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Author Archives: Michael Ritter
Software Defined Networking Comes of Age
New trends and rapid technological advances in IT and telecommunications are changing the way telecom networks are designed, deployed and managed. The list of innovations driving the continuously increasing demand for bandwidth is long. Mobile end-user devices are becoming smarter, rich media content such as video is commonly adopted for business and private consumption, applications are increasingly implemented in a network-based fashion and are pushed into the cloud, social media became part of our daily lives – and many more. Consequently, the architecture of the Internet has changed as well over the last years. Widely spread usage of e-mail, e-commerce, search engines, social networks and cloud computing are only a few examples driving this change.
Many of the new and trendy innovations have been enabled through migrating telecom networks from a static, circuit-switched infrastructure to a more flexible and scalable packet-based technology. The wide-scale adoption of Ethernet as a transport protocol and the increased usage of fiber in all parts of the network allowed operators to provide more bandwidth at significantly lower cost. Read more
How Much Ethernet OAM is Appropriate?
Another year, another Light Reading Ethernet Expo Americas. This show is the premier event covering the hot topic of Carrier Ethernet network technologies and services in the Americas. It was a must-attend Carrier Ethernet networking event also this year, where dozens of experts from the service provider, supplier and analyst community met in New York City.
The two-day event saw a series of informative presentations and panel discussions. Not so much on technology evolution and innovation anymore. Much more focused on how Carrier Ethernet is used and will be used in future networks. And a lot of discussions exploring how Carrier Ethernet will enable new applications including cloud services and how these applications will influence Carrier Ethernet equipment.
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The Idea of a Consolidated Network
There was a lot of traffic at this year’s Ethernet Europe in London. The two-day conference and exhibition saw a high number of industry experts and a Carrier Ethernet debate that shifted away from hardware and technology to deployment scalability and service development.
While a few years ago, there was a lot of debate about the different choices of backhaul technologies including fiber, copper and microwave, there is now much greater agreement on making use of all technology alternatives available to build networks aligned with business needs. The ubiquitous delivery of services and their efficient management to enable new applications became far more important – whether for business, mobile backhaul or wholesale.
A New Era Is Dawning for Optical Networking
Bandwidth demand growing exponentially for years while revenue per bit is dropping causes service provider margins to diminish. When combining this trend with unpredictable traffic patterns and a peak-to-average traffic ratio that is increasing quickly due to the adoption of cloud computing and social media applications, technology that will help service providers to streamline their operations and reduce total cost of ownership is needed badly.
In order to solve this issue, communication networks have to provide more capacity, become more dynamic when activating new services and need to be more flexible in terms of design and configuration. The mainstream trend of offering real-time applications based on a virtualized IT infrastructure – such as server and storage – has a clear impact on the underlying network infrastructure and its topology. Networks have to be designed and built differently in order to provide connectivity more dynamically and to better utilize resources available in the network. Connection paths have to be optimized and shortened to avoid wasting of resources and reduce latency.
Network encryption made easy
Why bring encryption to the transport network? To paraphrase bank robber William “Willie” Sutton: “Because that’s where the data is.”
To date, most data center security efforts have focused on physical security and protecting against Internet threats. However, IT departments can no longer ignore data theft through interception. Despite a reputation for being more secure than standard wiring or airwaves, the truth is that fiber cabling is just as vulnerable to technical hacks. Several years ago, three main Deutsche Telekom trunk lines were breached at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. In the United States, an illegal eavesdropping device was discovered hooked into Verizon’s optical network. Other international incidents include optical taps found on police networks in the Netherlands and Germany, and on the networks of pharmaceutical giants in the U.K. and France. Reports on these high-profile fiber intrusions offered few details. For the most part, hacks typically go unreported, and often undetected.
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256-bit block code AES encryption algorithms Corporate Backbones data backup data protection data security Diffie-Hellman disaster recovery exchange Grid/Cloud Computing Grid/Cloud Computing Low-Latency Transport interception Low-latency Metro Core Transport Mobile Backhaul network encryption Open System Interconnection Optical Transport Packet Optical Transport physical layer San Connectivity Verizon Wireline Backhaul
