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.

Crowdsourcing In Lieu of Outsourcing

The last couple of decades have seen a trend toward outsourcing versus traditional hiring to meet business needs. Coming out of the Great Recession, there is an even newer concept starting to pick up steam. It’s called crowdsourcing. Why not tap the power of the crowd when you have a specific task that needs a solution?

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach to problem solving. You normally think of handing a task to a specific employee or to a manager who will delegate it to a particular employee. In lieu of that, you can go out and bring in a temp or contract employee or forget the employment model completely and hire an outside firm to do the work. If you want to sell a building, you contract with a real estate agent. If you want to build a building you contract with an architect and general building contractor.

Crowdsourcing works something like contracting with a local firm except that the world is your marketplace. Many tasks like web design, logo design, artwork, article writing, app development and so on don’t require someone located nearby. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer can be done anywhere on Earth. On the network, the home office in Beijing is just as close as the corporate office down the hall.

Isn’t this just another form of outsourcing? It is, but on a micro scale and with interesting payment options. What I’m describing is farming out your tasks to individuals and crowds, not setting up your own shop to get cheaper labor overseas or partnering with a major corporation as a service provider.

When you go out for services locally, you probably start with the Yellow Pages or an online directory equivalent. You pick from who’s available in the area so you can meet with them in person to describe the assignment, write the contract and review the progress & results. When you go out for services online you do lose the ability to press the flesh or get your hand around somebody’s throat - literally. But if you can get comfortable doing business without the physical contact, you open up a world of new opportunities - literally!

The biggest enabler for online contracting or crowdsourcing is having a marketplace were buyers and sellers can meet. It’s a lot less dicey than trying to conduct business in forums and chats. Fortunately there is a very large and established marketplace already available with 6 million members worldwide. It’s called Witmart. They’ve got the resources and the tools that make it easy for service providers and clients to hook up successfully.

Here’s where the crowdsourcing idea comes in. You have the usual option to offer a job on a contract basis where you specify qualifications, negotiate the reward, job content and completion date and then pay upon completion. But you also have the option to make a contest out it. You specify the job and the amount of the reward and let the marketplace have at it. You then pick from best solution or solutions and release the reward to the winner or winners.

Where does the contest approach work best? It’s for things like logo design, business card designs, website design, marketing slogans, promotions, and so on. These jobs need quick solutions, don’t demand a lot of time and effort, and the value of diverse perspectives is an asset.

Contracting is more suitable for bigger jobs that require lots of time and effort, need considerable communication and coordination and have many specific requirements. Often the work is done in stages with payment released based on meeting milestones.

Do you occasionally or regularly need to find someone to build a website, translate documents, develop an iPhone App, promote a brand or come up with a company logo and find it a big hassle? Your life could get a lot easier right now by checking out the freelance marketplace with verified high quality providers at Witmart.

The Age Of Managed Networks Is Upon Us

It’s a sign of changing times. Competitive carrier AireSpring is now providing proactive networking monitoring free of charge to customers of its MPLS and Voice over MPLS solutions. That’s 24 hour continuous SNMP monitoring of the network that will generate alarms and reports if any deviation occurs. You can be sound asleep, but the NOC (Network Operations Center) will be keeping an eye on your MPLS network.

What heralds the future in this announcement is that service provider management of WAN services is on its way to become the default standard. That’s a far cry from the last half-century of bandwidth services. You ordered your dedicated lines, set up your networks and supplied your own staff to monitor operation. If something went haywire when the lights were off overnight, it got discovered and dealt with in the morning. A multi-national or otherwise 24/7 operation provided its own NOC to keep track of LANs and WANs worldwide.

Perhaps it has been the constant hammering on cost reductions caused by the deep recession that were are just now coming out of. Company budgets have been beaten down and beaten down to the point where business as usual a decade ago is just plain unaffordable anymore. Out of desperation, companies have sought out new methods of getting business done that don’t involve so many people and so much investment.

Into this opportunity gap have stepped the managed IT service offerings. That’s everything from outsourcing your entire IT department to partnering with suppliers to take over responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the line service you lease, to closing data centers and shipping the equipment to a colo center or selling it off in favor of doing everything in the cloud.

The common theme is lease versus ownership. Ownership certainly has its advantages. It also has its responsibilities. Medium and larger companies liked the idea of having everything under their tight control in-house. After all, who’s going to look after your interests like you do yourself? It’s easier to control security and network configurations when your people are running the show. If you have to go outside to get a connection, like you do with telecom services, you simply have the carrier nail up a line between point A and point B. If and when it fails, your terminal equipment will set off the alarms and you get on the phone to file a trouble report and then monitor the progress of the repairs.

What downsizing pressures and lack of available capital have done is slowly pry the tight grip of total control away from corporate staff in favor of letting outside suppliers provide some services and take responsibility for their performance. What many companies are discovering, to their surprise, is that providers can be trusted to deliver and maintain everything from networks to computing resources and business telephone switching.

Managed WAN services can be anything from a point to point T1 line to a complex international MPLS network with hundreds or thousands of connections. The demarcation point becomes the managed router rather than the smart jack. By installing Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), service providers have a view of everything on the WAN between your LAN edges. That includes all last mile connections as well as what’s going on with the core network.

That CPE is destined to move farther and farther into the local network as customers come to trust their IT service providers. Once they realize that the carrier or cloud provider is catching and fixing problems faster than they had been doing themselves, the reluctance to lease rather than own resources will fade away. The desire to return to an era of high capital investments, higher staffing levels and slow response to sudden demand changes will disappear. The flexibility of the company to adapt to change will correspondingly increase and older paradigms will seem as quaint as stacks of punched cards and racks of glowing vacuum tubes.

Are you being squeezed for investment capital and personnel, yet dependent on high performance information technology and telecommunications to be competitive? If so, perhaps now is the perfect time to consider managed IT and network services. Compare the costs and flexibility and see if managed solutions can be of service to your company.

The Ubiquitous Cloud of 2012

The business skies are clouding for 2012. This cloud isn’t a sign of foul weather ahead. Just the opposite. The cloud of 2012 brings relief to businesses living on a razor’s edge with little confidence in their ability to predict the future. Why try to be a forecaster when you can simply position yourself to respond as needed, depending on which way the wind blows?

Is there climate change afoot? One could easily argue that the business climate has already changed. Many businesses have found themselves stuck in the doldrums where nothing moves at all. Others experience volatility, where they are not sure which way the breezes will blow tomorrow. How many managers long for the old days, not that many years ago, when growth was robust, the path ahead was crystal clear, and there were no storms brewing on the horizon?

The best remedy for this new, new climate may not be to run away from developing clouds, but toward them. The IT cloud can be the solution you need to fend off those other clouds of doubt, worry and ill-weather. What the information technology cloud can do is let you ride with the wind and tack as needed to meet your business goals. Technically, what cloud services do is let you move from an ownership model of investing, maintaining and upgrading to a rental model of pay-as-you-go.

Ownership has its advantages. It puts you in control. Your business capital is right down the hall where you can see it. Nobody can take it away from you because it’s yours. You can do with it what you wish. There is depreciation to help the bottom line and once it is paid off, you own it without further payments... or so you think.

The problem with the ownership model for technology is that today’s servers and PBX systems aren’t like steam engines, lathes, CNC machining centers or mainframe computers. You don’t buy a monster machine for your company and expect it will still be going strong long after you retire. The half-life of anything powered by electronic chips or dependent on the vagaries of the World Wide Web is almost shorter than the time you need to get it fully productive.

Your capital investment is also the start of your costs, not the end. Even if breakdowns are infrequent, there is a steady stream of upgrades, modifications and security features to be installed and tested. That means ongoing costs for both software and personnel. None of this stuff runs perfectly for long with your back turned. There is always the need to deal with something that has dropped offline or needs a soft reset. It is nature of anything microprocessor based to get lost in its nearly incalculable software paths. It’s rare that you need to shutdown a box to stop the smoke from pouring out. It’s a given that you’ll need to unplug it and plug it back in to “magically” fix whatever is hung up.

There’s no denying the inherent nature of technology. The real question is whether it makes more sense for you to take ownership of these issues or pawn them off on someone else. A decade or two ago, the answer was clearly to do as much in-house as possible. Today? Launching those monkeys off your back and into the cloud is looking better and better.

I haven’t dropped the word “outsourcing” yet, but this is the time to embrace it. In simplest terms, you hire someone else to do things that are more cost effective for them to handle than for you to do yourself. On a macro scale, there can be major societal upheaval caused by suddenly shifting 100,000 jobs from here to there. On a micro scale, business by business, the evolution from doing everything in-house to buying services from other companies specialized in that service can increase your agility to compete in a world where the view of tomorrow is murky. Outsourcing technology to the cloud is going to be big in 2012, perhaps enveloping.

What can you transfer to the cloud? Technology tools are prime candidates. You use these tools to perform your business, they aren’t the core of your business. Does it make any difference to the nature of what you are doing whether you own that rack of servers, rent the same boxes from a colocation center or pay by the hour to use virtualized servers in the cloud? Not if they all do exactly the same function.

Technology services in the cloud now include virtual servers that can be expanded or contracted instantly, pools of disk storage, high bandwidth Internet connections, network security, development platforms, enterprise software packages, and telephone communications. That’s right, you no longer need a telephone system in your office. You still need the phones, of course, but the switching system and the outside trunk lines to the public telephone network can be provided by the cloud. That includes contact and call centers as well.

There must be a good reason for all the fervor surrounding cloud based services. Is it simply the fashionable new thing for business or are we experiencing a fundamental shift in how we will run businesses for the foreseeable future? If this is the new mode of operation to be competitive, how long do you want to wait before checking it out? It’s likely well worth your while to at least compare cloud options to what you are doing now. Then decide whether a small cloud, large cloud or no cloud at all makes the most sense for your business.