SDN Performance Takes a Leaf of Faith

By: John Shepler

If the cloud has done anything, it has turned a magnifying glass on once mundane WAN connections. Back in the day, it was OK for file transfers to take a bit too long or the Internet to be a little dicey. After all, the really critical operations were confined to the company LAN and in-house data center. No more. Once your services are hosted in the cloud, WAN performance becomes just as critical as LAN performance.

The New WAN Problem
There’s only one problem. YOU don’t own the WAN like you do your LAN wiring. You are at the mercy of wireless, cable, DSL, fiber and copper wireline service providers. Any issues in their networks have an immediate impact on your business.

How Do You Protect Yourself?
The answer is increasingly SDN or Software Defined Network solutions. SDN covers a lot of technology, but one very popular implementation for business is the integration of multiple, diverse WAN connections. You have several connections to the cloud, but they are coordinated by SDN.

Nature Knows How
Bigleaf Networks calls their process for doing this “Natural Networking.” They create a redundancy of connections with fault tolerance similar to how leaves protect themselves in nature. Here’s how Bigleaf explains their system:


Pretty clever, right? The SDN performance optimization that Bigleaf provides can also save you money. Without traffic management, many businesses wouldn’t even consider “best effort” broadband services like wireless, cable, DSL or low cost fiber options. The cost of outages and variations in performance was too great. The only acceptable WAN solutions were multiple dedicated private line services set up with automatic instant failover. These lines can get pretty expensive and you still have the headache of having to manage this system yourself.

Don't Do It Yourself
Bigleaf makes optimizing multiple Internet connections painless. They provide the managed router that tunnels traffic to their gateway clusters in the cloud. It’s all plug-and-play for you. For the ultimate in reliability, they even have an option to install redundant routers and switches at your site to match the redundancy of their cloud cluster.

Are you frustrated with the performance of your business broadband connection for cloud services? It’s time to take a closer look at what Software Defined Networks can do to improve both quality and reliability of your WAN services. Bigleaf technology is now offered by Telarus, along with services from over 50 data, voice and cloud providers. Discuss your issues and needs with an expert consultant now at no charge.

Connectivity Expansion With Multiple T1 Lines

T1 lines have been excellent network connection options for decades. They still are if your bandwidth needs are modest. But what do you do when 1.5 Mbps just won’t cut it anymore? Is it time to say goodbye to your faithful T1 line?

Wait! Not so fast. Those T1 lines have a lot of untapped potential. It’s simply time for a technology upgrade.

That upgrade is called “bonding.” As the name implies, bonding is a process of combining the capacity of multiple T1 lines so that they act as one larger bandwidth service. This is typically done using a managed router. The carrier’s side of the router has interface cards for two or more separate T1 lines. You plug into a single connector that delivers the combined bandwidth of all those T1 lines.

What level of bandwidth is reasonable to expect? Dual bonded T1 gives you 2 x 1.5 Mbps or a total of 3 Mbps. Triple bonded T1 produces 4.5 Mbps. Quadruple bonded offers 6 Mbps. You can bond 5 T1 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines for 9 Mbps, 7 lines for 10.5 Mbps and 8 lines for 12 Mbps. Generically, this is designated as NxT1 where N is the number of T1 lines involved.

Not all of these options will be available in any particular area. Two factors determine how much bandwidth you can get with multiple T1 lines. First is the equipment available at the central office where your telephone wire bundle terminates. This bundle consists of many twisted pair, perhaps as many as 50 pair, all in a single cable. That cable runs underground or overhead on telephone poles to get from your building to the telco office. Multi-pair bundles are almost always installed to business locations because they very often need multiple line telephone service.

The equipment is important because there have to be connections at both ends of the copper cabling for the bundling to work. There is a managed T1 router with multiple line cards installed in the telecom closet in your building. There is a complementary piece of equipment in a rack at the central office to connect to the far end of those T1 lines.

Assuming that the carrier equipment is in place, the limiting factor in bonding multiple T1 lines is the availability and quality of the extra copper pairs in the bundle. Some cables may not have 8 unused pairs available. That’s especially true if the building supports multiple businesses, all using several phone lines or more. Other cables may have vacant pairs, but they have bridging connections or quality problems that don’t support reliable data transmissions. In some cases, adjacent pairs may have too much cross talk to both carry T1 signals without data corruption.

A final issue is cost. The price of T1 lines has come down dramatically over the years. If you haven’t checked pricing since you signed your contract and renewed it a couple of times, you may be shocked at how little it costs to maintain T1 service these days. Some companies find that they can easily upgrade to 2xT1 or 3xT1 and not pay any more in monthly least costs. Otherwise the cost of bonded T1 service is the single T1 line times the number of lines you want to connect. There’s no real economy of scale.

If you still need 10 or 12 Mbps but the cost of 7 or 8 T1 lines is too much for the budget, you aren’t out of luck. A competing technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC) can typically give you twice the bandwidth for the same dollar. EoC uses the same copper pair you would otherwise use for T1 but can support higher bandwidths, perhaps 15 Mbps, 20 Mbps or more. Unlike T1, Ethernet over Copper is distance sensitive and only works well for locations near the CO.

Would you like to upgrade to higher bandwidth business connections without the expense or inavailability of fiber? Get pricing and bandwidth options for multiple T1 lines and competitive EoC options now.



Note: Photo of multipair cable courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hosted Network Monitoring Services

Metro and Wide Area Networks are becoming more and more important to businesses. The steady migration toward electronic transactions, online services and cloud storage & computing are making networks a critical part of the business infrastructure. That, in turn, is making networking monitoring a necessary function in every IT department. It breaks down to doing it yourself or contracting with a provider to monitor the network.

Companies have been monitoring their own LANs since they started installing networks. It’s logical to extend that philosophy to include any telecom links between facilities. That includes point to point networks and both public and VPN connections to the Internet. There are good reasons to rethink this approach now. Let’s have a look at how the networking monitoring processing can be improved.

One area of weakness is networks used by smaller businesses. A lot of factories, offices and retail outlets aren’t open or staffed around the clock. What’s going on in the wee hours? Who knows? A construction crew could be working late and cut through the cable that is your last mile connection. The alarm lights on the terminal equipment illuminate, but there is no one around to take action. You come in to open up in the morning and find that you have no network connection. You report it, of course, and the carrier will start the investigation process. You may or may not be back in business by noon. That’s only if you have a good SLA (Service Level Agreement) or a very proactive service provider.

There are measures you can take. You can set up a process to monitor the alarms and ping remote servers periodically to make sure the link is still up. If something goes wrong, you can have it send you or someone on-call in your IT department a text message. Somebody sill has to be awake enough to get the alert and then start working the problem. That involves figuring out if the outage in on the telecom link or in your equipment and contacting the right party to get some corrective action.

Large companies with 24/7 coverage of their data centers and other IT assets may consider this part of their charter. Small and medium companies, especially those with branch offices and critical e-commerce infrastructure, may have the need for faster response but not the budget to provide “just in case” staffing. These are the companies that hosted network monitoring services work wonders for. With hosted monitoring, the responsibility of what’s happening beyond your network’s edge belongs to the service provider. They do have the automated equipment and round-the-clock staffing to keep an eye on every network link to make sure that it is working properly.

In most situations, the network edge is a managed router installed by the service provider. This equipment terminates the line with the proper interface, be it T1, DS3, EoC, EoF or SONET. The other side of the router is where you connect, generally with an Ethernet interface. The router itself is considered “in the loop” as far as network monitoring and testing is concerned. If anything goes wrong, the provider has the ability to test functionality through all their equipment and lines, right on up to your Ethernet connection.

In some cases, you even have the option of letting the service provider include your internal local network within their networking monitoring service. You decide whether to let them have access to the entire network or just a portion. This is the ultimate level of support for smaller companies that have little or no on-site IT staffing.

A particularly robust network security solution is provided by MegaPath, a major facilities-based carrier. MegaPath goes far beyond just monitoring to ensure the network is “up.” They include comprehensive Unified Threat Management (UTM) to implement network security. This involves an advanced firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, web application control and data loss prevention. Network management involves deep packet inspection and uptime monitoring that monitors for latency, jitter, delays and packet loss. It is sometimes difficult for even larger companies to provide this depth of networking monitoring and security.

Are you interested in better management of your network connections at a reasonable cost? You should look into hosted network monitoring and security services suitable for the size of your business and criticality of your network.

What is an Ethernet Connection?

When we think of connecting to the outside world, what comes to mind is traditional telecom services. Those include POTS and PRI telephone lines for voice and T1, DS3 and OCx SONET for data. A newer technology that deserves a closer look is Carrier Ethernet. It’s Ethernet in the WAN to match up with Ethernet on the LAN.

The idea of extending an Ethernet connection from your building or campus to the Internet or another facility on the other side of the country might seem a bit odd at first. After all, the legacy telecom carriers have pretty much owned that space for over a century. That’s all changing fast. New competitive service providers are coming into the bandwidth marketplace without the history or traditions of using telco standards to define their networks. That frees them to take a “blank sheet” look at what a Wide Area Network (WAN) should be, how it should be priced and what services it should offer.

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the WAN starts where the LAN leaves off. I know that there’s often something called the MAN or Metropolitan Area Network in-between. MAN and WAN technologies are more alike than different. It’s mostly a matter of scale. While the MAN tends to cover a city and perhaps suburbs, the WAN has no geographical limitation. WAN services can be regional, national or even international.

Now let’s consider Ethernet WAN connections. Ethernet is the packet switching protocol now nearly ubiquitous on Local Area Networks. It wasn’t always that way. Even a few decades ago, there were competing standards such as Token Ring. Ethernet has become so popular now that the economy of manufacturing scale makes it more economical to implement than other standards. Ethernet has taken over the LAN, but it is just starting to make inroads on the WAN. In the coming decades, we may see a repeat of Ethernet dominance for local, metropolitan and wide area networks.

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has done the standardization work necessary to establish what’s known as Carrier Ethernet. This frees LAN Ethernet from its distance limitations so that it can connect from your building to the other side of the world. The MEF has also standardized Ethernet services so that the Ethernet you get from one carrier is the same as you get from another. This makes competitive bidding possible, driving down the cost for the buyer. It also enables carriers to extend their service footprint by interconnecting with other carriers through Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces (E-NNI).

WAN Ethernet has some definite advantages over the legacy telecom services we’re used to. First is the interface. If you want to connect to a T1 line or DS3 service, you need a specialized piece of equipment or a very specific plug-in module for your router. You can’t just take an Ethernet patch cord and connect your edge router to the carrier’s “smart jack.” The protocols are completely different. However, you can do exactly that with an Ethernet connection. Most often the carrier provides a common RJ-45 jack or a managed router that you simply patch into.

Second is services. You can order Ethernet Line Service to mimic the point to point or last mile dedicated Internet connections that you have with T1 or DS3. You can also order Ethernet LAN service. That’s a multipoint networking service that ties together multiple business locations. You don’t need to mess around with running individual private lines to each location. They all connect through the Ethernet LAN service.

Unlike T-Carrier and SONET services, Ethernet is highly scalable. In other words, you can get a wide range of bandwidths delivered to your installed Ethernet port. That will prove valuable if business suddenly increases and you need to increase your WAN bandwidth to handle the traffic. A change in bandwidth level can often be handled with a telephone call to your provider, with no need wait for equipment to be replaced.

Finally, Ethernet WAN connections have a cost advantage. It’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same price as a T1 line. At higher speeds, the cost savings is even more dramatic.

You owe it yourself to at least compare services and pricing for Ethernet WAN connections to what you have now to see if you may be missing out on cost and performance benefits. Ethernet WAN is available over both twisted pair copper and fiber optic cabling.

Ethernet DS3 Bandwidth Comparison

Business bandwidth requirements have been steadily increasing since T1 lines became standard for dedicated Internet access and private point to point connections. If you are a current user of DS3 bandwidth services or considering an upgrade, you’ll be interested in how your various WAN bandwidth options compare.

The traditional high bandwidth network connection is DS3, a 45 Mbps service. This is also the speed of a T3 line. Today, most DS3 services are provisioned over fiber optic cables with a copper handoff at the demarcation point. In some cases, you can get DS3 brought in over coaxial copper or wireless transport.

DS3 is popular for dedicated Internet access in larger organizations, video transport, links to offsite backup and storage and smaller ISPs. DS3 telephony bundles hundreds of outside phone lines for large companies and call centers.

The competitor to DS3 is Carrier Ethernet, especially Metro Ethernet in larger cities. Ethernet services offer standardized speeds of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps to match the common LAN speeds. But most Ethernet providers also offer other increments in 1, 5 or 10 Mbps steps. A 50 Mbps Ethernet service provides similar bandwidth to DS3.

So how do you choose one service over another? If you need the channelization of traditional TDM services for telephony or other applications, DS3 already meets this standard. It is easily multiplexed and demultiplexed to interface with T1 lines on the low end to OCx SONET fiber optic services on the high end.

Most networking applications are now packet based and more easily interfaced to Ethernet WAN services than legacy telco standards. But since the interface circuitry is generally an off the shelf router module, it may not matter all that much. If you go with a managed router, the service provider will take care of providing the proper customer premises equipment and monitoring the line and interfaces for proper operation.

To muddy the waters a bit more, fractional DS3 services are available that offer less than 45 Mbps for a lower monthly lease cost. You can often get the bandwidth you need by bonding T1 lines together to create increments of 1.5 Mbps up to around 10 or 12 Mbps bandwidth. Or you can get fractional DS3 bandwidth at the speeds where T1 bonding becomes impractical. On the Ethernet side, you can specify nearly any bandwidth from 1 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and often upgrade to higher levels with just a phone call to your service provider.

The fact is that DS3 and Ethernet bandwidths compare favorably. Which you choose for your particular application will most often be determined by which service offers the best pricing for your particular business location. How can you find that out? The easiest way is to check DS3 and Ethernet prices and availability using the GeoQuote online search tool.

The LAN WAN Connection Made Easy

The local area network has a standardization and continuity that makes sense. We know what Ethernet is. We know what an RJ-45 connection looks like. Nearly every piece of equipment has the ubiquitous 10/100/1000 Mbps network interface. It’s all so predictable until you try to leave the building. Then you’re up against a whole new set of telephone company standards that you don’t deal with in-plant. Is there any way to make the LAN and WAN worlds come together sensibly?

Not so long ago, you had no choice but to educate yourself in the unfamiliar and perhaps confusing technology invented and institutionalized by AT&T and the telco equipment manufacturers. It’s not a trivial task for network engineers and managers who spend their days talking packets and TCP/IP. You need to make a mental shift to DS channels, T-carriers, SONET multiplexing, channel banks, TDM synchronization, channel service units and data service units. Just figuring out how to efficiently match disparate networks could take some doing.

That was then, this is now. If you have the expertise and enjoy interconnecting dissimilar networks, you can do that and simply order the WAN connections that you need. But if you don’t have that level of expertise or just want to avoid straightening out the incompatibilities, you have more options available now.

One approach is to go with a managed network provider who takes care of the WAN link and the interface to your network. You plug into a managed router provided by the carrier and located on your premises. The routers at both ends and the network connections between them are monitored and controlled by the carrier. You don’t have to worry about what color alarm is going off or if the equipment is properly set to the line specs if you make any changes to your service. You simply plug in to the WAN port and use the service.

Managed router services are available for dedicated broadband Internet service, point to point data connections, MPLS networks for interconnecting multiple business locations, and ISDN PRI to provide telephone lines to in-house PBX phone systems.

Another service that offers ease of connection and use is Metro Ethernet. You can get mid-band Ethernet delivered on multiple twisted pair copper in many larger cities. Your connection is a managed router that has the special interface required to transport the signal. Ethernet is also available through fiber optic connections

One advantage of Ethernet services is that they tend to be less expensive, in some cases much less expensive, than other telecommunications services. Which type of bandwidth is right for your company? Find out with a quick business bandwidth price and availability check now.