tw telecom in particular has invested in network tools, with the goal of becoming a more flexible network provider of cloud connectivity. Read more of this post

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Finding the Missing Lync in Campus SDN

May 22, 2013 by 1 Comment

Mike Fratto

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

  • The focus of software defined networking (SDN) may be on the data center and carrier networks, but that doesn’t mean campus LANs can’t benefit as well.
  • New technologies need a compelling reason for IT to adopt them and SDN is no different. Sure, data centers have issues that SDN can address, but users see choppy video and voice as much more urgent problems to solve.

For many, SDN is a data center and service provider play because those two areas have unique scalability and versatility demands that SDN is well suited to address. There is as much value in the campus LAN as well, and I suspect that we’ll start seeing many more reasons why SDN in the campus makes sense. Two recent examples from Aruba and Extreme both involving integration of Microsoft’s Lync unified communications software are illustrative of why. Read more of this post

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OpenStack and ONS in Same Week; Can’t NetOps and Dev Just Get Along?

April 17, 2013 by Leave a comment

Mike Spanbauer

Mike Spanbauer

Summary Bullets:

  • Enterprises struggle with whether a programmatic networks is a developer concept, a networking concept or both
  • The long term success of SDN will eventually depend on solutions being simple to integrate across multi-vendor environments

At the Open Networking Summit this week in Santa Clara, the largest SDN conference and marquee event for the Open Networking Foundation, the leading SDN standards body, it is not lost on this attendee that the event is concurrent with the OpenStack event, a parallel standards body that also fosters open initiatives and technology (though on compute and the software stack vs. networking and the L1-3 services stack).  It is ironic that while this particular conflict was not intentional, it does represent the challenge faced by enterprises who are seeking to incorporate more “open” technologies into their ecosystem.  The question is whether to pursue the early adoption path as is the case with SDN and several solutions which are more coding than CLI configured today, or to wait for the fully “baked” solutions expected to arrive in the future.  The skill sets, staffing challenges, and operational paradigm for each radically differ.  Where one is often sought for a solution that cannot be accomplished by other means, the other is more focused on resource optimization, solution maintenance, and minimized disruption. (While not necessarily technical interruption, introducing a new technology such as SDN is highly disruptive to people and processes at minimum.)

Read more of this post

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BYOA and the Enterprise Application Portal: Create Your Own Internal Company Storefront

April 17, 2013 by Leave a comment

Joel Stradling

Joel Stradling

Summary Bullets:

  • The concept of ‘consumerization of IT’ is sure to evolve naturally in your organization, as employees want to use applications of their own choosing.
  • Some policy control is essential, and a sanctioned company app store is a good idea.
  • Companies such as Intel give employees an official app store, but users can also freely consume ‘unofficial’ apps from outside this domain.

First, the Chief Information Officer had to deal with the complexities that BYOD brought up; now, there is an increasing momentum to BYOA – in other words ’bring your own application.’  Extending beyond this is the concept of an open storefront for appliances, computing power, storage, OS, databases and so on – in other words, all IT.  Service providers are on board, as evidenced by the launches of several online store initiatives: Interoute launched CloudStore, offering applications, appliances, professional services and more; Belgacom offers Becloud; KPN offers a cloud store; and Orange’s VPN Galerie offers access to many apps developed both by Orange and by independent ISVs.  It is fair to say that the concept is already mature for the SME market place, with Belgacom’s Becloud offerings tailored for the mass SME segment but with more sophistication for larger companies.  Similarly, KPN’s Open Cloud Store gives its reseller partners (ISPs, SIs and other telcos) the opportunity to sell, provision and support cloud services to the diverse Dutch SME market. Read more of this post

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NII to Cede Peru Operations to Entel, Consolidating Around Brazil and Mexico Core Markets

April 9, 2013 by Leave a comment

Brian Washburn

Brian Washburn

Summary Bullets:

  • NII selling its Peru holdings could help fund investments to become a major cellular competitor in Brazil and Mexico.
  • Mexico and Brazil are extremely competitive markets; still, the long-running wireless demand boom could help lift NII’s prospects.

On April 4, regional Latin America wireless specialist Nextel International (NII) announced that it was selling off its wholly owned Nextel Peru subsidiary to Chile’s incumbent provider Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Entel). The purchase price is expected to be US$400 million when the transaction completes in H2 2013. NII will continue to compete with its existing wireless services in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Read more of this post

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Without Standards Conformance, OpenFlow Fails to Deliver Interoperability

April 3, 2013 by Leave a comment

  • Mike Fratto

    Mike Fratto

    Standards without conformance are useless. Conformance testing resolves varying interpretations which enables interoperability.

  • OpenFlow is starting to fragment along product and vendor partner lines, which isn’t good for either vendors or customers.

When it comes to standards, most if not all IT professionals agree that standards are important. The obvious reason is that standards allow enterprises to integrate the software and hardware they want to use rather than being confined to a subset of products from one vendor or a vendor’s partner program. That’s the high road. The reality is that IT just wants equipment that works whether or not they are standards based, and that’s because having a technical standard isn’t going to enable interoperation and integration. Read more of this post

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Mobile HD Voice Better for Business, but International Mobile HD Voice in Early Stages of Development

March 27, 2013 by Leave a comment

Joel Stradling

Joel Stradling

Summary Bullets:

  • Mobile HD voice is likely to benefit your business: both parties can hear each other more clearly and experiments prove call length increases with HD voice
  • HD voice codecs will be the norm in voice-over-LTE deployments
  • Your mobile device must support Wideband Adaptive Multi Rate (W-AMR) technology  to conduct HD voice calls

HD voice is delivered using wide-band audio, which results in far more natural sounding conversation. Consider a multi-lingual global business environment, with wheeling and dealing taking place over traditional crackly narrow-band, and it’s reasonable to assume that your sales force, technical support teams, and customer support would benefit from more articulate conversations with customers that are on their mobile handsets. Enterprise users that have IP telephony solutions in place are familiar with landline HD voice for internal or branch-to-branch calls, with multiple vendors supporting wide-band voice plus better audio components in their handsets, including for example Cisco, Avaya and Polycom; while UC hubs such as MS Lync also support HD voice. However, the reach of HD voice is limited to what’s going on the other end – namely if the call terminates on a traditional PSTN and regular handset, the call is not going to be in full HD! Read more of this post

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What’s an SDN? Who Cares? The Question is, Does It Help?

March 21, 2013 by Leave a comment

Mike Fratto

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

  • There isn’t any consensus on the definition of SDN, but in the many variations are value propositions that may be useful to you.
  • In the drive to define SDN, established and start-up networking vendors are developing products that can improve your network operations, and that is what is important.

Chalk it up to my extensive studies in philosophy, but I like definitions that are clear, concise, and differentiate one thing from another. At times I can be pedantic and get dragged down in details, but I’m also practical and I know that while theory can be fun and games, at some point, stuff has to get done. What was more important to me when I ran a small data center was getting things done. I didn’t really care about what I called whatever technology I was using. What I cared about, and what the IT professionals that I talk to care about, is how will this new technology make my job better, more efficient, less prone to error, or more cost effective. What matters is not the foundational ideas underpinning a new technology, but the practical applications. Read more of this post

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What Does Management Mean to You, How Big is It, & Can It Be Done?

March 20, 2013 by Leave a comment

 

Mike Spanbauer

Mike Spanbauer

  • The IT management toolkit consists of at least a dozen or more management tools to address element management, event stream correlation and trending, business process automation, virtualization control, to name a few, it’s a complex task to integrate and one that falls to consulting or the DevOps.
  • APIs and pre-tested integrations will become priority feature enterprises will evaluate when making technology decisions.

Gone are the days of being able to choose a point management product for a specific problem or vendor device and installing that parallel to other, dedicated task tools.  Today’s IT management buy centers must also evaluate the integrations with their existing toolsets, many of which were not tested by the vendor.  Network management vendors partner programs assist in integration and testing with other vendors but are limited to a small subset of third parties that joined the program.   These systems include element management, virtualization software, an event framework for operations and security streams, server and storage optimization tools, network tools, business process toolsets all of which should, but may not work together today.  The list of an average enterprise management software is much longer, rarely integrated well, and a hurdle to greater IT efficiency.  Much of this integration falls to a role that has always been a jack-of-all (integration) trades, the DevOps administrator. Read more of this post

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