CloudEthernet Forum Ensures Ethernet Will Dominate

After 40 years you’d think that Ethernet pretty much owns the network space. You’d be right. Token Ring...gone. Token Bus...gone. Fibre Channel... not so fast. SONET... alive and well. T-Carrier...still going strong. It’s not an Ethernet world yet, but it will be if some disrupting technology like, say, the cloud doesn’t spoil the party.

This is the impetus to the formation of a new industry standards group called CloudEthernet Forum. Founded just last month, this spinoff of the highly successful Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) looks to “address the need for scaling and enhancing Ethernet technology to meet the stringent demands of delivering cloud services.”

What’s threatening to derail Ethernet-everything is something that Bob Metcalfe couldn’t have foreseen back in the 70’s. It’s the massive expansion of networks from hundreds to thousands to millions to billions of machines all talking at the same time. In the case of virtual machines, they are all talking within the same data center. The rise of the “Internet of Things” is only making this situation worse. Pretty soon everything manufactured will have intelligence, even if it is subtly hidden from view.

The old collision domain Ethernet protocol has long given way to a collision-free topology implemented with switches and routers. This eliminated the throughput degradation caused by all those crashing packets and had the additional advantage of doubling network capacity in full duplex mode. Physical layer Ethernet has evolved from thick coaxial cables to unshielded twisted pair telephone-type wiring to fiber optic strands. The next desperately needed improvement was allowing Ethernet to escape from the LAN into the MAN and the WAN.

This is where the Metro Ethernet Forum came into being. The MEF is an industry standards group comprised of over 200 stakeholders including telecommunications service providers, cable MSO’s, network equipment manufacturers, software developers, semiconductor producers and testing companies. Their 10 year mission has been to extend the Ethernet standards to get past the distance limitations needed to extend Ethernet outside the building or campus. They’ve been so successful that Carrier Ethernet services are now common in Metropolitan Area Networks, nationwide fiber optic networks and worldwide communications. The E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface ensures that carriers can seamlessly exchange traffic, expanding the service footprints of all participants.

What’s been good for the MAN and WAN is surely good in the cloud, where multi-tenant data centers are rapidly replacing in-house server racks. While it’s possible to build a small cloud with a few racks of equipment, what’s really happening is the building of exponentially larger data centers that need to be located near available sources of power to ensure that they can get the electricity they need to operate. These secure facilities house thousands upon thousands of physical servers that morph into millions and millions of virtual machines. Start of the art Ethernet networks are in danger of straining under the new loads.

What sort of improvements does the CloudEthernet Forum expect to make? VLAN scaling, past the current 4,096 VLAN number limit is on the list. The forum intends to recommend enhancements to minimize the effort required to setup and operate virtual machines. They’ll also work on increasing layer 2 performance that can be degraded by broadcast multicast and unicast traffic. Another initiative will be to support cloud storage requiring connections that are highly resilient with extremely low latency. The big plan is to enable millions of virtual servers and storage devices to work effectively over regional and global networks.

The initial members of the CloudEthernet Forum include Alcatel-Lucent, Verizon, Tata Communications, Spirent, PCCW, Juniper Networks, HP, Equinix and Avaya. This august group will no doubt be expanding soon as standards work gets underway.

What can we expect from Ethernet in the future? Right now the switchover from telecom-based standards such as T1, DS3 and SONET to Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet is accelerating. There are big advantages in linking multiple business sites with Ethernet services that can create a single bridged LAN for the entire corporation. Scalable Ethernet connections allow companies to order the bandwidth they need today while knowing that they can quickly ramp up their WAN speed when the need arises.

Ethernet is proving itself as a reliable connection to the cloud when high speed and low latency are necessary to maintain productivity. The CloudEthernet Forum will no doubt ensure that communications to and within the cloud are able to expand as fast as needed to meet the growing demands of information technology.

Are you missing out on the performance improvements and cost savings offered by Ethernet connections? Check out the expanded services and pricing available for your business locations.

Fiber Optic Service FAQ, Part 3

Here are more frequently asked questions and answers about fiber optic service for your business You may also be interested in the first and second lists of fiber FAQs.

Q: What is a lit building?

A: This is a building that already has fiber installed and “lit” for service. Usually only a single carrier lights each building. If your building is lit, you can easily get bandwidth services from that carrier.

Q: What are wavelength services?

A: A wavelength or Lambda is a particular color of laser light that carries the signal through the optical fiber. Early fiber systems used only a single light beam. Today, multiple beams travel the same fiber strand using a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. You can lease an entire wavelength for your exclusive use if you wish.

Q: Why would you lease a wavelength rather than just buying bandwidth?

A: Leasing a wavelength gives you high bandwidth dedicated to your use. Typically each wavelength supports 10 Gbps. You can decide whether to use SONET, Ethernet or some other protocol over the wavelength because the service does not share traffic with other users.

Q: What is dark fiber?

A: This refers to fiber strands that have been installed but not lit for service. Most fiber optic cable has dozens or hundreds of fiber strands all bundled together. Carriers that have extra strands they aren’t using will often lease them to other carriers or businesses that need the capacity.

Q: What’s the advantage of dark fiber?

A: Bandwidth is nearly unlimited and security is high because there is no traffic on the fiber strand other that what you provide.

Q: What protocols does dark fiber support?

A: Anything you can generate, including SONET, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and others. By using Wavelength Division Multiplexing, you can assign a different protocol to each wavelength and they won’t interact.

Q: Why wouldn’t you select dark fiber?

A: You’ll need to provide the termination equipment at each end, which can be rather expensive. On wavelength and other bandwidth services the carrier does this. Also, there may not be any dark fiber available on the route you have in mind.

Q: How does fiber support cloud services?

A: Cloud communications are bandwidth intensive. All the traffic that used to run to your in-house data center now goes over a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection to the cloud. You need high bandwidth and low latency connections for this to work properly, just what fiber is good at.

Is fiber bandwidth service the right solution to your business needs? Compare costs and service options for the fiber optic service options available for your business locations.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 1 and Part 2.

New Data Center Networking Solutions

Data management and storage requirements for enterprise level organizations continue to increase. In addition, a majority of enterprise IT departments now replicate data between data centers. This has created a need for new and more cost effective bandwidth services, especially at 10 Gbps and above. Level 3 is addressing these needs with an enhancement of its existing data center networking solutions.

What’s different about data center connectivity compared to other business requirements? Data centers are far more concentrated than other computing resources. This is especially true for storage, a prime driver for offsite data centers in the first place. What this does is increase the need for high bandwidth connections between the concentration of storage and the concentration of users. It also influences the connectivity required.

What you need for last mile connections to an MPLS network or private lines to link business locations can usually be handled by T-Carrier, SONET/SDH or Carrier Ethernet line services. Data centers need higher bandwidth connections, but may also need special SAN protocols including Fibre Channel, Infiniband, ESCON and FICON.

SAN stands for Storage Area Networks. These are large collections of disk drives that connect directly to the application servers. SAN networks have traditionally been very localized, with the disk arrays physically near the servers. But what do you do when you need to duplicate data between data centers?

Many companies operate two or more data centers, sometimes a half-dozen or more. Some of this is due to mergers and acquisitions of formerly independent organizations with their own IT infrastructures. Much is driven by a need for disaster protection and recovery. When your business is critically dependent on its electronic data, normal backup processes aren’t adequate. You can have multiple copies of your files locked up locally and still be put out of business by a fire, tornado, flood, earthquake, hurricane or other disaster that destroys whole buildings and everything in them.

This means that you want to have copies of your critical data dispersed geographically. Establishing independent data centers in two or more cities far apart means than a disaster that takes out one center probably won’t knock out everything. There’s also an advantage to content providers in having the servers and data content located close to the customers. Latency is reduced and performance is increased due to less network congestion. A challenge is how to make sure the data is replicated exactly at all locations.

This is where long distance SAN networking comes into play. You need high levels of bandwidth but also support for SAN protocols to keep everything synchronized. FCoE or Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a popular protocol for transmitting Fibre Channel frames over 10 Gbps Ethernet connections. WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing avoids having to layer protocols to connect facilities. Each wavelength in a fiber optic link can be assigned its own protocol, regardless of what is running on other wavelengths in the same beam.

Level 3 Communications has expanded its data center networking portfolio to include SAN fiber channel protocol, dark fiber and managed fiber solutions. This is in addition to dedicated bandwidth services from 1 Gbps to more than 40 Gbps, including 10 Gbps EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service. They offer low latency route guarantees and an international service footprint, including a presence at key public exchange facilities.

Are you concerned with managing multiple high performance data centers? Would you like to have more options and/or better pricing for all your telecom connectivity needs? If so, get complementary consulting help and pricing and availability for high bandwidth networking services.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

WDM Wavelength Services Offer Expandability

If your need is for high bandwidth, security and flexibility, you should take a look at wavelength services. This is more than the typical fiber optic bandwidth service. It’s almost like owning the network facilities yourself.

The thing about fiber optic transmission is that it offers almost limitless bandwidth. That’s a foreign concept to anyone who’s been tied to copper wireline services. It’s also an odd notion for those who pick a fiber optic service level and sign a contract for it. If you order OC3 SONET service, what you get is a line that runs at 155.52 Mbps with a payload of 148.608 Mbps. You don’t have to fill the pipe continuously, but the capacity is there all the time. If you need more bandwidth, you only recourse is to add an additional service or upgrade to something like OC12 or Gigabit Ethernet.

What you are using with fiber optic services is not the entire bandwidth of the fiber. In fact, you may be totally unaware that your signals are multiplexed with lots of others all traveling on the same fiber strand. If there is only one laser beam with a single color or wavelength shining through that fiber, it likely has a capacity of at least 10 Gbps. Chances are, though, that there are many different color beams all riding simultaneously down the fiber. They don’t interfere because they are different colors of light, called Lambdas, all in the infrared region of the spectrum. Each Lambda or wavelength has a carrying capacity as high as 10 Gbps. You can think of these as equivalent to individual high capacity lines. If the fiber optic strand were made of copper, each wavelength would be a separate pair of wires.

What if you could lease a wavelength instead of a copper wireline or a fixed bandwidth service on a fiber optic cable? The wavelength doesn’t care what modulation or data pattern you use. It’s just a pure light beam of one wavelength. There’s no fancy footwork required to convert between one protocol and another just to be compatible with what’s running on the line. That opens some interesting possibilities. You could use your leased wavelength to carry Gigabit Ethernet or Fast Ethernet, SONET OC3, OC12 or OC48, Fibre Channel, or ESCON.

Need to transport a variety of high bandwidth protocols? OK. Just lease multiple wavelengths and give each protocol its own Lambda. The won’t interfere. In fact, they won’t even known the other wavelengths exist.

This type of network transport is no longer a pipe dream. All you need to do is lease WDM Wavelength Services from a fiber optic network carrier such as AboveNet. What AboveNet has done is install a base of dark fiber in many metropolitan areas. It’s called dark because it hasn’t already be put into service with a particular fiber optic service in mind. It’s like a blank canvas ready to become any work of art. AboveNet “lights” the fiber as needed using WDM equipment to create their wavelength services.

WDM stands for Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It’s the technology that creates multiple wavelengths on a single fiber strand. This is a standardized process that ensures there is enough separation between the wavelengths that they won’t interfere and that different brands of networking equipment will work together. There are two flavors of WDM: CWDM or Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing and DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The difference is that DWDM squeezes more wavelengths, up to 160, onto a given fiber but at a higher cost than CWDM.

Is this affordable? AboveNet says that their CWDM service becomes competitive at the OC-3 service bit-rate. If you can use more bandwidth than that, you’ll save money with CWDM. Typical applications include connecting corporate headquarters with branch offices and data centers, or connecting multiple hospitals and medical centers for exchange of medical images and other health service records.

Has your business or organization become limited by the network services available? Perhaps it’s time to move up to wavelength services. Find out by getting prices and availability of fiber optic wavelength services for your locations. Complementary consulting by bandwidth experts is also available for serious applications.



Note: Image of light spectrum from prisms courtesy of Marcellus Wallace on Wikimedia Commons.

AboveNet Core Wave Makes Dedicated Wavelength Bandwidth Available

What do you do when ordinary bandwidth is no longer up to the task? You go above and beyond with AboveNet’s Core Wave service. For demanding financial services, media, health care, retail and government applications, you really do have to get to the core of fiber optic transport. The very core.

Most telecom services are electrically multiplexed somewhere along the way. What multiplexing does is combine your bandwidth service with dozens, hundreds or thousands of others to fill the capacity of a fiber optic core network. But what if you have enough demand on your own to take all the bandwidth a service provider can deliver?

One answer is to become your own service provider. You do this buy building-out or buying fiber strands or even entire fiber optic cables. That’s what Cable TV MSOs do. So do major telecom service providers. But bandwidth is their business. It’s what they do to generate income. You aren’t really in the business of bandwidth. You simply want to use large amounts of bandwidth to enable your business processes. Does investing large amounts of capital in fiber infrastructure really make sense for your corporate mission?

Of course it doesn’t. What does make sense is to partner with a service provider that has already made the investment and has enough bandwidth capacity at their disposal to meet your current and future needs. AboveNet has that capability and now they are making it available to large organizations in major markets.

Let’s take a look at AboveNet Core Wave. It’s a high capacity bandwidth service for point to point connectivity in metro areas, like New York City. Right now you can get 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps service. The platform is scalable, so that when demand justifies it AboveNet can also offer 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps bandwidth services.

How are they doing this? The platform is built on a fiber optic network managed by ROADMs. A ROADM is a Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer. This is the cutting edge of fiber optic networking. What a ROADM does is manage the traffic on the network optically. Each fiber transports not one, but many different light beams known as Lambdas or wavelengths. Each wavelength is said to have a different color, although these are in the infrared spectrum and not visible like the colors from a prism. A ROADM can manage dozens or hundreds of wavelengths in a process known as DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing.

Normally wavelengths have such high carrying capacity that they transport traffic for many companies. But Core Wave gives you the option of having your own dedicated wavelength. The wavelength is like a blank slate to be written on, so you are not forced into the protocol of the core network. AboveNet gives you the choice of Ethernet, SONET/SDH, or Fibre Channel for storage networking.

Are your bandwidth needs pressing the limits of conventional telecom services? If so, perhaps it is time you moved up to fiber optic wavelength services, like AboveNet Core Wave. Why not check pricing and availability now? There is likely more capacity available than you think.