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.

IP Transit vs Peering vs DIA

We live in a world of networks and networks of networks. The Internet is the ultimate example of networks upon networks upon networks. All of these networks need some way to communicate. For that, you have the choice of IP transit or peering.

Network to network communication would be unnecessary if the Internet was constructed the way most people envision it. When we think of the Internet, we think of one giant network that links everyone to everyone. It generally works that way for the end user, but the notion of a monolithic universal network is an illusion. Look inside the Internet and you’ll find it to be a collection of large, medium and small networks that all work together to get packets from one point to another. Let’s see what that takes.

At the top of the heap are Tier 1 networks. These are huge international IP networks that have points of presence in key locations around the world. Tier 1 networks are indeed the superhighways of the Internet. But like all highway systems, they don’t go everywhere. In order to create an Internet, you need to connect these superhighways together.

The connection process is called peering. The name suggests that this is a connection between equals or peers. That’s exactly right. Huge networks have huge amounts of traffic. If two of these networks peer to exchange traffic on an equal basis, then each network effectively doubles its reach. Network A has access to all the customers on Network B and vice versa.

Tier 1 networks peer on a settlement free basis. In other words, the networks are interconnected via high capacity routers and the traffic flows back and forth at will. Settlement free means that there are no toll booths at the border. Neither network pays the other because they are getting equal value through peering.

Not all networks are the same size. Smaller networks, called Tier 2, have less capacity and less reach than Tier 1 networks. Tier 1 networks aren’t about to peer with Tier 2 networks at no charge because the smaller network would be getting a lot more value from the arrangement than the larger one. What Tier 2 networks can do is ban together and peer among themselves to create a much larger entity that can compete with those Tier 1 networks. If they want access to the Tier 1 networks, they can pay a settlement charge based on the traffic imbalance. That charge is called IP transit.

Internet Service Providers have a choice when it comes to accessing the Internet. They can spend the capital and maintenance cost to build out their networks to the point where they can peer with other large networks, or they can just purchase IP transit services from a large network and avoid the investment in equipment and personnel.

Very small networks or medium size companies with their own internal networks will choose to buy Dedicated Internet Access rather than IP transit. You need to be a network operator with an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) that identifies each network on the Internet in order to qualify for IP Transit services. Some large organizations with connections to multiple networks may fit this definition, as well as large scale ISPs.

Everyone else, from local WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) to SMBs (Small to Medium Size Businesses) simply purchases Dedicated Internet Access by the Mbps or Gbps of bandwidth. Operation of the Internet is left to those networks who specialize in that service.

What type of Internet connectivity makes the most sense for your business? It depends on whether you are a large ISP, a content delivery network, a large corporation with international locations, or a network of retail stores. Why not compare pricing options for IP Transit, Peering, or Dedicated Internet Access, as appropriate? Complementary consulting services are available to help you sort through the possibilities.

The Multiple Data Center Dilemma

With mergers and acquisitions on the rise, companies are finding themselves with a multitude of data centers. So, do you leave things the way they are or try to capture some cost savings thorough data center consolidation?

The solution may not be as simple as picking one data center to expand and moving everything there. For one thing, each of those data centers is likely somewhat unique. They have different equipment, applications and expert personnel. Even if you take half a dozen small server rooms and move them intact to one big data center, you still have the matter of connectivity.

Most companies have networking set up to support much higher levels of traffic within the facility than to the outside world. That’s changing, as cloud services become more accepted. But even users of cloud computing and storage have to face the fact that they need much higher WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth than they used to. That drives two things: cost and availability.

Yes, availability can be a show stopper. If all your facilities are located downtown in major metropolitan areas, you have suite of services and providers to choose from. Telecom service competition in densely populated areas will work to ensure that you get excellent pricing on your service contracts. But what if your facilities are now scattered among small, medium and large cities with some locations out in the boonies?

This is why you start with a paper study before you do anything. Figure out what the new traffic levels will be to and from your main center or centers and then price out bandwidth that supports those levels with some margin for growth. Also make sure that you aren’t at the high end of available service levels or you’ll find future growth completely stifled. Do you really want to make a major move now and then make another one in a few years?

Calculate new bandwidth levels to serve the rest of your business locations. Note that while their data centers may now be downsized or empty, WAN traffic levels will almost certainly be higher. After all, all that data that was stored and processed locally will now have to come from somewhere else.

While virtualization and equipment consolidation may eliminate a lot of hardware and its associated power and cooling costs, you need to make sure that you aren’t just adding that cost back in network service expense. Perhaps you’ll find that modestly priced T1 lines or Ethernet connections are all you need to provide connectivity for those remote facilities.

By the way, if you are going to be ripping out facilities and re-installing equipment, this could be the perfect opportunity to take a look at cost savings you might not otherwise think were worth the effort. One approach is to move everything to a colocation center rather than try to operate your own. The advantage is that you’ll get a better deal on shared resources like HVAC and backup power. Also, bandwidth prices are often best within a colo. There are no availability issues and little or no provisioning costs because multiple carriers are right there in the same building.

Another option is to take a look at cloud services rather than providing your own. Once again, access bandwidth becomes critical with appropriate backup circuits to ensure that you’ll always be able to connect with the cloud. You’ll be trading off the capital expense and ongoing maintenance and operations costs of running your own data center for monthly fees to the cloud service provider. It is a better deal? Do the paper study and see what makes sense for your particular situation.

Would you like some help with this? Our Telarus bandwidth consultants are happy to get your requirements and work out pricing and availability for a variety of options. This consulting service is provided gratis to IT managers with serious requirements. Why not get started now? Put in a quick inquiry for enterprise voice and data services now.



Note: Photo of data center equipment courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Qwest Brings 100 Gbps to Your Business

Qwest is upping the ante on bandwidth with an upgrade to its long haul network from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps. The build-out has already begun and will continue through next year.

So, what does this mean for your business? Qwest offered some perspectives on how fast point to point network traffic is at 100 Gbps. You know how long it takes to download a 4.7 Gigabyte DVD. At 100 Gbps, you can download 138 of them in 60 seconds. A 2 hour HD movie or presentation will transfer in 9 seconds flat. You can backup a fully loaded 500 Gigabyte hard drive in 46 seconds. For hospitals, medical centers and physicians offices, 100 Gbps will transfer 90 digital mammograms per second.

There actually are applications that could really benefit from this massive WAN bandwidth today. Movie and video production studios generate enormous databases for their projects. It’s a deluge of data that can clog up the kind of connection that works well for most businesses. With engineering and manufacturing now so distributed, it may make sense for large aerospace companies to have 100 Gbps bandwidth available. Someday even smaller architectural and design firms might not consider this level unreasonable, as prices come down.

Prices have already come down dramatically for WAN bandwidth. T1 lines cost half what they did a few years ago. Ethernet pricing has plunged even more dramatically. You might not have been able to get Metro Ethernet a few years ago. Now it’s readily available and at prices per Mbps that make it even cheaper than T1.

Your bandwidth options have also increased. Standard T1 line speeds of 1.5 Mbps are now considered entry level. Ethernet services scale easily from 1 to 10 Mbps over copper or fiber, and up to 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps over fiber. While 100 Gbps service isn’t readily available quite yet, you can get 10 Gbps to your door.

Qwest has some ambitious goals for its network upgrade. It now serves 145 markets across the US and expects to add more. They’re installing new Alcatel-Lucent routers and switches out to the network edges. Fewer regeneration sites will be needed, reducing power demands. The overall upgrade is expected to enhance network protection and reduce latency as well.

Is there really a need for all this bandwidth? According to Qwest, Internet traffic is doubling about every 19 months. Individual Internet users are consuming 43 percent more bandwidth each year. That’s right, 43 percent more every year.

With the demands of downloadable and streaming video, electronic medical records, engineering design and simulation, and other high bandwidth applications, keeping ahead of bandwidth demands is a challenge for carriers. No only are they meeting the bandwidth need, but the latest IP based network designs are offering users new services such as Ethernet WAN and bandwidth pricing per Mbps that is better than ever.