Carrier EthernetAn Ideal Option

Jayant Deo The author is the president, RAD India

Gone are the days when a CIO could simply order a leased line circuit or VPN connection and be assured that the service would satisfactorily cover all required enterprise applications at a fixed price and guaranteed performance level. The changing nature of enterprise communications for the modern workforce puts emphasis on the need for mobility, collaboration, enhanced security, business continuity, and disaster recovery. These together with the high bandwidth requirements of applications such as video and graphics, are forcing CIOs to look beyond traditional service provider offerings. They must consider new WAN services that will enable them to better cope with budget constraints, a dynamic business environment, user Quality of Experience (QoE) expectations, remote connectivity and security for off-premises locations (such as hotels and airports), and mobile operations.

The top priorities for these new WAN enterprise services can be classified as follows:

• Meet budget constraints by increasing IT operational efficiency and productivity, lowering operating expenses
  -Distance learning vs. costly on-site training
  -Lower price per Mbps
  -Help extend (budgetary) planning horizons to avoid expensive overhauls
• Dynamic business environment
  -Efficiently handle site additions and bandwidth upgrades
  -Quick adaption for new applications
  -Fast reaction to organizational changes
• Satisfying user expectations
  -Ensure user QoE for critical applications
  -Enable speedy fault resolution and performance accountability
  -Ensure service resiliency for BC/DR (eg, for data center connectivity)
  -Get more bandwidth on demand
• Enable remote users/locations
  -Support distributed communications and web based applications for disparate locations, workforce on the move, etc. -Ensure system integrity and data security

In this new scenario, Carrier Ethernet is ideally positioned to address the CIOs WAN enterprise service requirements. There are several reasons why:

• Valueget more for less:
  -Higher throughput at much lower price per Mbps than Frame Relay and other legacy services
  -Scalable rates up to 10 Gbps with guaranteed throughputget as much bandwidth as needed
• Simplicity and Reliability:
  -Mature, standardized technology (Metro Ethernet Forum, IEEE, ITU-T, IETF)
  -Familiar, ubiquitous LAN technology no need for new training
  -Built-in resiliency features
• Flexibility:
  -Provides flexible connectivity site-by-site; non-disruptive site addition
  -Easy to adjust when more bandwidth is required
  -Enables IP applications such as MPLS VPN and Dedicated Internet Access (DIA)

Drivers for Carrier Ethernet Services

These are some of the reasons why Carrier Ethernet services are the fastest growing segment in the telecom industry today. According to the Vertical Systems Group, the worldwide market for ethernet services delivering business applications are supposed to reach $40 bn by 2014. The popularity of applications and services that are running on cloud services and distributed data centers is actually helping in the global adoption for Carrier Ethernet services.

Defining an SLA

As organizations deploy Carrier Ethernet services, it becomes very important for CIOs to define various Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in advance, so that there is very little room for confusion later on.

A business-grade SLA for Carrier Ethernet services will typically includeconnection rates, bandwidth commitments, Class of Service (CoS) levels definition, Quality of Service (QoS), Key Performance Indicators (KPI) guarantees, monitoring and reporting, service and support hours, response and repair times, restrictions and credits/SLA violation remedies.

CIOs need to ask themselves 1 big question. Are they getting the SLAs that they are paying for?

It is advisable for CIOs to go for a service provider that can provide performance reports to monitor the service and then it becomes easy to compare actual performance to the contracted SLA.

On the other hand, service providers can guarantee transparency of SLAs and deploy certain time-tested tools. To achieve this transparency, service providers can implement the following capabilities in their networks:
-Traffic and bandwidth management for multilevel QoS
-Performance monitoring and reporting
-Fault management and repair
-Resiliency and protection

In order for these attributes to be effective, they need to be implemented at the service hand-off point, ie, inside the service providers CPE (also known as an Ethernet demarcation device) installed at the customer premises.

The Road Ahead

Owing to opex and capex benefits along with the other attributes mentioned above, Carrier Ethernet is fast becoming the main business service offering for private line, virtual private line, private LAN, and virtual private LAN connections. This is particularly the case where high bandwidth applications are involved, such as data center connectivity and where CIOs prefer to maintain control of their network configurations and routing tables. Carrier Ethernet is also considered to be the ideal option for connectivity to the cloud and SaaS. The next time you have to renew or upgrade your enterprise WAN service contract, youll want to consider Carrier Ethernet and its many bottom line benefits.