The Office to Data Center Connection

By: John Shepler

Outsourcing IT applications to the cloud has become so popular that the connection to the cloud is sometimes given little consideration. Why should it be when all the action is in the remote data center? That center has a wealth of connectivity options both to the Internet and dedicated private lines. But, how do you connect with the cloud? Does it matter?

The Ubiquitous LAN Connection
To understand why office to data center connections are so important, let’s take a look at what you have now. You have your own data center right down the hall, in the basement or the next building over. Chances are that nobody gives a second thought to how they connect with that equipment because everything connects through the company LAN. All of the network equipment runs at the same speed, 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps most likely, so one Ethernet jack is pretty much the same as another.

Performance Taken For Granted
The beauty of the in-house network is that it is well controlled and that high bandwidth and low latency are fairly easy and inexpensive to come by. After all, it’s just a copper or fiber cable running hundreds of feet at the most. Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet switches are standard. Bandwidth, jitter and latency? You can pretty much take them for granted.

If your network is converged, with voice, data and video all running on the same network, your job is a little harder. You likely need to prioritize traffic so that the sensitive audio and video streams aren’t interrupted or delayed by less sensitive data transfers. Even so, on the local network this is under your control

The Trouble With Telecom
The challenge begins at the edge of your network. This is where you hand off control to a third party. Unless you are leasing dark fiber or have a wireless or optical laser link, you need a carrier to accept your signal and transport it across town, across the country or even around the world. Your wide area connections can be as robust as your local network connections… but they aren’t necessarily.

This is where you can get into trouble. Metro and long haul connections come in many flavors, each with its own classes of service, guaranteed bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss.

Shared vs Dedicated
Two major categories of bandwidth service are shared and dedicated. They mean what the names imply. Shared bandwidth means that you share a pool of bandwidth with dozens or hundreds of other users. Dedicated means that you have exclusive use of a line. Whatever you don’t use sits idle.

Why would anyone opt for shared bandwidth when they could have an exclusive channel? It comes down to cost. Telecom lines are less expensive than they’ve ever been. Even so, the cost is not trivial. Consumer Internet broadband is set up as shared bandwidth in order to get the monthly charge down to something most people can accept. The same is true of 3G and 4G cellular wireless and satellite. Wireless bandwidth is scarce and expensive, so there are usage limitations imposed above and beyond the shared usage.

When Sharing Works and When It Doesn’t
For things like email, web surfing, downloading short video clips, online purchasing and other activities that aren’t very resource demanding or time critical, shared bandwidth offers an excellent tradeoff between price and performance. This is why many small businesses opt for commercial grade cable broadband as their Internet connection. For home offices, shared bandwidth is almost universal.

Where sharing become a problem is when applications are sensitive to time delays. VoIP telephony can’t take much in the way of latency caused congestion, packet loss or jitter without sounding bad or dropping calls completely. The same is true for video conferencing. One often forgotten time sensitive application is the business critical cloud application.

What Makes Cloud Stormy
Cloud and other remote data center applications have unlimited resources, right? So why should they not perform even better than when you hosted them yourself? The answer is that pesky connection back to the office. You might assume a perfect connection, but it probably isn’t so. If you are using shared bandwidth, it really isn’t so.

What happens when there are even short time delays in packets to and from the cloud? You experience hesitation in the application. You send a request. You’ll get a reply… eventually. That’s likely no more than seconds at worst, but the seeming randomness of the delays is enough to drive a user crazy. The more annoying it gets, the more productivity suffers.

The Dedicated Line Solution
The answer to effective remote data center connectivity is to make your WAN as transparent as your LAN. You do this by ordering a dedicated connection with symmetrical bandwidth and guaranteed performance for bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. It’s a direct connection between you and the data center without going through the Internet and its potential bottlenecks.

Fortunately, this has become affordable for all but the smallest operations. Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE are now readily available for most business locations. Even 100 GigE is starting to be installed for the largest and most demanding users.

Are your applications suffering from lower than expected performance since you moved to a colocation facility or cloud service provider? If so, it’s time to look into what’s available in the way of high speed dedicated bandwidth connections.

Hosted VoIP Solutions Include New Phones

When we think of cloud services, it’s fairly easy to imagine the server racks down the hall being replaced by a much larger set somewhere out there. Similarly, it’s easy to see that the PBX in the telecom room disappears one day to be replaced by a much larger hosted PBX system in the cloud. But what about all those phone wires that used to plug into the PBX FSX and FSO ports? What do they plug into now?

They need to do what the network connections do. Moving data servers outside is made easier by connecting the LAN to an edge router that has a high capacity WAN line to your cloud service provider. When you outsource the PBX, the same thing needs to happen. In this case, the connection is called a SIP Trunk. Yes, it’s possible to terminate the SIP trunk into a myriad of analog phone ports so you can just plug in the phones you now have and keep going as if nothing has changed. But if you do that, you’ll miss out on one of the big advantages of upgrading to Hosted PBX service. That’s all the special features enterprise VoIP has to offer.

A big cost saver with VoIP, especially for medium and large organizations, is the consolidation of the separate phone and computer networks into one converged voice and data network. The phones are now like computer peripherals. There’s an RJ-45 jack on the back that connects to the network just like a PC. The phone has its own MAC address. You can move it around on the network and still have it ring at the same phone number. Forget rewiring or reprogramming like you have to do with standard phones when you make changes.

Analog phones can be made to work like IP phones by using an adaptor box called an ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor). This is something of a kludge because the phone still has only the rudimentary features it had before. That’s why the ATA approach is only used for residential, home office and very small business situations. For every other application, the right thing to do is bite the bullet and move up to IP phones, also called SIP phones. These are telephones designed to run on the converged network and make use of productivity features you can get with networked telephony.

If you are designing your own in-house enterprise grade VoIP telephone system, you’ll need to budget for new phones as well as the IP PBX equipment. Count up the number of desks and wall phones, multiply by the cost of each IP Phone at several hundred dollars per, and your eyes may pop out at the total investment required. You can put together a capital investment plan and go face the bankers or take the alternative approach of pay-as-you-go.

Who let’s you pay by the month for your complete telephone service? Hosted PBX providers, that’s who. The pay for usage model is what’s making cloud computing such a hot service these days. There’s no reason telephony can’t be put on the same basis. The one variable is the telephone sets that remain at your business, not in the cloud. You can buy those, of course, or you can have the lease cost included in your per-seat pricing for the system. That way you get brand new sophisticated desk phones that are guaranteed to be compatible with the hosted phone service. You also have one provider to deal with for everything. If you’ve ever had to referee between phone set manufacturers and carriers blaming each other for something not working, you’ll recognize the advantage of having “one neck to wring.”

Would you like to avoid the never-ending capital appropriation and procurement cycle in favor of just paying for what you need as you need it? Hosted VoIP may be the way to go for your business. Get competitive quotes and features for hosted VoIP telephone systems and compare with the what you have now.

Moving From OC-3 Bandwidth To Ethernet

Many medium size and larger businesses have been using OC-3 bandwidth over fiber optic connections for dedicated Internet access, video transport, remote data backup, large file transfers between sites and other high bandwidth applications. Now, there’s a newer lower cost option that can get you as much bandwidth or more for less money.

That solution is Carrier Ethernet. You may still think that Carrier Ethernet is a specialty service found in only a few areas by even fewer service providers. Not any more. Carrier Ethernet is mainstream. There is a mad dash underway to convert TDM based networks to IP packet networks. It may not be much longer that you’ll even be able to get OC-3 bandwidth services.

It’s all about the switch from telephone technology based on individual circuits to computer network technology based on packets. What’s happened in recent years is that the vast majority of traffic around the world has changed from voice to data to video. Voice is now thought of as one more service on a converged network that can transport voice, data or video with equal ease.

OC-3 is a TDM or Time Division Multiplexing technology. It has its roots in telephony, where everything revolves around small discrete channels that each carry one individual digitized telephone call. All of those channels are carefully synchronized by giving them each their own time slot in the bitstream.

So what’s wrong with that? Nothing other than the fact that using this methodology to transport packets that aren’t the same size as channels and don’t require the TDM synchronization unduly complicates the network interface and introduces inefficiencies. An OC-3 line runs at 155.52 Mbps with a payload of 148.608 Mbps.

Ethernet is the same protocol that runs on your corporate network. What Carrier Ethernet does is enable that same protocol to run for long distances on Metropolitan and Wide Area Networks.

Is there a direct Ethernet equivalent to OC-3? Not exactly. Ethernet does have standard LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1,000 Mbps and 10,000 Mbps. Carrier Ethernet is far more scalable, though. You can order just about any bandwidth you require. A 150 Mbps Ethernet service is pretty much equivalent to the OC-3 speed. You could, however, select 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or some other bandwidth that more closely matches your true requirements.

Here’s something else that makes your life easier. Install a Gigabit Ethernet port and you can easily upgrade to any bandwidth up to 1 Gbps at any time. Start with 150 Mbps to match that OC-3 today and later move up to 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps when the need dictates. In the mean time, you’ll be paying for only what you need on that fiber optic link.

Moving from OC-3 to the next available standard of OC-12 means you’ll have to jump from 155 Mbps to 600 Mbps and wait for a technician to change out your router card or managed router. Moving from 150 Mbps Ethernet to 200 Mbps Ethernet or higher can be done with a phone call in hours or days, not potentially weeks or longer.

Best of all, Carrier Ethernet is almost always priced less per Mbps than OC-3 and similar telco services. The reasons are increased competition and a technology that is on the rise, not the decline. How much can you save by making the move from OC-3 bandwidth to Ethernet? Check fiber optic bandwidth prices and availability to find out how many competitive options are available for your business location.



Note: Graphic of router symbol courtesy of Tosaka on Wikimedia Commons.