On Ramps That Improve Cloud Performance

By: John Shepler

IT infrastructure is now key to your business. It’s a lot more than a few servers in a closet down the hall these days. Chances are that you are using Software as a Service (SaaS) running on popular public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure plus your own private data center. What once was an easy interconnect to everything on a company LAN is now a worrying mix of local and remote connections. Are you stuck with performance that varies constantly and nightmares of security breaches, or is there a much better solution?

Weak Links In The Chain
When equipment or services are remotely located, the first thing everybody thinks of is connecting through the Internet. Broadband is readily available nearly everywhere and very reasonably priced. This is especially true if you just connect through a Cable broadband service. Reliability of HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) networks has gotten very good and prices are as low as you’ll find.

The massive adoption of consumer broadband is what has kept prices low even for business broadband. The tradeoff is that you are sharing that connection with dozens or even hundreds of other users. You can’t see them, but you can feel the effect as the Internet speeds up and slows down.

Dedicated Access Improves Performance
The Internet is an amazing data superhighway, but the on and off ramps are where a lot of the congestion is. A good solution is get a private ramp, called Dedicated Internet Access or DIA, between you and your Internet service provider. This is most likely a fiber Ethernet connection but could be Fixed Wireless as long as the path you are using is dedicated for your use only.

Why Not All Private Access?
The next step up is a completely private line from your local network to your cloud service provider. Once again, this would be a fiber optic Ethernet running 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps with guaranteed performance. This is like having your own highway with no traffic other than your company data. It’s the closest thing to a LAN that stretches across the country to include your cloud services.

The drawback to dedicated private lines is the cost, as you might suspect. There is no one else sharing the pipe, so there is no one else helping to pay for it. You have all the bandwidth and the security of a walled-off connection, but you have all the costs too.

An intermediate solution that maintains connection performance and offers high security over long distances is the MPLS network with dedicated access lines. The MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network is a private Wide Area Network with costs that are shared among many subscribers, but with performance guarantees instead of the “best effort” you get on the Internet. Security is better than the Internet because the network uses a proprietary label switching protocol and not the easier to hack TCP/IP.

Move Next Door To Really Improve Performance
Remember how easily it was to get all the network performance you needed when everything was in the same building and all you needed was runs of Ethernet cabling? You can replicate that by choosing to move your equipment to a colocation center that also houses your software service providers or has dedicated cloud on-ramps.

This is an example of a hybrid cloud. Your servers and storage are in racks in the colo building that supplies power and cooling. It also has direct cable or fiber connections to service providers housed in the same building. Other direct connections go to points of presence for large public cloud services that are located in multiple data centers around the world. By accessing one of these cloud on-ramps you avoid the vagaries of the Internet and connect your private cloud to their public cloud to create the hybrid cloud arrangement.

Of course, this can be expanded to include multiple services providers as long as they have a physical presence or on-ramps available in the data center. Connect to as many as make sense to create a multi-cloud that give you all the services you need. The connection to your business is then through a dedicated private line or Dedicated Internet Access from your colocated equipment back to your offices. This is considerably more cost effective than having many dedicated private lines to widely scattered service providers.

Do you need higher performance than your current connections can provide or have a requirement to interconnect multiple service providers? If so, find out what mix of dedicated, dedicated access and cloud on-ramps would work best for your company.

Connecting Offices Between the US and Mexico

By: John Shepler

Many companies do business in both the United States and Mexico. There are numerous carriers that serve the US market and others that serve the Mexican market. But what do you do when you need the same service level in both countries?

International Connections
Companies that do business internationally need telecom services that cross national borders. Fortunately, there are a number of carriers that offer international line services. These include connections between US cities and those in Mexico.

What type of connections? Today you have options for voice, data and video services. You can connect just two locations or create a large virtual LAN that includes all of your business locations in North America and beyond.

International Private Lines
The Bell Labs developed T-Carrier system is a standard used throughout North America. That includes the US, Canada and Mexico.

T-Carrier includes T1 (DS1) that runs at 1.5 Mbps and T3 (DS3) at 45 Mbps. In-between those standard levels additional bandwidths can be created by bonding T1 lines together. Two T1 lines give you 3 Mbps, three lines offers 4.5 Mbps and so on. The maximum bandwidth available by T1 line bonding is 10 to 12 Mbps. Above that, you generally run out of copper pairs available to be pressed into service or the bonded service become cost prohibitive.

T3 lines can be rate limited to bridge that gap between 10 Mbps and 45 Mbps. The line itself runs at full speed, but you only pay for the bandwidth that is actually enabled. The cost savings may or may not be attractive for fractional T3 service, depending on your needs.

It’s important to note that T1 and T3 lines are dedicated private circuits that are always available or “nailed up.” You don’t need to dial into them and they are reserved for your exclusive use. Since you are the only customer on the line, the only network congestion possible is due to your own demands on the circuit.

Fiber Optic International Lines
Fiber optic lines were originally developed using SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standards deliberately chosen to be compatible with the T-Carrier system. The entry level service is OC3 which runs at 155 Mbps. It is designed to easily transport 3 T3 line services. In fact, T3 is most often carried for most of the transmission distance by OC-3 fiber service and then provisioned by coaxial copper cable at the customer demarcation point.

SONET is still the core transmission technology of most wide area networks. OC-3 is just the starting point. Other commonly available services include OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

Like T-Carrier, SONET services are dedicated private lines. You don’t shared the bandwidth with anyone. It is completely reserved for your use and sits idle when there is no traffic.

Ethernet International Services
Telephone traffic was dominant on international telecom circuits for a century. That has changed dramatically to where voice is now the minor traffic and data is dominant. On some networks, video is not the big bandwidth user, followed by large data transfers and then voice traffic.

This change in the nature of telecommunications traffic has spurred a change in the transmission technology. Nearly all local area networks have adopted the Ethernet standard. It’s logical that metro and wide area networks do the same.

The equivalent to T-Carrier or SONET is EPL or Ethernet Private Line. The beauty of Ethernet is that you plug the network line into your headquarters LAN at one end and your branch office LAN at the other. It’s Ethernet all the way. Because of this, you can bridge two LANs so that they perform as one large local network.

Carrier Ethernet, as it is called, offers another service called Ethernet LAN service. This is a meshed network that can connect 3 or more locations as one LAN. It’s perfect for companies with operations in multiple locations.

MPLS Networks
For international connections, like US and Mexico, MPLS networks often offer the best value. MPLS is a private “cloud” network with nationwide and international nodes. You can get the same point to point connections offered by dedicated private lines, only on MPLS they are called virtual private lines and virtual private LAN. The virtual designation comes from the cloud structure of the network. You are sharing the network with other traffic rather than having a circuit all to yourself. The MPLS network operator sets up your virtual paths and guarantees bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss.

In the end, you have the sense of private line performance, but a much more affordable rate with the shared network infrastructure.

MPLS networks can carry voice and data traffic simultaneously with class of service provisions to prevent data from overwhelming voice. VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is VoIP carried on MPLS networks. It provides your telephone service among multiple business locations.

Do you have a need to interconnect offices between the US and Mexico? If so, check out the options available with International private lines and MPLS networks.

Improve Cloud Performance With Direct Network Access

By: John Shepler

In the mad dash to the cloud, some companies are left wondering if they were better off before the upset the IT apple cart. Everything was running smoothly and business was humming along. It was the lure of cost savings or avoiding huge capital investment that made cloud hosted services look so good. Wasn’t performance supposed to improve, not decline, when you move to the cloud? Why on Earth didn’t it work out that way?

Chances are that there is nothing wrong with your cloud services. They do exactly as advertised for other companies. Costs go down, performance goes up and you can’t run out of resources. You don’t have the wrong cloud, you have the wrong connection.

How can that be? It’s the same Internet connection we’ve refined over the years. Response is snappy, files transfer smoothly and it almost never goes down. We’ll at least all those things were true BEFORE we made the move.

I believe you. The Internet is a marvelous service. I wouldn’t be without it no matter where I am. In fact, I can’t do business without the Internet and you probably can’t either. What you need to know is that the Internet is good for some things and not so good for others.

What’s it good at? Connecting you to the endless sea of consumers in their homes and out & about. You’ll need a good broadband connection to enable your traveling and home workers. Email is ubiquitous. Certainly you must have that today, right?

Indeed you must. Those needs can only be met by great Internet service. It’s everything else that doesn’t belong on the Internet that’s getting you in trouble.

What would that be? Basically, anything that is real time or response sensitive. File transfers aren’t all that time critical, a few seconds or even a few minutes delay probably won’t matter as long as there are no errors in the transfer. Email? You wouldn’t notice anything but major delays. You might even appreciate less dinging from the mailbox. How about VoIP telephone, video conferencing or software as a service? Bingo! These are the applications that can be ruined by poor network performance.

The Internet was designed to be really, really good at making sure that files get from point A to point B without corruption. That doesn’t mean that packets don’t get mangled. There is a built-in mechanism (TCP/IP) that sends another copy of any packet that doesn’t arrive intact. It doesn’t matter how congested the Internet gets or how crummy the line noise is. Your files will get where they are intended to go in perfect shape… eventually.

That’s the problem. We are used to local networks that have all the capacity required and set up so that real time processes get priority. Being relatively small and internal to the company, there’s isn’t much of a problem with noisy lines destroying bits in a packet. As far as you are concerned, the network is transparent from your workstation to the IT data center. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were still so once you move to the cloud?

It can be. What you need to do is get off the Internet “superhighway,” as it is euphemistically called, and get a direct network connection to your cloud services. This direct connection runs via a private network engineered for high performance. This can be in the form of private lines, be they SONET fiber optic or Ethernet Private Lines. You may even need to engage wavelength services if your requirements are massive.

Another approach is to connect at both ends to a MPLS IPVN network. MPLS networks are a shared resource among multiple users but with traffic management unknown on the Internet. This gives you the performance of having your own private line, but at a lower cost.

What can you expect with direct connections to the cloud? Similar responsiveness to what you have with a local data center, even though the cloud data center is somewhere on the other side of the country. This means that employees don’t have to pause what they are doing to wait for the connection to catch up. VoIP phone calls through hosted PBX services maintain their voice quality and even support HD voice for greater clarity. Video conferences maintain their HD quality and lose the jerkiness. Even backup and recovery processes run faster and more smoothly.

You don’t have to give up performance to gain the cost savings and scalability of cloud computing services. What you need is a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection that supports the performance capability of the cloud.

Could you use a better connection in your business? Check out prices and options for direct cloud service connections and private lines now.

More Fiber Optic Network Services For Canada

By: John Shepler

Enterprise and wholesale bandwidth users in Canada now have access to expanded high speed network connections throughout the country and to the United States and other international destinations. Let’s take a look at what’s happening, what it might mean and how you can get access to these services.

XO Communications is a major international telecommunications carrier based in the United States. Within the U.S., XO supports fiber connections to 4,000 on-net buildings with more than 1.6 million fiber miles in a 29,000 mile Tier 1 IP network that spans the nation. They also connect internationally to nodes in Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Toronto that feed 55 countries.

Toronto is a recent addition. XO initiated service through its new hub at the 151 Front Street West carrier hotel in Toronto last October. This hub connects to Montreal and back to the U.S. XO network through a 600 mile fiber route to Albany and Buffalo, NY.

XO has now expanded its Canadian services to cover all of Canada’s six time zones with high speed fiber network services that include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), high speed IP transit for other carriers, MPLS IP-VPN, VPLS, Ethernet, Private Line and Wavelength services for enterprises and wholesale customers. For multinational companies, MPLS IP-VPN can interconnect facilities in 60 countries. The expanded connections in the United States include New York City, Cleveland and Seattle.

Canada and the United States share the worlds longest border called the International Boundary. Cross-border business exceeds $1 billion per day & is growing at 5% a year. Communications between our two countries is vital to that commerce. Not the slow traditional line speeds, mind you. What’s in demand is 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps links. These connections support a wide variety of enterprise needs in the fields, of finance, manufacturing (especial automotive), media,& entertainment including film and television production, retail, plus energy including oil and gas production.

Today’s high productivity business requirements include high bandwidth, high capacity, low latency, packet loss & jitter, and high security. Point to point Ethernet private line services provide that kind of connectivity between two locations. Many large companies have traditionally created their own corporate long haul networks using multiple point to point private lines. A newer and more cost effective approach is to employ MPLS networks to accomplish the same results.

What do MPLS networks offer? They’re also called MPLS IP-VPN because these networks inherently provide virtual private networking by design. They easily transport IP traffic, but are not IP at their core. They use a proprietary switching and routing scheme called label switching, which is the LS in MPLS. Being privately owned and operated combined with label switching technology provides a much higher degree of security than you’d expect from the public Internet. If you feel that you still need an even higher level of security, such as for financial data, you have the option of encrypting the traffic you send to the MPLS network.

MPLS networks enjoy a substantial cost advantage over dedicated private lines because they use a common network infrastructure to serve many customers. Each customer has a committed information rate without interference from other customer’s traffic. It feels like you have the network all to yourself, but don’t have to pay for the construction and operation of a large international fiber optic network.

Do you need connectivity within Canada or cross-border between Canada and the United States? You have more options now than ever before. Find availability and pricing for Ethernet, MPLS, Wavelengths, private lines and Dedicated Internet Access from XO Communications and other major international network service providers.


Note: Map of North America courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.