NetEvents EMEA Summit, Garmish, blog - part three

Rosalind Craven, IDC: Helping Mobile Operators Boost Profitability

Introducing the discussion, Craven said that voice revenues are not going away but that data volumes are growing while average revenue per user remains flat or is even falling., which means that means profits are under threat.

She said that carriers need a reduction in data transport costs, especially mobile backhaul but "they don't want to invest now and have to spend again in two years time - they need a longer term solution. But data usage is unpredictable, and they need the cost/bit to fall."

Evaluating this challenge, Roland Klemann, director, service provider practice at Cisco, said: "Mobile traffic is now eight times more than the whole of Internet traffic in 2000. Operators need better offerings, as tiered pricing and advances in spectrum efficiencies will not deliver enough savings."

Alan Solheim, VP at DragonWave, said: "Operators want higher capacity than technology can deliver so customers are looking at new ways of doing business. Ethernet backhaul growth was about capacity to start with but this is now about new services, such as using that bandwidth more efficiently."

Kevin Vachon, chief operating officer, MEF, said: "India is saying they have yet to experience this as they don't use so many smartphones but it's a matter of when not if. We want to help operators move to carrier Ethernet from TDM, and it's happening, driven by LTE. Now with class of service we allocate bandwidth better to make big pipes more efficient. Operators say they can save 25-40% of their bandwidth by using different configurations.

Craig Easley, VP marketing at Accedian said: "Now that operators have experience of carrier Ethernet, they are more comfortable buying lower cost services and that's where they save. If traffic is not real-time, they can drop a few packets and do it with a lower cost service and not compromise quality."

Solheim said: "We are seeing more intelligence at the edge of the network, and that same technology can be applied to mobile backhaul. The hardware cost is only 10pc of total cost - it just needs to be more reliable and faster to deploy."

Greg Gum, chief marketing officer, TelcoSystems, said: "A survey of top mobile operators worldwide said they have a mobile backhaul strategy but only 42% were upgrading to just mobile backhaul to separate data and voice. In India, SE Asia, eastern Europe and Africa, they're still on 2G or 3G so the ability to use carrier Ethernet's smarts has yet to take hold."

Addressing the significance of MEF carrier Ethernet standards on profitability, Vachon said: "Standards apply to multiple service types -- we created a new higher level specification that shows how they can be applied in backhaul environments, specifically in 3G or 4G deployments.

Easley said: "MEF22 was a stake in ground for backhaul standards. The biggest problem remaining is taking backhaul technology and applying it to 4G."

There followed a discussion about small cells, such as wifi and pico and femtocells as a way of offloading data from the mobile operators' networks. Klemann said: "We see 11% of mobile traffic being offloaded growing to 25%. That yields operational challenges for service providers. Small cells are easier to manage -- there's more redundancy and self-healing -- but more access points that need to be linked to backhauls. Operators will emerge to meet this need for backhaul."

Solheim said: "The capacity crunch point is the radio network. All new spectrum efficiencies only make 10% of the capacity gain we need, so we need a new architectural changes, that's why we have small cells. But they present operational challenges: how to connect them? We don't want wires so it needs to be wireless backhaul. The aesthetics of the solution are as important as the technology as local council won't put up with ugly boxes on the lampposts.

Gum said: "Wifi is the main offload mechanism, especially for streaming video and web intensive apps such as Facebook."

Easley answered an audience question about whether LTE will succeed: "For operators, differentiation is all about the network so they have to move up to faster radios. It's coming, it's way past trials."

Roland Klemann, Cisco: A Vision for Cloud Mobile

Roland Klemann concluded the plenary proceedings with a presentation on mobile cloud. "When mobile and cloud collide it's an explosion of data," he said. He then presented the results from a rich Cisco survey into the behaviour of end users and businesses.

He said that new devices are driving the mobile cloud, especially the iPad. "Apple is selling 1500 per hour and they generate three times more traffic than a smartphone," he said. Users are using and will use email, social networks, VC, games, documents -- video is a big driver, along with shared content, and file storage and backup.

Business users will drive the mobile cloud, according to Cisco's data, as they are twice as likely to use cloud services. "This will change the way people work," Klemann said. "It will mean more cost-efficient workplaces, more productivity." In future, we will see virtual desktop integration, thin-client, cloud-based devices, that professional and personal lives will blur and that we will need dual personality devices, one personality for work, one for personal use.

Consumers want to use any device anywhere and they use cloud services because they know their data is safe no matter what happens to the device, he said. "Drop it in the toilet and the data stays safe," he said.

Users said they trusted mobile cloud providers, and Klemann said that mobile cloud apps will generate the most network traffic -- 7.6 exabytes -- an increase of 66% worldwide. Most mobile data consumption is actually from fixed locations so wifi will work as an access method, found the survey. Klemann said that people said they would wait for wifi to access mobile cloud apps.

Bob Metcalfe leads launch of Carrier Ethernet 2.0

Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, led a set of presentations launching a new generation of Ethernet: Carrier Ethernet 2.0 (CE 2.0). Metcalfe said: "Perhaps most remarkable is that, almost 40 years later, the growth of Ethernet is so strong and innovation is still hard at work. You know, every time we look at a reinvention of Ethernet we are always left with the same conclusion: this is just the beginning."

MEF President Nan Chen explained how the first generation of CE standardised Ethernet services for Service Providers and carriers. He said: "CE 1.0 is about standardisation of Ethernet services. CE 2.0, which is compatible to 1.0, is characterised by three powerful and standardised features: multiple Classes of Service (also known multi-CoS), interconnect and manageability over eight services, which is more than twice as many supported in 1.0."

Chen said that the new services "standardise performance objectives across a variety of geographic performance tiers and applications. This results in improved quality of service and optimised efficiency on a global scale."

For example, Chen said: "the mobile backhaul implementation agreement creates a standard for efficient and reliable 4G mobile backhaul networks and services."

MEF board chairman Mike Volgende said: "Support of multiple Classes of Service itself is not new. Rather, it's standardisation with performance objectives for each service class defined which is new. So now you know what performance you can expect for each class supported. This means you can have consistent performance levels and associated SLAs no matter who you interconnect with."

Volgende said that cloud services providers would benefit because: "Efficient service delivery translates directly to cost savings and quality delivery of high-performance applications.

"Carrier Ethernet 2.0 represents a significant milestone in the industry partnering to enable delivery of next-generation Ethernet standards to the global marketplace."

Metcalfe concluded: "We would encourage everyone to join us here at MEF in changing the world again, with a new generation of Ethernet – CE 2.0."

NetEvents Garmisch 2012 - blog part two

Peter Hall, Ovum: Managing Change Within the Enterprise

Peter Hall opened the discussion by outlining out the complex role of the CIO, whose job includes managing strategic projects, managing growing endpoints, more network performance demands, threats, evaluating new technologies such as cloud, and responding to growing CEO expectations with less budget.

The panel was asked what the challenges were, in their opinion. Charles Ferland, VP at IBM Systems Europe, said that networks were not just about speed but needed to be smarter. Brett Johnson, VP at AboveNet, said that his customers now ask about latency where they didn't five years ago and that this was a big trend. Carolyn Crandall, marketing VP at Riverbed, said that performance was about the end user, whether an employee or website visitor and that change needs to have a purpose.

Daniel Beazer, analyst at Tier1 research said: "What we see is a process of creative construction (see Schumpeter) as telcos race to the bottom with prices. Everything is commoditised - Wedgwood did this with crockery. This is a feature of the market."

They were then asked to what extent CIOs relied on their service providers, rather than managing change in-house. Ferland said the problem of performance was "not always about adding bandwidth but managing the system dynamically as workloads move around from server to server, from datacentre to datacentre across the globe."

Johnson said: "Performance is big issue, along with scalability and flexibility, even for apps of the future with unknown requirements. That's why we built a direct connect platform to Amazon, bypassing the public Internet, which gives enterprises options."

Crandall said: "Enterprises still need to do tape backup - they don't want to change their software but still want to back up to the public cloud. They also want to do management such as load balancing."

Rob Bamforth, Quocirca: smart security solutions for tomorrow's networks

Focused on security, Bamforth opened by remarking that gadgets are on the march. "There's a lot of use of devices in the enterprise, especially in people-oriented businesses," he said. "Tablets are used to access corporate data across the globe, not just in North America. This means you need to have the confidence in your ability to protect that data." He pointed out that that ability is high for email but much lower for other types of data repositories, such as USB sticks and mobiles. How can CIOs keep data safe?

From the panel, Pascal Oetiker, EMEA director, NetIQ, said that management of users in today's cloud should be seamless and controlled. Markus Nispel, technology strategist at Enterasys, said: "One CIO I met recently said he was measured by how fast he could give up control." Franz Kaiser, regional director at Fortinet said: "We aim to give back control to IT manager." Thomas Hemker, security strategist at Symantec said: "We take a holistic approach - it's about securing data assets. We can do hosted security solutions, as it's important to be able to use cloud providers such as SaaS securely, so we will see more cloud firewalls in future."

Can CIOs take back control? Nispel said the driver behind the BYOD phenomenon was new apps so security managers need to look at which ones need protecting. "We are going cloud," he said. "We at Enterasys have Box.Net, we use Google Apps and Gmail, and our expense control is in the cloud."

Oetiker said: "My marketing managers run their own P&L centre and use their own credit cards to buy services. Then the problems start. Businesses need to be able to do this kind of thing for a short while then move out of the application and get the data back. You also need a way of connecting users to cloud applications and authenticate them properly, as this gives you control and allows you to use SaaS."

Hemker there was a need for single sign-on or improved authentication. There was discussion about and agreement on the need for control of apps on the network and access control to secure them.

To a question about remote kill capabilities for remote devices, Nispel said: "You can install software on the device, for example, or use network access controls and monitoring, or use Exchange plugins for email. It's tough to install a wipe application on all devices because of the wide variety of OSes and hardware." There was broad agreement.

Carolyn Crandall, Riverbed: Next wave of Consolidation

This guest speaker presentation opened the second of the event's two days. Presenting Riverbed's Virtual Server Infrastructure, Crandall said: "This is something that has not been done before."

She explained how VSI combined concepts from virtual desktop infrastructure and server virtualisation to allow server images to be projected from a central location and linked using Riverbed's WAN optimisation technology, so providing improved security and control. She said that Riverbed technology had resolved customer objections about booting servers over the WAN, fear of what happened when the WAN went down, and about performance over the WAN.

"The product is called Granite," she said. "It can be a separate box or run in one of our Steelhead appliances, and you can boot in under one minute over the WAN." She said VSI brings advantages of lower TCO and a hard ROI, complete consolidation, happy end users and better performance, and rapid service deployment.

Crandall concluded with four case studies where customers had saved money and time deploying VSI technology. "Not everyone will want to do this as it's an architectural change," she said. "But at least now they have a choice."

Daniel Beazer, Tier1 Research: Change in the Datacentre

Beazer opened the discussion with information about the growth of data in the datacentre. "One problem is that the cloud is expensive," he said. "It's just like a hire car, it's much more expensive to hire by the day than the week."

From the panel, Andreas Lemke, Alcatel-Lucent cloud solutions manager said: "By 2014, 80% of apps will be in the cloud, so we see a strong trend of apps moving there. This means we need to develop the technology to set apps up in the datacentre.

John Rollason, senior manager product solutions at NetApp said: "We see the move towards cloud and if you define it as shared virtual infrastructure, yes, data keeps growing. We see us taking more orders and partnering with BT and others, as end users don't want to run their own infrastructure. We will have fewer customers but the workloads will increase massively."

Paul Griffiths, global consulting engineer at Riverbed, said: "People are looking for choice and want to choose where to host their apps for business, whether temporary, or test and dev, or production apps. We will follow the customers' data and provide a LAN-like experience."

Sven Klindworth, head of BT Advise Compute, said: "The trend is towards much bigger datacentres than the past, for example look at BT's new facility in Frankfurt. But is one per continent enough? Customers want to see the datacentre and the flashing lights on the servers and go there with their auditor and see where their data is."

Beazer introduced server-huggers -- managers who did not want to relinquish their servers -- pointing out that there were good reasons why branch offices wanted to hang onto their systems, not least to grant some autonomy from the "insane" orders that came from HQ. Backing up to tape was of a similar order, he said.

Rollason said: "There's no logical or financial reason to backup to tape but it takes a very long time for enterprise IT to change. But over next 10 years, there will be a 4,000% growth in data which means that things have to change - it's not efficient to keep going as we do."

Klindworth said: "In financial services companies, they use the latest technologies but the CIOs say that all this new tech always comes on top so no old system ever gets switched off. They still have systems to send customers statements that were programmed 30 years ago and which run on old mainframes."

Griffiths said: "Server huggers are minimising the risk by hanging onto servers, they know that the data is the crown jewels and their jobs might be at risk if they don't take care."

Discussing data privacy issues, Lemke said: "Europe is more conservative, compared to the US or India. We need to take the concerns about security and performance in the cloud seriously and comfort people that our solutions can work or improve on the current situation, and help them save costs. In a tough economy if you can save admin or datacentre costs by going to the cloud people will do it."

Lemke answered an audience question about how to ensure that data doesn't end up in the hands of the US government as a result of the Patriot Act. He said: "We can ensure that your data is safe -- but the Patriot Act compels companies to hand over data even if the data lives outside the US. So you need to ask who your data / cloud provider is. Most companies want to keep their data in the local country so the cloud provider needs to be in the country."

Rollason said: "Many people assume that the server-hugger's silo is secure but there's more risk from end users doing things that you don't want them to do - such as cloud leakage - and we've seen people who have servers removed go and buy servers from Amazon. Also there's a lot of data loss down to internal issues eg rogue employees."

NetEvents Garmisch 2012 blog - part one

Dan Pitt, Open Network Foundation: A Revolution in Networking is on the Horizon

NetEvents, held in Garmisch at the Sonnenbichl Hotel and overlooked by the Zugspitz, Germany's highest mountain, opened with a keynote presentation on software-defined networking from Dan Pitt, Executive Director and sole full-time employee of the Open Network Foundation (ONF).

Networking equipment has always combined the control and data planes, said Pitt, but now they could be separated. The ONF supports software-defined networking (SDF), via the Open Flow protocol, which allows packet control in switches and routers to be separated from the mechanism that actually directs packets.

The advantages, according to Pitt, are that you would need only one operating system instance running on any single network and it would perform all the control functions that are currently performed by multiple instances, one in every switch. This lightens the processing load, it gives control to the centre, and it allows third parties to write applications for that device. These network apps might be specific to each business application, which would bind the network to business goals tighter than ever before. Switches and routers, Pitt said, then become simple packet forwarding devices.

"Telcos have been doing this for 100 years but it's new to data networking," Pitt said. "Instead of OSPF in every device, you put it in the central OS."

Member companies that have signed up for SDN and who are on the board of directors include large end users such as Google, Yahoo, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and NTT.

"No vendors are allowed on the board," Pitt said. "Only the board can found a working group, approve standards and appoint chairs of working groups. Vendors can be on the groups but not chair them. So users are in the driving seat."

Other member companies include chip and switch vendors, including Cisco, and others including Citrix, Dell, VMware and Infoblox.

"In future, networking will become just an integral part of computing, using same tools as the rest of computing," Pitt said. "Enterprises will get out of managing plumbing, operators will become software companies, IT will add more business value, and there will be more network startups from Generation Y."

Before taking his place on the panel for the next session, Pitt was asked what impact this architectural shift would have on network performance. He said that a 30,000-user campus could be supported by a four-year-old Dell PC.

Ian Keene, VP, Gartner: Software Defined networking - is it really the future?

The next session picked up where Pitt had left off and discussed the chances of software-defined networking's success. Keene prefaced the panel discussion by asking: "In 2010, the top three network equipment vendors owned 82% of the $6bn market - what will they do? What about carrier networks, a $13bn market with top four vendors having 85% of market value. Will SDN rule?"

All the panel members, from Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), SDN board member Deutsche Telekom, Alcatel Lucent, Accedian, Enterasys, and the ONF's Dan Pitt, agreed that SDN was the future.

Asked about compliance, Pitt said the ONF was developing conformance programmes and procedures. "The spec needs to be extended to circuit switching, not just packet switching to as this will allow all switching to be identical. It also needs to work with existing infrastructure," he said.

Challenges were addressed next. "SDN still needs more work, including carrier grade resilience, interoperability with existing systems, and MPLS interoperability," Peter Feil, research director at Deutsche Telekom said. "It needs more than just a four-year-old Dell."

Marc Lassere said that lots remained to be done: "How do controllers talk to each other, and what about redundancy?" Feil disagreed: "SDN is already in use - look at the board members who are already using it."

Discussing the architectural changes, Markus Nispel, technology strategist at Enterasys, said: "You need to check the use cases that will affect the upper layers, and I agree you need a distributed control plane for complex secured networks. But hybrid systems will be around for a while."

Asked about performance, Lassere said: "Packets will still run at wire speed but this is not the main problem. You will need APIs that allow apps and the network to talk to each other and right now they don't." Feil said that the community would build apps using the open source model.

As for SDN's chances, Volker Distelrath, research head at NSN said: "It's open, that's the crucial thing and the main players have bought in and are working on it." Craig Easley, marketing VP at Accedian said: "End users are working on it too and that's a big point in its favour."