Advances in communication have occurred so rapidly that we assume we can get any information we need at any time -- from viewing satellite pictures of our own home to accessing the sales automation tool from the office -- while we’re at home or on the beach. Meanwhile these advances have complicated things for today’s businesses, especially multi-location enterprises, as information silos and access requirements continue to grow.
In fact, enterprises now find that the myriad types of information they wish to communicate and the numbers of enterprise locations that must be connected exceed the performance capabilities of the typical corporate network installed just a few short years ago.
Today’s Internet has become immensely powerful and provides enterprises with unprecedented connectivity. However formidable, the power and resources of the Internet are causing enterprise on-ramps to be crushed by the burgeoning demand they have spawned.
Since corporate connections to the Internet usually treat all traffic as one big data stream, mission-critical applications stand in line for available bandwidth with unimportant applications. How often have you heard the comment, “Boy, the network sure is slow today,” as co-workers lament their participation in the World Wide Wait?
Unpredictable network performance is a killer for real-time applications like voice and video, but can also render other important business applications all but unuseable. Simply put, this is not just about bandwidth; different types of applications require different network characteristics, and successfully integrating them all requires at least a modest understanding of the needs of each.
Multi-location enterprises are especially susceptible to this dilemma. They often use their Internet connection to support proprietary business applications that ride inside secure “tunnels” from one location to another. However, without a way to segregate those different applications -- both in terms of the “type” of information being sent and its relative “importance” to the enterprise -- the exiting packets hit the corporate network connection with all the comportment of a Hollywood cattle call. The same thing happens on the receiving end, for, as we all know, the Internet does not discriminate!
Attempts to solve this problem usually start with an all-too-familiar approach of adding MORE POWER (bandwidth) -- a dubious solution that dramatically increases cost and complexity, while serving only to temporarily alleviate the symptoms rather than curing the root cause. Now a widely available product, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), is the mantra of enterprises “in the know,” but it comes with its own set of complexities and security risks. It offers great job security for the resident technologist, though, if you can get it.
As with most things, complex systems are far more interesting, but usually far less effective in solving problems. In this case, a simple solution would involve carriers offering a way for customers to tell the carrier how to treat different information as they prepare to accept these multiple information streams on a single connection. That will represent a much-needed leap forward in acknowledging and addressing the evolving needs of enterprise communications. As a famous technologist once observed “We have the technology…”
— David Malfara, President and CEO, Remi Communications
We are hearing more and more about I/O virtualization being used as a tool to improve resource utilization and QOS. Does this technology impact a geographically distributed datacenter environment or is this new virtualized approach simply improving in-house, core network QOS, respons times and utilization?
Do you think we are seeing the beginnings of a trend where I/O virtualization will be utilized at the backbone/infrastructure level as well? I believe that hardware virtualization is here to stay and will likely impact most corporate and infrastructure systems eventually due to it's flexibility, adaptability, and fault tolerance/hot migration characteristics. Now that virtualization model is well entrenched and accepted in the data center, it is likely to spread to lots of other systems.
To your point, the ways in which QoS may be introduced are numerous. The bottlenecks I see most often in customer networks are at the access/egress points. These problems can be resolved with simple DiffServ markings and the layer-3 queuing techniques you mentioned, however, getting a customer to mark packets can be challenging if not impossible. Return traffic can be even more difficult.
An easier way to resolve the issue and add some much-needed security is offered with a layer-2 approach where, for instance, 802.1p bits can be used to prioritize traffic within a customer "virtual circuit" using provider equipment at the customer location. Both VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) and VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service) technologies support this capability without requiring a complicated "peer" routing interface between customer and provider. A layer-2 based architecture where VLANs are extended across service areas using VPLS represents a secure solution that provides network performance characteristics based upon the needs of each information flow (ex. transaction, bulk transfer, real-time, etc.) AND the importance of each information flow to the business goals of the user. The markings would not be used to drive prioritization within the carrier network (where we all have plenty of bandwidth) but would simply be preserved to be used at the egress point where the marking would help to organize information outflows to the end point.
IP rules the world but it must sit on an intelligent, QoS-enabled layer-2 infrastructure in order to drive maximum security and efficiency at the bottleneck points of the network - the on/off ramps.
WWW = World Wide Wait. I love this acronym! And it is very appropriate for most of us..... usually when we have to download that critical document for a meeting that has already started.
Yes, I agree that Quality of Service (QoS) is a major concern for the Internet. Unpredictable network performance, latency and congestion are killers for real-time applications. We are all waiting for that day when the carriers can offer a way for customers to tell the carrier how to treat and prioritize their information on the web. "Best effort" IP routing just does not make it any more.
The early Internet relied on TCP to provide flow control, error checks and retransmission of data packets when necessary. TCP provided a best-effort level of QoS that was acceptable for email and web browsing. Another primitive (but effective) method used for early QoS was the First-In First-Out (FIFO) buffer. FIFO buffers provide a simple method to store packets when there is temporary network congestion, but make no intelligent decision about the priority of traffic. So the best-effort tools of TCP and FIFO do not provide an acceptable level of QoS for today’s Internet.
There are QoS methods for differentiated service that can prioritize IP traffic and provide a statistical preference for higher priority traffic.Policy based routing, priority queuing, IP precedence and flow-based weighted fair queuing (WFQ) are a few methods that enable providers to classify and prioritize IP traffic. But none of these methods provide guaranteed end to end service.
Protocols that provide a guaranteed level of QoS by reserving network resources are available, but usually only work well on smaller networks. For example, the RSVP protocol uses out-of-band signaling to reserve resources across a network. Integrated services (IntServ) is another QoS method (used with RSVP) to prioritize traffic and reserve resources. But on a network the size of the Internet, it would be impossible to keep track of all the resource reservations (core routers could have thousands of reservations).
You mentioned MPLS which is the flavor of the month QoS method. MPLS is effective at labeling packets with routing and priority information. But MPLS can only provide QoS within a MPLS domain and not end to end.
Reading back over my wordy message, I’m not sure what the solution will be to solve QoS over the Internet (I won’t even mention wireless mobile QoS challenges!) I kind of like the age-old QoS solution that you mentioned: more bandwidth!
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
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While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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