‘Access anywhere’ nightmare

Bandwidth is a lot like money. Nobody ever complains about having too much of it. The more we have, the more we discover exciting new ways to spend it, and inflation keeps eating away at it.

Fifteen years ago, a small- to medium-sized business could do some pretty nifty stuff with a 128Kbps connection to the Internet. Five years ago, 2Mbps seemed like a lot. Today, 4Mpbs is entry-level.

What are we doing with all that extra bandwidth? We’re exchanging ever-larger files, accessing more and more information online, and watching a lot of streaming video. It’s not all laughing babies and double rainbows, either: video is now the medium of choice for delivering training, and it’s being used in an increasing range of other business applications.

Networking specialists across the board are seeing a massive increase in demand for video, which is placing increasing strain not just on public bandwidth resources but also on internal company networks.

“Everyone just expects the network to support video,” says Accenture Cisco Business Group lead, Warwick Talbot.

At the same time, the range of devices and places from which people expect to be able to access company networks has also increased, whether it’s their laptop at the airport, their iPad in a coffee shop, or their phone at the gym.

“It’s a tough time to be an IT or networks manager,” says Talbot. “Now you have employees who expect to be able to work from home, work from multiple devices and bring them all into the corporate network. The distinction between the internal company network and the Internet is being lost.”

“There’s a definite trend towards borderless networking,” confirms Riaan Ferreira, senior solutions architect for HP Networking. “Anyone, anywhere, using any device, wants to connect seamlessly, securely and reliably.”

Corporate network traffic is beginning to look more and more like consumer traffic, adds Tertia Labuschagne, business development and strategy manager for network integration at Dimension Data SA.

“What we do and what we allow is all changing – you can no longer just block Facebook. This is all affecting the business in a much more subtle way than we think. The network’s role is becoming much harder to measure in terms of hard return on investment or total cost of ownership. The question should rather be: What does this allow us to do in our business?”

Labuschagne advocates building networks as if they were businesses. “We’ve identified four main uses for company networks: to make money, enable business processes, transport information or optimise costs. The network should be designed and managed according to what dominates in your mix of uses.”

Business need is the best driver for network architecture, concurs Talbot. “Network design has tended to follow vendor-dictated best practices, not business requirements,” he says. “But now it’s even more important to design with business needs and business processes in mind. It sounds obvious, but a lot of people aren’t doing it.”

All of this poses new challenges for those who design, build and maintain networks. “In 2011 and beyond,” says Cisco SA GM David Mead, “networks will not only need to efficiently and securely transmit bandwidth-intensive data, voice, video, and wireless applications, they will also need to provide for evolving traffic patterns, new services, and optimised application performance.”

In purely technological terms, this means increasing adoption of 10Gbps Ethernet, and soon 40Gbps and even 100Gbps, with the standards for these due to be ratified later this year. Quality of service and power over Ethernet technologies will also enable networks to support new applications and devices, says Mead.

“The way applications are developing means networking needs to be ever more agile and dynamic,” says Ferreira. “Blade servers and virtualisation are the key building blocks for cloud infrastructures, which deliver scalability and flexibility.

“The traditional boundary between server and network is becoming blurred. Now we talk about a flex fabric that virtualises the network edge. The emerging industry standards for this are Converged Enhanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet, which enable the same network to carry both storage and traditional data traffic. That makes it possible to consolidate switches, which, in turn, means lower power consumption.”

“Video is becoming more and more important for everything from training and video-conferencing to surveillance.”

Warwick Talbot, Cisco Business Group lead, Accenture

Changes to network architecture and the proliferation of access points create security challenges as well, although challenges to the complacency of traditional network managers may be a good thing.

“It’s not just the mobile worker who poses a security challenge,” says Martin Walshaw, senior systems engineer with F5 Networks. “People used to assume that if you gained access to the building, you were okay, and as a result there are far too many unsecured network points lying around in a typical organisation. You can do a lot of damage just by plugging in.

We need to do things differently now, to focus on identifying users, identifying the resources they should have access to and delivering only those resources, no matter what access medium is being used.”

Jeff Fletcher, co-founder of Three6Five Networks, points out that the security of Internet connectivity is actually pretty good: “If it’s good enough for us to do our banking online, why isn’t it good enough for enterprise users?”

Fletcher predicts that corporate networks will become more like ISPs: “If you’re an ISP customer, you buy your own equipment, pay your own bills and provide most of your own support. The same thing is starting to happen in companies. People use their own mobile devices, provide most of their support and pay the bills from a company allowance. That means corporate networks need to be built the same as ISP networks.”

WiFi hotspots, for example, use access point isolation to keep individual user connections private from each other. “Corporate networks now need to apply the same kind of thinking,” says Fletcher. “You can’t just allow anybody free rein once they’re on the network – you need to manage access capability for each user individually.”

Just as networks need to respond more flexibly to different users, so will they need to work more intelligently with applications. “Recognition, prioritisation and control of applications are referred to as application intelligence,” says Mead.

“Today’s networks must recognise many types of applications and understand the importance of securing and prioritising applications running on the network to provide the best user experience.”

“We need to start looking at what applications need at the network level,” agrees Walshaw. “When applications are slow, the temptation is just to add more bandwidth, but that’s not always the right solution. Quite often what you need instead is to make the network more intelligent and more application-aware, so you can use what you have more efficiently.”

Web acceleration is one way to squeeze more out the same network resources, says Walshaw; another is to enable some application tasks to be offloaded from the server.

“Often the server is doing all the work for an application, which means it rapidly gets to the point where it can’t handle the load,” he says. “At that stage, many people go off and buy a new server, but it’s far more efficient to offload some of the burden.

“Once you start to take applications apart and allocate tasks more intelligently, you can minimise their impact on the network, which, in turn, means you can deliver them more quickly.”

This only makes sense, of course, when applications are being delivered over a network rather than being installed on individual desktops, which is increasingly the case.

“The more people turn to Web-based applications that sit outside the enterprise infrastructure, the more the organisation is just providing a pipe,” says Fletcher. “In that case, you want to provide the fastest, most efficient access, not necessarily the most secure. Security then needs to be managed between the browser and the application provider.”

Fortunately, providing that access has never been easier. “Suddenly you have a whole bunch of options,” says MTN Business GM of technology and infrastructure, Edwin Thompson. “South Africa is

growing up and there is a lot of investment going into new network capacity. Once you have access to dark fibre, organisations can build pretty much whatever they need. With a 40Gbps pipe between data centres, a lot of applications suddenly become practical.”

As rapidly as fibre is being laid to build backbone infrastructure, wireless solutions are evolving to provide last-mile access, or even substitute for wired links where the costs aren’t justified.

“Wired links are always going to be faster, but they’re also much more expensive to install and maintain,” says Henk Kleynhans, MD of Skyrove and chairman of the Wireless Access Providers Association (WAPA).

“If you can’t afford to pay at least R350 per metre for a fibre link and you can afford to wait a couple of minutes to transfer gigabit-sized files, wireless is a good alternative.”

Kleyhans says many WAPA members focus on highly specialised markets, including agriculture, the mining industry or healthcare. Wireless is an ideal bridge between ADSL and Diginet solutions.

“ADSL is a best-effort service, which means you get no guarantees at all,” he says. “Its uplink is also very slow compared to its downlink – that’s why it’s called Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. It was designed for home users who would never have big upload requirements, never for businesses.”

Wireless solutions are best suited to companies that face a combination of high-speed requirements with cost constraints, those in rural areas without alternative access and those who need temporary solutions in particular sites, says Kleynhans.

That’s for now. Things will get a lot more interesting in the wireless market once currently unused parts of the spectrum start being released. “There are huge chunks of premium spectrum that were allocated on a monopoly basis decades ago and are completely under-utilised,” says Kleynhans.

“The new 802.11n and 802.11u WiFi standards improve use of the spectrum that is currently freely available in the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands, but it’s still not great. There are massive amounts of really beautiful sub-900Mhz spectrum that have just been opened up in the US, paving the way for ‘super-WiFi’ applications.

“The moment that hardware becomes available in the US, there is going to be pressure to be able to use it here. And once that spectrum is open, it will explode the entire market; ADSL will become obsolete.

“Wireless is the future, especially for small and medium-sized organisations,” concludes Kleynhans.

“Those who can afford it – the ISPs and large enterprises – will use fibre. For everyone else, the last mile is going to be all wireless.”