Will Elastic Bandwidth Help Your Company?

A big advantage to professional telecom services like T1 lines and SONET fiber optic connections has been the rock solid symmetrical bandwidth they provide. Order a T1 line and you can count on 1.5 Mbps in both directions all the time. Likewise, a SONET OC-3 service gives you 155 Mbps, also bidirectionally 100% of the time. What if that is no longer the type of bandwidth you need? What if you need something that can scale up and down at will? Welcome to the world of elastic bandwidth.

You might be thinking that this is similar to the kind of “best effort” services provided by DSL or Cable broadband. Those services do, indeed, provide variable bandwidth. However, the bandwidth that you get is determined by the traffic level on the network. If many users are demanding service at the same time, the total bandwidth gets divvied up and everybody gets less than the maximum capacity of the connection.

Elastic bandwidth is something different. Instead of being at the whim of network congestion, you actively control the capacity of your connection. You scale it up or down to meet your needs at the moment.

The service provider tw telecom is a pioneer in the field of elastic bandwidth with the recent introduction of their Dynamic Capacity service. Instead of a fixed amount of bandwidth that is determined when the line lease is signed, Dynamic Capacity users have the ability to scale up their bandwidth in a matter of seconds without service interruption. This is done by the customer themselves using a self-service portal. What’s more, users can schedule bandwidth increases for a particular amount of time to accommodate particular events such as overnight data backup. The programmed bandwidth changes then occur automatically without anyone having to manually intervene.

This goes far beyond previous solutions that include the ability to burst or use more bandwidth than you are allocated for short periods of time. It’s something of an extension of the rapidly scaling feature offered by many Business Ethernet providers. Carrier Ethernet is designed to be much easier to scale up and down than legacy line services. Providers will typically let you increase your bandwidth with a phone call to their office. It may take a few hours or a few days to realize the change, but this is far superior to having to wait weeks for a truck roll to change out equipment or make adjustments to the WAN network.

Dynamic Capacity is one of several phases of tw telecom’s Intelligent Network approach. The idea is to create a far more flexible network design that includes customer IT management in the loop. The first phase introduced detailed performance data reporting of Ethernet or IP VPN services. An future phase will add API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) so that applications themselves can request bandwidth changes as needed.

With the advent of cloud services, the concept of resource elasticity is gaining steam. Virtualization of servers and storage makes it easy for customers to provision more resources themselves in a matter of seconds or minutes. You simply pay for what you use and can change your mind anytime, depending on current business demands. Now, that same elasticity is being applied to WAN and metro Ethernet bandwidth services. This seems like the final piece in the puzzle to optimize the performance of cloud services.

Are you frustrated by fixed or limited networking resources? If so, then perhaps a bandwidth increase or an elastic solution like Dynamic Capacity would make a big difference in your business. Get options and pricing for copper and fiber bandwidth solutions now.

How To Deal With Sudden Massive Bandwidth Demands

You’ve been cruising along with fairly stable but slowly increasing network bandwidth demands for years. Then, one day, you are faced with an “out of the blue” requirement to crank up your WAN bandwidth by a factor of 10x or 100x. How did that happen and what can you possibly do to deal with this kind of uncertainty?

It would be strange, indeed, if everybody in the company suddenly decided to start downloading HD movies on the sly. Would it blow your bandwidth allocation? You bet. Does it make any sense? No, of course not. Bandwidth demand doesn’t suddenly mushroom for no reason at all. If you get caught unable to support the need, it’s likely that there is a logical reason and one that makes a lot of sense in retrospect. The question is should you be able to see this coming in time to plan for it?

Sometimes you can’t help but get caught off guard. At a large company where I was working I got an email message with a curious attachment. When I opened it, there was a short video animation of a dancing baby. Not having seen this before, I watched it a few times and sent it on to some colleagues. Turns out that this was an early example of viral video. Everybody in the company was getting this video and passing it on to everybody else.

The IT department was flummoxed. All of a sudden they were running out of disk space. It took a day or two for them to figure out that all of our mail boxes were full of separate copies of the dancing baby video. They were multiplying faster than baby rabbits. Soon a missive came out from IT management demanding that we stop sending this thing around and delete the copies we already had. Crisis averted. Gigantic new disk drive order cancelled.

Today we grab everything off the Internet. Instead of getting a file in our email, it’s a Web link. You probably won’t be filling up the storage drive farm anymore, but any content brought down to the screen is going to have to traverse the WAN. It doesn’t take much of a viral anything to clog up a dedicated Internet connection if the file is big enough and enough people want it simultaneously.

Here’s a more recent example of where IT departments are getting caught short. C-level management gets a case of cloud fever when they see the potential cost savings and insist on moving every application possible to the cloud as fast as possible. In the mad scramble that ensues, the local data center goes dark while the same apps light up at a remote cloud provider. With nearly infinite CPU cycles and GB of storage on demand, everyone expects that the days of bottlenecks are over and that every process will just scream. Shock, horror, and disappointment permeate the office when users discover that formerly snappy responses from the system have gotten sluggish.

How can this possibly happen? Adjusting performance at the cloud doesn’t seem to make any difference. What got forgotten is that all that traffic that ran smoothly on the LAN all of a sudden transferred to the WAN. The line capacity is too small and the latency is too great. Whoever had the bright idea of saving a fortune by accessing the cloud via the Internet is finding out that network neutrality favors Netflix viewers as much as Salesforce.com users, as everyone’s packets take their turn on the Information Superhighway.

This scenario can be avoided with carefully planning and enough lead time to get the right bandwidth resources in place. That can be a challenge when bandwidth provisioning time is the long pole in the tent. You can hedge against future upsets by installing connections that have easier scaling than traditional telecom services. Carrier Ethernet is just such a service. Install a 1 GB port but only commit to 250 Mbps of service right now. When, out of the blue, some VP gets every employee signed up for an online video training course on the latest trendy productivity or quality initiative, at least you can grab the phone and tell your provider to crank up the bandwidth immediately.

You may also be served better by contracting with an MPLS network provider instead of running your own private network of point to point dedicated lines. It’s a major reconstruction effort to upgrade bandwidth on all those lines, especially if you have to go from copper to fiber. Your MPLS provider may be able to give you higher committed rates quickly or allow you to burst to handle unexpected peaks. Best to discuss these possiblities before signing a service contract.

It’s always possible to get deluged with a difficult or impossible to foresee spike in resource demand, including bandwidth. Know that there are services available now that make scaling BW up and down a much easier and quicker process than traditional approaches. Do a little planning now and see what’s available in Carrier Ethernet and MPLS Network services designed for rapid scalability.

Bandwidth For Data Center Consolidation

Companies are always on the lookout for ways to save money, while still delivering the same value to their customers. Efficiency improvements are a sure winner. You may think you’ve wrung out all the efficiency you can from your data centers, but have you?

Most organizations don’t appear fully formed. They start out as small operations to test the market and the concept. Over years or decades, they outgrow facilities, add new products, acquire and merge with other companies, and so on. At any given point in this process, there is generally something to be gained by stepping back and considering how you would set things up if you had a clean sheet of paper.

One byproduct of company mergers and expansions is that you wind up with multiple data centers. Each installation made sense at the time. They are uniquely designed to serve the needs of a certain type of company, a certain size enterprise or certain product line. But when conditions change, you can find that there are creeping inefficiencies that come from patching things together here and there. It all works, but it may be costing you more than it could.

Data center consolidation is an activity that many companies are taking a closer look at, especially as top line growth stagnates and staff has been thinned out. You may not want to put everything in one location for the sake of redundant backup. But you may have bits and pieces here and there that can be easily combined. Fewer locations with fewer servers, larger servers and virtualization are all techniques that ultimately lead to the same or better performance at reduced cost.

Something to bring into the analysis is the cost and availability of bandwidth to support your consolidation efforts. That’s especially true if only the data centers are being consolidated but other operations continue at your geographically diverse locations. You’ll need some way to get data from place to place. That task used to fall to the site LAN, but now you’ll need a WAN connection.

Depending on how much traffic leaves data center and goes to each site, you may not need the same bandwidth that you have on your LAN. Workers at each location need access, of course, but the heavy processing may be local to the data center with just data entry and results going across the WAN. You’ll need to ascertain that bandwidth requirement and then check availability and pricing of bandwidth options.

Fortunately, bandwidth today is cheaper than ever with more options available. Ethernet is becoming more and more popular. It tends to be cheaper per Mbps than traditional T-carrier and SONET services. You can get point to point Ethernet line services or multipoint Ethernet LAN service. MPLS networks are often an excellent solution to the task of interconnecting multiple sites. They offer managed bandwidth, class of service options, and lower costs that proprietary networks.

Some companies are finding the the place to consolidate their data centers is in a colocation center or “carrier hotel” This is a completely managed facility will physical security, fire protection, backup power and a full time technical staff. You’ll often find the best bandwidth deals at colo centers because carriers establish points of presence within the facility to reach many customers at once. With multiple service providers vying for your business, you can often get outstanding deals on any level of bandwidth your require.

Are you in the midst of or considering a data center consolidation project? If so, get competitive quotes for your bandwidth needs from multiple service providers. This will help you minimize your costs, while getting the performance you need.