What Dynamic CoS Means to You

By: John Shepler

Most of today’s networks are converged networks. In other words, they carry a variety of traffic from disk backups, file transfers, cloud access, VoIP telephony, audio streaming, video conferencing & streaming and web services. With all of that going on, how do you ensure that your networks maintain the integrity of every process?

The Need for QoS
A network is more than a “dumb pipe” when Quality of Service (QoS) controls are implemented. What do you need that for? Can’t you just provide enough bandwidth so that every packet can traverse the network without limitation?

You certainly can if your pockets are deep enough. 10 Gbps? 100 Gbps? 1 Tbs? There is some bandwidth level short of infinite that will carry any traffic you throw at it with ease. Unfortunately, such capacity gets very expensive very fast. On a local network, you may find that even the fiber you have isn’t enough. When ordering MAN and WAN bandwidth, the cost can make your eyes bug out.

Different Applications, Different Requirements
This is where quality of service controls come into play. Not every file transfer needs to take place in a fraction of a second. Nobody expects those overnight backups to get done in minutes. Your emails need to get to their destinations, but not instantly. Even video downloads are expected to take some amount of time, considering their size.

What we do insist on is telephone conversations that don’t break up or make each party wait a second before responding. We wan’t video conferencing that doesn’t look jerky and responses from cloud software that don’t hesitate, especially long and random pauses.

The truth is that not all packets need equal treatment. Some need to get right through the network as quickly as possible. Others can wait a second. Still others can get through when they get through… within reason.

CoS to Implement QoS
What’s needed is traffic control that decides how your network capacity is allocated among all the packets that want it at any given time. Implementing this process is called Quality of Service. The mechanism that does that is called Class of Service (CoS).

Class of Service is a numerical tag that is inserted in the Ethernet header. There are three bits assigned for this, giving 8 possible classes from 0 to 7. Most of the time you won’t need this many. A few different classes will keep the insensitive traffic from damaging the highly time sensitive traffic.

Chances are that you have CoS tags implemented on your local network now. This is especially true if you’ve made the transition from analog telephones to SIP phones for VoIP. Phone conversations and huge file transfers don’t play well together… unless they’re kept separate.

Think of CoS as lane assignments on a superhighway. Voice packets go on the high occupancy lane. Cloud traffic gets the fast lane and data backups go in the slow lane on the right. CoS tags determine which lane a packet gets to use.

The Next Step: Dynamic CoS
As conditions change, you may wish to alter the class assignments. Local IT people can implement these changes on your network. The WAN is another matter. Legacy procedures for making changes tend to involve paperwork and delays of even weeks for implementations.

tw telecom has implemented something called Dynamic CoS that allows you as the customer to prioritize your applications dynamically and in real-time. Along with dynamic bandwidth control, it gives you, the user, wide ranging control of WAN network resources, as if they were your own.

Are you in need of more flexible bandwidth services that can respond to rapid changes in business requirements? You may well benefit from newer intelligent and dynamic network services. Find out what MAN and WAN network services are available that meet your requirements.

Bandwidth on Demand Complements Cloud Services

By: John Shepler

A big advantage that cloud services have over running your own IT infrastructure is agility. A deep well of virtualized servers and disk drives combined with the ability to scale resources up or down on the fly gives businesses an unprecedented ability to match resources with need. The result? Greater productivity through higher resource utilization.

One part of the solution that hasn’t kept up with the move to virtualized resources is connectivity. The connection between your facility and the cloud is still treated as a large dedicated pipe of a fixed size. You can likely upgrade to a larger pipe when needed, but it is a major undertaking.

The WAN has to be reconfigured and equipment has to be replaced on-site. Just getting your order scheduled can involve serious time delays. The result is weeks or months needed to respond to a change in demand that the cloud handles almost instantaneously. Will bandwidth be the Achilles’ Heel of commerce?

Not for long. A major change already underway is the move from traditional TDM telecom services to Carrier Ethernet. What Carrier Ethernet offers, aside from a lower cost structure, is rapid scalability. The network is designed for quick changes and no premises equipment work is required so long as you have a large enough port installed. These days, that’s at least 100 Mbps and generally 1000 Mbps. Ports up to 10 Gbps are available.

Just because you have a larger Ethernet Port than you can use right now, doesn’t mean you have to pay for the full capability. You pick the bandwidth level that you need to support your operations and pay by the Mbps for that. The day will come when your current service gets maxed out, perhaps only at peak utilization times immediately and then most of the time. When you detect a bottleneck developing, you call your service provider and request an incremental upgrade. Your bandwidth will be increased in anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

What’s even better? Automatic bandwidth on demand. Why wait until network congestion starts to impact sales or employee productivity before you take action? Why not let the system monitor your activity and automatically increase your line speed when needed?

That’s the idea behind tw telecom’s new “Alerts Driven Dynamic Capacity” service. The idea is that you pre-set bandwidth utilization thresholds and the system automatically adds capacity when traffic rises above that threshold. You can double or triple your business Ethernet bandwidth up to 6 Gbps on a 10 Gbps port right on the fly. If the need is only to cover a short term peak demand, you can return to the originally committed network bandwidth when things slow down again.

What applications can make good use of this bandwidth on demand? tw telecom suggests that it is a good match for fluctuating demands on the network due to data backup & replication, seasonal traffic increases, limited time projects or campaigns, video conferencing, telepresence & streaming video, new software updates & deployment, variable cloud computing resource consumption and unforeseen events in general.

Where is this service available? It’s being offered to companies that have access available to tw telecom’s intelligent network services in any of the 18,500 fiber-connected buildings in 75 major metro areas.

Bandwidth on demand is clearly an idea who’s time has come. Agility is now part of efficient business structure, even being able to respond to changes in hours, minutes or even seconds. Look for these services to expand rapidly, perhaps as a part of a comprehensive cloud solution that increases the competitiveness of your business.

Are you in need of a better bandwidth or cloud solution? There is a lot to choose from compared to even a few years ago. Capabilities have increased while prices have been reduced. See what cloud and bandwidth services are available for your business locations from tw telecom and other major service providers.

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.

ENLAN Spans The Nation

The idea of having all your company locations on a single extended LAN is one that is gaining traction. Why continue to manage a nightmare of dozens or hundreds of connections to link an array of branch offices or retail locations when a single managed network can handles this for you?

TW Telecom calls this service ENLAN for Extended Native LAN. It provides users with a fast reliable and secure network that extends to encompass what is normally considered the WAN or Wide Area Network territory.

The WAN has traditionally been the jurisdiction of the telecom companies. If you needed to leave your own property, you were forced to convert your traffic to a telco standard to travel on their network and then convert back at the remote location. No more. A combination of Ethernet and MPLS is making the WAN invisible. It all now looks like one big LAN.

The way this works is that the core of the extended LAN is the TW Telecom MPLS Cloud. As a multi-protocol network, the MPLS Cloud can transport whatever digital format is required. That includes voice, video and data packets as well as traditional TDM services.

Ethernet is a perfect fit with MPLS networks. TW Telecom lets you keep everything in the Ethernet protocol, just like it is on your LAN. Rather than going through a speed bump when you have to exit your edge router and enter the WAN, you simply hook up to an Ethernet connection that leaves your facility. When this Ethernet access network reaches the MPLS Cloud it is assigned to one or more L2 Tunnels where it is transported to its intended destination. From there another Ethernet access connection takes it to the remote location.

Note that all connections are Ethernet and the transport takes place through layer 2 tunnels. That allows you to keep a switched Ethernet protocol linking all your desired locations. It looks just like one big LAN, even though you are traversing a MPLS cloud network on the way from point to point.

Being able to stay at the layer 2 switching level is one advantage of ENLAN. Another is that the Ethernet access connections and MPLS tunnel bandwidth is scalable. You can order bandwidths from 2 Mbps up through 1 Gbps. Your access is through IEEE standard 10/100/1000/10000 Mbps Ethernet interfaces. With scalability you can get the bandwidth you need to support your operations right now and then easily upgrade as needed.

Is ENLAN or Ethernet / MPLS networking right for your business or organization. To find out quickly and easily, simply request a quick quote for the bandwidth and locations you need to support. Then see if you can justify not saving a small fortune on your network services.