E D I T O R S D E S K
Networkings Latest
Humblebrag: 802.11ac
Wave 2
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Whenever a new
standard bumps
up bandwidth, we
wonder how well
ever fill up that
pipeand its not
long before we
eat our words.
Here we go again.
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such throughput.
For most enterprises, Wave 2 sounds like
overkill today. And for many that have already overhauled their networks to support
Wave 1, spending thousands more on Wave
2 is out of the question. But it wont be long
before the next big bandwidth-hogging application comes along, and it will catapult
the need for Wave 2s capacity gains to the
forefront.
As we explore in our cover story in this issue of Network Evolution (Making Waves:
Preparing for the Next Phase of 11ac), enterprises preparing to take the plunge will
need to think about how Wave 2 affects
their architecture beyond access points and
switches.
Also in this issue, we look at whether the
single pane of glass approach to network
management is still the preferred model
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802.11ac
Making Waves:
Preparing for
the Next Phase
of 11ac
BY ANTONE GONSALVES
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30%
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But with many organizations having recently upgraded to 802.11ac Wave 1, its unlikely those that have made significant investments will jump into Wave 2 soon. IT pros
who have already adopted Wave 1 say that,
fortunately, they expect their current architectures to serve them well for quite a while.
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Rogers was surprised to discover that areas with the most traffic peaked at only 90
Mbps to 100 Mbps.
Traffic from all 1,400 access points averaged only 2.5 Gbps, which is far below the
capacity of the 10 GbE switches from Cisco
and Brocade that the university installed
along with the access points. He expects the
current technology to meet the universitys
needs for the next three to five years. Thats
because the majority of smartphones
and tablets in use today do not support
802.11ac. Only 15% of the devices online at
USF use the latest Wi-Fi standard.
Organizations using 802.11ac Wave 1 today say the most important advantage of
upgrading is the higher number of mobile
devices that can be handled by each AP. The
standard operates in the less-congested
5 GHz band and supports more 20 MHz
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Data Mine
k What do you look for in campus LAN switches?
Respondents could select more than one answer.
51%
48%
36%
IPv6 support
33%
23%
SDN support
23%
42
percent
PM
of enterprise IT pros
expect to see
wearable devices,
such as smart
watches or fitness
trackers, connecting
to their wireless
LANs by 2016.
11%
2014
26%
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2019
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Software-defined data
Layer 4-7
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data centers are eager to see these platforms climb up the stack to tie in Layer 4-7.
Theyre hungry for orchestration tools that
can automate the deployment and management of those services with minimal human intervention.
Its becoming close to table stakes, says
Rick Drescher, managing director of technical services at Savills Studley, a commercial real estate advisory firm in New York
that helps businesses lease data center
space. For companies that are really leveraging a software-defined data center, that
level of orchestration on firewalls, virtual
switches, virtual routers and virtual load
balancers is becoming something that they
absolutely have to have.
Theres just one problem: The commercial products and open-source alternatives
available today just scratch the surface in
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The amount of human error thats going to be introduced into a system like
this continues to grow as the system gets
more complicated, Drescher says. So the more
you can automate things
Top five network
like switching VLANs
virtualization uses
around or updating fireWhich network virtualization capabiliwall changes dynamically,
ties are most important to you?
Respondents could select multiple answers.
the more youre going to
get out of your IT infraMonitoring a virtual environment
55
structure and the less
Layer 2-3 network virtualization
50
prone youre going to be to
Switching within the virtual stack
downtime.
48
And while much of the
Application awareness
in virtual networks
focus on Layer 4-7 orches38
Virtualized Layer 4-7
tration has been around
network services
26
data centers, Kindness
Source: Network infrastructure buyers survey, TechTarget,
says, the wide area netMarch 2015, N=126
work (WAN) may stand
%
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service provider and wholly owned subsidiary within Lufthansa Group that serves
the German companys flagship airline
along with more than 300 other airline
customers.
Employees at one of Lufthansas larger
offices on Long Island, N.Y., have a video
conference twice a month with their colleagues in Frankfurt. In a traditional
network architecture, any policies and appliances used to optimize that traffic would
have to be staticmeaning,
once a policy is set, its always onor would have to
be manually reconfigured
I do not often say the word
awesome, but if this turns
by Voegele and his team in
out to work as designed by
Kelsterbach, Germany.
Cisco, this will be awesome.
Hoping for a more effiMarkus Voegele, Lufthansa Systems
cient approach, Voegele is
testing Ciscos Application
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81%
80
43%
60
40%
40
23%
20
%0
Network
operations
Server
operations
Virtualization
managers
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Application
developers
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k Out with the old, in with the cloud
40%
67%
47%
40%
32%
28%
Click-to-call applications
20%
Source: Unified communications and collaboration buyers survey, TechTarget, March 2015, N=182
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Average number of
outages suffered
a month
Average number of
degradations suffered
a month
Average number of
hours an outage or
degradation lasts
Source: The Cost of Server, Application, and Network Downtime, Infonetics Research, January 2015, N=205
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Network Management
Single Pane of
Glass or Single
Glass of Pain?
BY SEAN M. KERNER
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New Challenges
in Network Management
Some vendor sales representatives might
pitch the idea that there is, in fact, one network management tool to solve all challenges. But thats not quite how network
management works in the real world.
Rick Drescher is often asked about what
tool should be used to manage the network.
In his role as managing director of the critical facilities group at Savills Studley, a commercial real estate advisory firm in New
York City, he helps many enterprises figure out their data center needs. Network
management is a concern for many clients,
and the biggest challenge is that the network isnt a single entity anymore in an IT
environment.
A lot of people use the term network
management software as the umbrella for
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Management intelligence:
Finding order in chaos
What are your top challenges when
using network log data as a source
of management intelligence?
Respondents could select multiple answers.
Cost of tools
51%
38%
37%
36%
36%
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34%
30%
30%
28%
30
20
18%
28%
21%
16%
16%
14%
10%
10
9%
8%
15%
11%
4%
2%
6%
%0
1 to 3 tools
4 to 5 tools
6 to 10 tools
11 to 15 tools
Source: Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends 2014, Enterprise Management Associates, April 2014, N=246
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16 to 20 tools
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true today.
In his work with enterprises, Drescher
says he still sees many hands-on networking professionals track network assets in a
spreadsheet.
Lefebvre acknowledges that even amid
all his collection of specialized network
management tools, he too uses a spreadsheetin his case, Google Docs in the
cloudbut he also has a few other tools
to help keep track of the locations of his
physical networking gear. He has all of
his switches listed in SecureCRT, an SSH
client.
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Drescher suggests that networking professionals first need to take a step back to understand what it is they are actually trying
to manage.
The reason why network management
fails is that people dont have a good grasp
of their entire environment before they go
out to deploy, he says.
According to 451 Groups Renaud, it is
important that both enterprises and the
vendors that support them understand that
modern network management is about
more than just protocols, speeds and feeds.
Rather, it needs to be treated for what it
isa discipline built on solving business
problems.
From a features perspective, Renaud emphasizes that network management tools
must have visibility into virtualized environments and the cloud.
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n
n
Jason Rieger
P
rincipal Network
and Security
Architect
F
ireHost Inc.
Richardson, Texas
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customers, and that requires a very scalable, secure and high-performing environment for those tenant workloads to run on.
Ive been working over the past year with
another of our architectsfrom the compute and storage side, and me from the networking and security sideand weve been
engineering and developing this new generation for cloud architecture where network virtualization is a key player.
Why did you go with NSX? VMwares
heritage is not networking, so what made
you confident it was the right fit?
I get asked that all the time: Why NSX
over ACI? Why over Nuage Networks or
Junipers Contrail acquisition? Well, [the
vetting process] was difficult. It was farreaching. It required a lot of due diligence
and getting to know the producttrials,
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tribulations and what have you. So it required a lot of research with the vendor
itself, getting to [talk to people at] product
manager levels and having a clear understanding of where their short-term roadmap as well as their long-term roadmap
was concerned.
We chose NSX for a few major reasons.
We are a VMware vSphere hypervisor shop.
We are not a multi-hypervisor shop currently. Whether thatll change in the future,
whos to say? But we are a vSphere environment today, so we knew that we would
get a lot of economies of scale, as well as
better integration because we use their hypervisor. Thats not to say other vendors
dont support VMware vSphere; they do.
But what we [liked about VMware] was the
concept of in-kernel firewalling and security services. And thats one of the things,
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timeframe, in which enterprises were looking to get more out of less hardware. They
were consolidating physical hardware systems, doing physical to virtual migrations.
They were taking, say, 10 physical servers
and turning them into 10 VMs on one physical server. So server consolidation was a
big part of what brought me into server virtualization back then.
Then after server virtualization came
the foundation of what would eventually
become network functions virtualization
on the timeline. It comes before network
virtualization, which is where we are now.
In the mid-2000s, you started to see more
virtual network appliances and functions.
All this means is you take a physical switch
or a physical router, and you port the code
into a virtual machine so that its no longer
a physical device; its a virtual appliance
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CONTRIBUTORS
Networking Media Group. He has deep and wide experience in tech journalism. Since the mid-1990s, he has
worked for UBMs InformationWeek, TechWeb and
Computer Reseller News. He has also written for PC Week,
CSO.com and CruxialCIO, in addition to covering startups for Bloomberg News. He started his journalism career
at United Press International, working as a reporter and
editor in California, Florida, Kansas and Texas.
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