BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

M A R C H 2 0 1 7 \ V O L . 8 \ N 0 . 2

C O N N E C T E D S T A D I U M

The Connected Stadium: If You Build It, They Will Come

N ET W O R K I N N O VAT I O N AWA R D

Vidyo

E D I T O R’ S D E S K

With NBASE-T Ethernet Switches, Do More With What You Have

k

k

kk

k I N F O G R A P H I C S

Data Mine

k

O V E R T H E W I R E

Why an APM Tool Is Essential

k

k M A N A G E D S E R V I C E S

Enterprises Embrace Managed Services

T H E S U B N ET

SDN Service for Sale … From a Healthcare Provider?

WITH 802.3BZ, OLD CABLES LEARN NEW TRICKS

The new IEEE Ethernet standard gives CAT5e and CAT6 cables a bandwidth boost.

I N F O G R A P H I C S

Pulse Check

2 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

subnet and packets: slug is blue and bold

edit name is sidebar color

delete the “XX” part on ed letter

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

The IEEE Ether-

net standard gets

networks up to

speed without

requiring all new

cabling. That’s

good news for a

handful of early

adopters.

EDITOR’S DESK | ALISSA IREI

With NBASE-T Ethernet Switches, Do More With What You Have

New Yorker contributor Calvin Trillin once wrote, “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 35 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

As a kid, I abhorred leftovers, but—now that I’m the one cooking—I like nothing better than a meal stretched and repurposed into another meal. Grilled chicken becomes chicken tacos; roasted vegetables make a colorful frittata; just about anything goes in a soup, salad or stir fry.

This culinary ethos of minimum waste and maximum use makes me think of the new NBASE-T Ethernet standard—bear with me—which al-lows organizations to get more from their existing CAT5e and CAT6 cables. Thanks to NBASE-T switches, 1 Gbps can become 2.5 or 5 Gbps, helping enterprises increase bandwidth without a major

rip-and-replace project. And for organizations on long refresh cycles, NBASE-T can also help them plan ahead for future growth. In this edition of Net-work Evolution, we talk to early adopters of the new IEEE Ethernet standard, as well as some network managers in no hurry to make the switch (“Organi-zations Futureproof Their Networks With 802.3bz Switches”).

Also in this issue, we examine a rising interest in managed network services (“Enterprises Em-brace Managed Services”) and take you inside the rapidly evolving networks of major sports venues (“The Connected Stadium: If You Build It, They Will Come”). Heard of augmented reality? It could be coming to a ballpark near you. n

ALISSA IREIFeatures and E-zine Editor, Networking Media Group

3 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

feature 1 yellowfeature 2 magentafeature 3 cyan

on turn pages of features the color of the rules match the opener color

hard return after each line of deck.

two body text returns above first paragraph

CREDIT, THIS PAGE: ISTOCK. COVER: THE-LIGHTWRITER/ISTOCK

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

BY STEVE ZURIER

Ethernet

Organizations Futureproof Networks With 802.3bz Switches

Ω Early adopters turn to the new IEEE Ethernet standard toensure their networks can meet the bandwidth demands of tomorrow.

As the advent of cloud computing has upended traditional rip-and-replace cycles at many enter-prises, the networking industry has found itself grappling with tectonic changes and a plethora of unknowns over the past several years. Amidst all this uncertainty, one clear trend caught the atten-tion of beleaguered vendors: Organizations’ reliance on wireless networks has increased dramatically. This, in turn, has prompted a demand for more flexible networking gear capable of scaling to meet growing bandwidth demand.

The networking industry responded by devel-oping IEEE 802.3bz—an Ethernet standard also referred to as NBASE-T. It calls for the addition of

4 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

multigigabit speeds of 2.5 Gbps on CAT5e cable and 5 Gbps on CAT6 cable.

Now, traditional networking companies such as Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Aruba of-fer NBASE-T switches that can handle 1, 2.5, 5 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The switches offer flexibility and help organizations either add on bandwidth as

their wireless networks expand, or futureproof for a time down the line when their bandwidth requirements will inevitably grow.

“This is actually a good idea, especially as there are more people running on wireless net-

works and workers are [using] more bandwidth-intensive applications,” said Tim Zimmerman, a

research vice president at Gartner who covers net-working technologies.

Zimmerman added that, for the most part, early adopters are deploying the technology at this stage. The organizations tend to be colleges and universi-ties that have budget money available only every five to

seven years, so they deploy 802.3bz to futureproof their networks. Other early adopters include medi-cal or engineering firms using bandwidth-intensive magnetic resonance imaging or computer-aided de-sign applications.

NBASE-T SWITCHES MAKE THE GRADEThe Houston Community College System in Texas exemplifies Zimmerman’s point about early adopters.

Kyle Cooper, director of network and telecom-munications, said about four years ago, the college started work on a $480 million building expansion project, with a portion of available funds allocated to technology infrastructure.

Cooper, who manages technology for 26 cam-puses, 75,000 students, and 6,500 faculty and staff, said the college was looking for networking tech-nology that could handle the new Wave 2 access points (APs) that the networking companies were shipping.

About six months ago, the college started with Wave 2 on two campuses, using Cisco’s 3802 Wave 2 wireless APs. Cooper said that all new access point deployments in the future will be Wave 2.

2021The year analysts predict 25 GbE and

100 GbE will account for more than half of total Ethernet switch shipments. SOURCE: “DATA CENTER SWITCH LONG-RANGE FORECAST

REPORT,” CREHAN RESEARCH INC., JANUARY 2017.

CREDIT: AKINDO/ISTOCK

5 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

“We needed a technology that could handle mul-tigigabit speeds, but let us do it over existing CAT5e and CAT6 cabling,” he said. “And it also needed to let us run Universal Power over Ethernet over existing cabling.”

Cooper did some research and decided to deploy NBASE-T switches from Cisco. The Catalyst Mul-tigigabit switch has a 48-port line card that lets the college manage bandwidth flexibly. Twelve of the ports are multigigabit lines that support 802.3bz at 2.5 and 5 Gbps. The switch also supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) so Cooper doesn’t have to run dedi-cated hardware for his more bandwidth-intensive applications. Using the Catalyst switches, the school can standardize network deployments and refreshes

in both old and new buildings, using a single switch and line-card type.

“Having this flexibility helps us manage the ever-increasing video traffic at the college,” Cooper said. “Today, roughly two-thirds of our traffic is video-based.”

Cooper added that while the

college doesn’t currently utilize all the bandwidth capabilities of the multigigabit switch, the network infrastructure has to last roughly seven to 10 years. He said the multigigabit technology helps ensure the college has a network in place that can support its future needs and growth.

WAITING IT OUTOther organizations see the potential benefits of NBASE-T switches, but think it’s still early in the technology’s lifecycle.

Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president and CTO at MLB Advanced Media in New York City, said his group would definitely find 2.5/5 Gbps Ethernet of interest, but it all comes down to price.

“In 12 to 18 months, when we’re ready to do a re-fresh, if the multigigabit switches are only 10% to 20% more expensive, then it’s something that would be of interest,” Inzerillo said. “If they were much more expensive, then we would probably wait out that refresh cycle.”

On the other hand, Inzerillo said there’s definitely a use case at MLB Advanced Media for a 5 Gbps pipe.

“A 1080p stream takes up about 3 Gbps, so

61%Growth in private cloud Ethernet switch

sales between Q3 2015 and Q3 2016.SOURCE: “WORLDWIDE QUARTERLY CLOUD IT INFRASTRUCTURE

TRACKER,” IDC, JANUARY 2017.

6 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

running 3-gig video over a 5-gig pipe would be nice,” he explained.

David Hunter, network design engineer at Indi-ana University, echoed Inzerillo, saying the univer-sity probably won’t upgrade to 802.3bz for at least a couple of years.

But much like MLB Advanced Media, Indiana University also has potential use cases for NBASE-T switches. For one, they could use the 802.3bz switches to deliver more bandwidth to the univer-sity’s wireless access points. And multigigabit lines would also be of interest to the university’s research community.

Unlike Houston Community College, Hunter said Indiana University has a much steadier refresh cy-cle, so they typically don’t have to wait five to seven years to upgrade.

“As wireless evolves we will review our switches and look at doing a refresh,” he said.

Ryan Harden, research and advanced networking architect at the University of Chicago, said the uni-versity will move to 802.3bz in due time. If nothing else, it will do so to support its newer wireless access points.

“Honestly, it’s not much of a concern for us,” Harden said. “Most of the big network providers have switches that support 2.5/5 Gbps, so if and when the time comes, we’ll simply switch our de-ployment standard to one of those.”

While networking vendors make a strong argu-ment for NBASE-T switches—most everyone finds 802.3bz of interest and can come up with use cases that make sense for a mid-tier level of bandwidth—for many, it’s not yet a must-have technology. More than likely, as the 2.5/5 Gbps speeds become standard in new switches, the vast majority of orga-nizations will just make this part of a routine upgrade. n

Data Mine

7 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

k Gotta have standardsWhich of the following wireless networking standards is most widely used in your organization?

SOURCE: “GARTNER WORLDWIDE IT SPENDING FORECAST,” GARTNER, JANUARY 2017.

SOURCE: “CAMPUS NETWORK TRENDS,” ENTERPRISE STRATEGY GROUP, APRIL 2016, N=263.

6% of workloads currently run on infrastructure as a service.SOURCE: “VOICE OF THE ENTERPRISE: CLOUD TRANSFORMATION,” 451 RESEARCH, SEPTEMBER 2016, N=1,200.

k Expected increase in worldwide IT spending between 2016 and 2017.

43+26+26+5+50 2.7%0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%

802.11n

802.11b/g

802.11ac

Don’t know 5%

43%

26%

26%

8 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

feature 1 yellowfeature 2 magentafeature 3 cyan

on turn pages of features the color of the rules match the opener color

hard return after each line of deck.

two body text returns above first paragraph

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

CREDIT: ISTOCK

Ω An increasingly popular option enables corporations to offload network maintenance to third parties and focus on core business.

In keeping with the new service economy—in which the typical person can pay third parties to do everything from drive (Uber and Lyft) to grocery shop (Blue Apron and Peapod)—a growing number of organizations are handing over routine network tasks to third-party managed service providers.

“With IT systems becoming more complex, more companies are looking to outsource their infra-structure,” said Carolyn April, senior director, in-dustry analysis, at CompTIA. While the movement has been gaining steam, it also faces pushback—with concerns about security, fluctuating pricing and ease of use giving some organizations pause.

Still, IT systems are becoming larger, more

BY PAUL KORZENIOWSKI

Managed Services

Enterprises Embrace Managed Services

9 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

connected and more complex, while network bud-gets are not keeping pace, and outsourcing enter-prise network services can prove less expensive than managing them in-house. Consider that Gartner ex-pects IT spending to grow by just 2.7% in 2017. Plus, executives are more willing to put cash into high-profile, business-changing projects like big data and the internet of things, than mundane tasks like keep-ing the network up.

DRIVERS OF MANAGED SERVICESThat mindset is forcing companies to make difficult

choices. As product lifecycles shrink, and competition intensi-fies and becomes more global, C-level executives want to focus on core technologies that directly affect their business (e.g. business applications) and less on man-aging the IT infrastructure, ac-cording to Ted Corbett, research director at Gartner.

Managed services help net-work managers meet executive

objectives in a few ways. Companies turn network management over to a specialist, often a firm better able to handle today’s complex, dynamic network configurations. In fact, about half of respondents in a recent CompTIA survey said improving efficiency and reliability of IT operations drove them to use provider services.

Speed is another factor. By relying on third par-ties to support their infrastructure, firms become more agile, freeing up internal resources to work on innovation and development. Existing IT staff can concentrate more on projects, like custom applica-tion development or building new analytics solu-tions to improve customer service.

Finally, cloud providers (see “What’s the dif-ference between a cloud provider and a managed service provider?”) are also gaining ground. Con-sequently, many firms feel more comfortable out-sourcing IT infrastructure than they did in the pre-cloud era.

A MANAGED SERVICES BUFFETResearch firm TechNavio expects MSP revenue to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)

11%Predicted compound annual

growth rate of managed services market between 2016 and 2021.

SOURCE: “MANAGED SERVICES MARKET BY DATA CENTER, INFRASTRUCTURE, NETWORKING, INFORMATION, MOBILITY,

COMMUNICATIONS AND SECURITY— GLOBAL FORECAST TO 2021,” MARKETS AND MARKETS, SEPTEMBER 2016.

10 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

of 13.7% through 2019. Enterprises can now choose from a plethora of options, as providers jump to capitalize on the managed network services trend. AppDynamics, Atera Networks Inc., AT&T, Care-Worx Inc., CenturyLink, Chips Technology Group,

Computer Support Group, DataDog, IT Authorities Inc., Level3 Communications LLC, NewRelic Inc., ServiceNow, SolarWinds and Tangoe all now vie for slices of the MSP pie.

These vendors offer a variety of discrete managed

What’s the difference between a cloud provider and a managed service provider?

THE LINE BETWEEN cloud and managed ser-

vices has blurred.

“Right now, there is a lot of confu-

sion about the terms,” said Carolyn April,

senior director, industry analysis, at

CompTIA.

Both cloud and managed service pro-

viders stem from the application service

providers (ASP) movement, an offloading

model that gained attention during the

dotcom boom. While handing applica-

tions over to third parties made sense,

the infrastructure needed to support

application-level offloading was immature

at the time. The ASP market stalled and

eventually became a historical footnote.

Handing network management to a

vendor was simpler, and a step that many

businesses had already taken with their

communications providers, like AT&T and

MCI. So, the MSP market took root.

In more recent years, MSPs have been

moving up the protocol stack and offer-

ing application-level services. Meanwhile,

cloud suppliers have made a splash with

software as a service. Lately, they have

also started focusing on infrastructure as

a service, which puts them in more direct

competition with MSPs.

The end result?

“In many cases the distinction can be

gray—there are many overlaps,” said Ted

Corbett, Research Director at Gartner.

“Generally speaking, it’s a taxonomy issue

where both terms can be used or ‘inter-

preted’ interchangeably. Cloud providers

are certainly delivering managed services,

while MSPs are invariably delivering their

services from the cloud; or remotely.” n

11 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

network services, with many expanding their port-folios over time. For example, Certus Technology Group started providing managed services to busi-nesses in Wales and England in 2000 before branch-ing out to the whole United Kingdom. The firm focused first on network connectivity, but then ex-panded to data center services, virtual servers, vir-tual desktop services and business continuity.

An enterprise can start simply with one or two en-terprise network services, and then upgrade as they see fit.

Managed security services seem to be growing in popularity. According to the CompTIA survey, MSPs stated that “meeting security risks” was the most important IT problem their clients will face in 2017.

“Every company is looking for better security and needs to protect their information more,” CompTIA’s April said.

The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is also of enormous interest, with a slew of MSPs adding managed options to their offerings, including Verizon, CenturyLink, Hughes Network

Systems and Masergy Communications Inc. “WAN services are undergoing a major transfor-

mation, unlike anything we’ve seen in at least 20 years,” Gartner’s Corbett noted.

Applying software-defined networking principles to the wide area network enables network operators and businesses to meet a variety of objectives: lower network pricing, additional bandwidth and faster deployment of new services. As a result, IDC expects SD-WAN revenue to reach $6 billion by 2020, fueled by a 90% CAGR.

NOT A PANACEABut organizations often feel leery of moving to these services for a variety of reasons. Companies have grown used to running the network themselves and are hesitant to move the systems and management off site. They feel more comfortable walking into the data center and looking at the screens themselves rather than viewing information via a portal.

Pricing can also present a problem. These solu-tions are often usage based: Customers are charged by how much bandwidth they consume each month. During a busy time—say, a retailer’s holiday

$2.8BPredicted worldwide revenue from SD-WAN managed services in 2020.

SOURCE: “CLOUD AND DRIVE FOR WAN EFFICIENCIES POWER MOVE TO SD -WAN,” IDC, MARCH 2016.

12 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

sales—their costs may rise dramatically. One area that is generally weak, with a few ex-

ceptions, is the managed services’ customer portal capabilities, according to Gartner’s Corbett. These systems can be less than intuitive and difficult to use, with limited self-service functionality, infra-structure visibility and real-time reporting.

WHAT’S NEXT? Some MSPs now subscribe to cutting-edge managed services from other providers in an attempt to im-prove their own service offerings. Certus Technol-ogy previously relied on Kaseya Inc. management tools to support its own managed service, but found they were becoming outdated. At the end of 2015, the MSP evaluated its options and selected Solar-Winds’ service.

“SolarWinds offered more automation, so we can more quickly analyze the network alerts gen-erated,” said Alex Bidhendy, systems development

manager at Certus. In addition to network automation, customers

are also demanding better data analytics. Corpora-tions want detailed reports illustrating how well the network is working—sifting out junk, like false alarms, and presenting only relevant information. As businesses add more endpoints and collect more performance data, such tasks become increasingly challenging.

Finally, with the move to mobility and cloud, the number of enterprise connections has been grow-ing. MSPs need to do a better job of integrating vis-ibility, management and reporting of these different systems into a cohesive, complete picture of net-work performance.

The MSP model fits with current IT desires and demands: reduce expenses for nonstrategic items and concentrate more on core competencies. Con-sequently, more corporations will continue to em-brace managed network services in the coming years. n

Pulse Check

13 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

k Define the relationshipHow do you think software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and cloud are related?

SOURCE: “VOICE OF THE ENTERPRISE: SOFTWARE-DEFINED INFRASTRUCTURE,” 451 RESEARCH, MARCH 2016, N=588. RESPONDENTS COULD CHOOSE MORE THAN ONE ANSWER. NUMBERS HAVE BEEN ROUNDED.

32%of organizations say their campus network strategies include transitioning to a wireless-only model.SOURCE: “CAMPUS NETWORK TRENDS,” ENTERPRISE STRATEGY GROUP,” APRIL 2016, N=263.

87%of video conferencing

users say they communicate with contacts outside their

organizations using the technology.

SOURCE: “2016 VIDEO CONFERENCING END USER SURVEY,” WAINHOUSE RESEARCH, SEPTEMBER 2016, N=311.

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

52%

38%

26%

26%

12%

Public cloud and SDI are complementary.

SDI is a path to achieving hybrid cloud.

SDI is a path to achieving private cloud.

Public cloud and SDI are alternative approaches to IT.

Not related.

14 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

feature 1 yellowfeature 2 magentafeature 3 cyan

on turn pages of features the color of the rules match the opener color

hard return after each line of deck.

two body text returns above first paragraph

CREDIT: FOTOLIA

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

Ω In the next-generation sports venue, the home team’s network can serve as a strategicresource, driving fan engagement,concession sales and more.

When the Atlanta Braves celebrate opening day this year, they will unveil more than just a brand-new ballpark. They’ll also introduce their fans to one of the sports world’s biggest experiments in aug-mented reality. Pokémon GO, meet Field of Dreams.

Such an endeavor is possible because the Braves now have at their disposal an unprecedented amount of bandwidth and a state of the art Wi-Fi network, thanks to one of the largest stadium and mixed-use development installations in the country—a 60-acre, $1.1 billion real estate project that includes retail shops, restaurants, residential units, an office tower, a hotel and a Live Nation entertainment venue, in addition to the new connected stadium.

BY CHRISTOPHER HEUN

Stadium Networks

The Connected Stadium: If You Build It, They Will Come

15 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

“We’re going to do augmented reality and show that it works, and then everybody and their brother is going to do it,” said Adam Zimmerman, vice presi-dent of marketing for the Braves. “Everyone loves virtual reality; I can’t scale virtual reality to 40,000 or 50,000 people. I’m looking for stuff I can scale. I can scale augmented reality.”

What will it look like for Braves fans? Augmented reality superimposes a computer-generated image on the real world. The most exciting application is the ability for visitors to the ballpark to point their mobile phone at a player on the field and access his stats, photos and even videos. Users of the Braves app could also choose to join a scavenger hunt for virtual bobbleheads around the facility, similar to

the Pokémon hunters of 2016.

“It’s a whole new medium to monetize,” Zimmerman said, alluding to potential sponsorships. “It’s a tre-mendous canvas for untold engagement.”

Comcast Business is providing the Braves’ new

complex with two redundant fiber feeds of 100 Gbps Ethernet along with more than 700 Wi-Fi access points.

FANS DEMAND CONNECTED STADIUMSThe Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park is just the latest in a long line of projects funded by sports franchises and their leagues along with local governments and taxpayers competing to build the latest and greatest facilities.

Last fall, the $535 million Golden 1 Center, home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, opened with two 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) dedicated internet cir-cuits, 1,000 Wi-Fi access points, and more than 1 million square feet of Wi-Fi and cellular coverage. A year ago, Levi’s Stadium, the $1.2 billion home of the San Francisco 49ers, hosted Super Bowl 50 and set a record transferring 10 TB of data over Wi-Fi. That’s a lot of tweets, Snapchats, Facebook updates and In-stagram posts.

“You need to allow people to be connected. They are [for] the rest of the day. You can’t cut that off once they come into the venue that they’ve spent a lot of money to go to,” said Fred Kirsch, vice

35,430unique users accessed the NRG Stadium

Wi-Fi network during Super Bowl 51. SOURCE: “RECORD -BREAKING WI-FI USAGE AT SUPER BOWL LI,”

EXTREME NETWORKS, FEBRUARY 2017.

16 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

president of content for the New England Patriots and Kraft Sports Productions.

Last fall, the team upgraded its Wi-Fi network to 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless technology from Ex-treme Networks that increased internet capacity inside the Patriots’ stadium to 10 Gbps and tripled the number of access points from 350 to more than 1,000. This kind of connectivity “is the cost of doing business,” Kirsch said.

Without question, fans have an insatiable digi-tal appetite. They expect to be able to text their friends, upload game-day photos and video, and access the internet just as they would at home. At the same time, teams are using their upgraded net-works to personalize the connected stadium experi-

ence wherever they can—tracking fan behavior and serving them everything from coupons for their fa-vorite beer to updates on lines at different bathrooms to traffic updates for when they leave.

MVP: THE NETWORK“The network becomes a strategic resource,” said Mike Allen, systems engineer at Brocade, which has provided network infrastructure at Levi’s Stadium and built the 160 GB backbone that supports the new arena in Sacramento. Stadiums today are being built from the ground up with technology in mind. Traditional Ethernet, Wi-Fi, broadcast video, sta-dium lighting, IP televisions and security cameras are all connected to the same network.

Allen estimated that the hardware to support these elaborate networks can cost as much as $10 million, depending on the facility. The Wi-Fi net-work typically requires an additional investment of a couple million dollars.

“We’re way out in front of any innovation that would come to use that bandwidth,” said Eric McLoughlin, director of marketing and product management for Comcast Business, referring to the 100 GbE at the new home of the Braves. “It’s like having a 20-lane highway when you only need three lanes at any given moment.”

Teams are trying their best to fill that highway with their own content. Besides the Braves and their augmented reality project, the San Jose Sharks are

New 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless technology has increased internet

capacity in the Patriots’ stadium to 10 Gbps and tripled the number of access points to more than 1,000.

17 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

experimenting with virtual reality and 360-degree video. The NHL franchise spent 10 months collect-ing unique camera angles that aren’t available on TV: a Zamboni machine cleaning the ice, a player’s helmet during pregame introductions and a puck drop at center ice.

“Those are the perspectives fans don’t get to see, so it offers a unique vantage point,” said Doug Bentz, vice president of marketing for the Sharks.

BURGERS AND BEERS ARE LOW-HANGING FRUITFor all the excitement about providing fans with virtual reality, teams can also use their networks to boost concession sales. A recent study commis-

sioned by Oracle Hospitality found that fans ranked food and beverage as the most important element of their experience at a game, but those long lines and fear of missing the action scared them off. On average, fans said they would spend an extra $20 if wait times were cut in half.

“Mobile technology to improve ordering, payment and delivering

loyalty programs is a promising path to greater sales. Though such options are used sparingly now, fans report great interest in them,” the Oracle re-port stated.

The Pittsburgh Penguins have had great success with a loyalty program through the team app that of-fers discounts at concession stands. For example, it was able to increase post-game sales by 20% at con-cession stands by targeting fans who had made a pre-vious purchase there, said Brock Bergman, director of business development and strategy at SessionM, which helped the team administer the program.

SessionM software integrates with a team’s app to track fans’ spending habits inside the stadium.

“We’re trying to create a much more immersive and differentiated experience than I would get at home on my couch,” Bergman said. “We’re helping venues and organizations collect data to personalize the experience.”

TEAMWORK BETWEEN WI-FI AND DASSoldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears, is over-hauling its Wi-Fi network with Boingo, which pro-vides both the current Wi-Fi network as well as a

100Number of Wi-Fi-enabled,

mobile point-of-sale concession stations at the Denver Broncos’

Sports Authority Field.SOURCE: “DENVER BRONCOS: SPORTS AUTHORITY

FIELD AT MILE HIGH,” CISCO, JANUARY 2016.

CREDIT: REDKOALADESIGN/ISTOCK

18 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

neutral-hosted distributed antenna system (DAS) to increase wireless capacity in the stadium.

Luca Serra, director of sponsorship and media at Soldier Field, wants both systems in place for the best fan experience to offload a portion of the data traffic when necessary.

“You need parallel concurrent networks with the ability to play together. There’s two ways to get your data, through your cellular network and the Wi-Fi,” he said.

“There is a clear advantage in having two systems that provide coverage redundancy during times of a service outage, in addition to two separate systems that provide more overall bandwidth,” said James Hammond, director of IT for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, which upgraded the Wi-Fi connectivity at its stadium last year with more than 1,200 access points. For DAS, the team chose CommScope’s ION-U distributed antenna system.

“Instead of merely providing coverage, we now must provide an extremely high level of capacity and quality as well,” said Kevin Schmonsees, CTO and vice president of Beam Wireless, which con-sulted on the Panthers upgrade. “The level of detail

required to support a high quality experience has grown immensely.”

GAME TAPE: LESSONS LEARNEDLike any project, the key to building networks in-side stadiums is involving the technology partner as early as possible in the process, McLoughlin of Comcast Business said.

“That way you can spend the time mapping out the best locations for Wi-Fi access points, mapping out conduit runs and how the fiber needs to be dis-persed throughout the complex,” he said.

Brocade’s Allen recommended identifying poten-tial problem areas early and physically separating services like Wi-Fi and IPTV, so they don’t interfere with each other. For its two most recent deploy-ments, Brocade set up an internal testing network to speed up implementation.

“As soon as construction is over, [teams] want the network in the next day. You need to get all the con-figurations set up and staged so once it’s time to get the gear into the stadium it’s really just connecting things together,” Allen said. n

Network Innovation Award

19 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

Vidyo: Vidyo.iok W H AT I T I S

A communications platform as a service

k W H AT I T D O E S

Allows developers to embed high-quality, multi-party video conferencing capabilities into any application.

k H O W I T W O R K S

Vidyo.io provides developers with free, easy-to-use video APIs, so they can experiment with the platform at no charge. Once an organization decides to sign on as an official customer, pricing is pay-as-you-go. Calls scale up to hundreds of participants through cloud-based routing.

k W H Y W E L I K E I T

The uses for embedded video are many and varied, ranging from telemedicine calls and video banking to workforce collaboration. Vidyo offers exception-ally clear and reliable live video, making face-to-face interactions not only possible, but enjoyable.

To learn more about why Vidyo is our latest Network Innovation Award winner, read the whole story on SearchUnifiedCommunications.

20 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

subnet and packets: slug is blue and bold

edit name is sidebar color

delete the “XX” part on ed letter

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

An APM tool

harvests data

and differs from

application man-

agement, offering

valuable services

in an age of

virtualization.

OVER THE WIRE | APM | ANDREW FROEHLICH

Why an APM Tool is Essential

Application performance monitoring is a method used to harvest performance metrics via a distributed software system. At a minimum, per-formance software is deployed on the application server, as well as the client machine. An advanced APM tool also deploys monitoring software throughout the network to gain even more data points.

The idea of performance monitoring is to collect specific application metrics along the network path between the server and client devices. The perfor-mance data is highly granular and can be used to identify specific parts of a client-server transac-tion that may be causing performance problems.

As networks, servers and operating systems be-come increasingly virtualized, a robust application performance monitoring tool becomes a neces-sity. Without it, developers are left in the dark to determine if code within their application is the

problem—or if there’s an issue with the underly-ing virtualized environment.

There are simply too many variables to make even an educated guess as to what the root cause of the performance problem might be. Therefore, the best way to truly figure out what’s happening from a performance standpoint is to monitor transactions from a client-side point of view.

For most IT departments, APM tools are suf-ficient for identifying the majority of application-related issues in a production network. But for those that require the need to identify performance detail at a deeper level, that’s where application perfor-mance management tools come into play.

Performance management tools function simi-larly to performance monitoring tools by baselining and analyzing collected data to form a correlated opinion on where problems are likely to be residing. But instead of simply pointing to high-level

CREDIT ROBUART/ISTOCK

21 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

memory allocation problems or CPU spikes caused by the application, performance management tools drill down to the code level to identify the exact por-tion of the application code that is the likely culprit.

Because of this, application performance man-agement tools are better suited for application developers, as opposed to application and server administrators. n

22 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

subnet and packets: slug is blue and bold

edit name is sidebar color

delete the “XX” part on ed letter

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

n Mike Weisse

n Network Architect

n BayState Health

n Springfield, Mass.

THE SUBNET | Q&A | ALISSA IREI

SDN Service for Sale … From a Healthcare Provider?

In a sense, the evolution of network architect Mike Weisse’s career mirrors that of IT itself. Weisse, who worked on IBM mainframes—the “dinosaurs” of computing—in the 1980s, is now tackling cutting-edge software-defined network-ing technology as a network architect at BayState Health.

Weisse has spent the past couple of years help-ing the healthcare provider, based in Springfield, Mass., become an early adopter of hyper-converged infrastructure and VMware NSX. Now, he believes BayState Health may have a future as a small-scale SDN service provider, using microsegmentation and multi-tenancy to securely run other organizations’ networks parallel to its own.

We spoke with Weisse to learn more about his work with VMware NSX, microsegmentation and multi-tenancy, and the possibility of an SDN

service offering from BayState. Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly

edited for length and clarity.

How long have you worked in networking?I’ve been doing this for 36 years now. I first started as a programmer. I was a civil engineering major in college and kind of fell into a programming course. So I wrote assembler and COBOL programs for a couple of years and then in the ’80s I started doing system programming on IBM mainframes. I worked for a manufacturing company and a bank and then actually got recruited to come to BayState Health. I stayed in systems programming with mainframes until the early ’90s. Pretty much nobody in the health system—which was just a hospital at the time, called BayState Medical—really managed the local area networks. They were scattered about in

23 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

different departments. I just volunteered to pull them all together, and they were happy someone wanted to do it.

Tell me about your introduction to software-defined networking. A couple of years ago, we had a turnover in our lead-ership. We had a company come in called Vertite-chIT, and they were tasked with building a new data center. Our CIO decided that the data center would be too expensive, so VertitechIT had another idea—software-defined networking.

We already had a converged infrastructure using VMware for many years, which gave us the ability to build virtual machines on a physical host. Verti-techIT suggested expanding on that and becoming hyper-converged. A hyper-converged infrastructure shares storage, server and compute resources across multiple sites—one of those sites being the new data center that we were potentially going to build out.

So that project started two years ago, using VM-ware NSX. NSX adds the ability to share your net-work the way you share your virtual machines. We also adopted vSAN, which is VMware’s storage mechanism.

That was quite a big thing to throw on our plate. Personally, I had no experience with SDN. My back-ground is in the physical network—switches, routers and firewalls. A software-defined network takes all of those switching, routing and firewall concepts and puts them in software. That’s what we had to learn.

What was that learning curve like? It was huge. I’m familiar with the concepts, because I’ve worked with switching and routing for 20 years, but putting them onto a software-defined topol-ogy and understanding that—that was a challenge. They put some of us in a class for a week to teach us NSX, and then we had to teach ourselves the rest of it. That was quite a huge task; it was daunting. But after a while we embraced it, because it was some-thing that was going to save us money, and give us a lot of flexibility.

When you have a virtual machine, you have the ability to move it from one physical host to another—it’s just a software function. Before we had software-defined networking, you could only do that within one site, because the IP addressing would have to change from one site to the other. You have to honor the physical layer of networking. But with

24 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

software-defined networking, the address travels with it, so you can move from site to site. So that—along with the vSAN storage component—allows us to have redundancy and disaster recovery capabili-ties built right into the network.

We have a three-site software-defined network, so if we were to lose a site, everything that was running on the host at that site would come up within min-utes at another site. It’s pretty cool stuff. It was a big paradigm shift for us too, because the way we used to work was—I mean we worked with the storage guys and the server guys—but we were kind of inde-pendent of each other. We really only met and talked when we needed something from each other. Now because it’s so tightly integrated, we don’t do any-thing without talking to each other. We plan things together; we meet once a week and go through what are called Knowledge Base Articles. Those are the weekly articles that come out from VMware—we re-view those together. I really enjoy the collaborative effort that we were kind of thrust into. It’s been a re-ally good thing.

What are you working on currently?The project that I’m working on now—which

builds upon the hyper-converged infrastructure and SDN—involves microsegmentation and multi-tenancy. With microsegmentation, I can implement what are basically firewall rules in any of those vir-tual machines that are running on our software- defined network. That was something that was harder to do in the physical world, because you needed a physical separation. In this world, you’re separated virtually.

Microsegmentation allows us to get so granu-lar that I can segment it down so that a server only needs to serve a particular set of people and ma-chines. So you don’t have a server that’s open to everyone in the hospital—only to the people that it needs to be open to. That server doesn’t talk to all the other servers, so you reduce your security risks that way—from hacking or from viruses. We’re un-der PCI rules, and so we have to segment out certain devices and machines.

We’re currently moving our physical servers and our legacy virtual servers into this structure, and as we do that, we segment them. Our target for this year is to get completely off the physical hardware and our legacy virtual hardware and get everything into the software-defined network.

25 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

HOME NBASE-T DATA MINEMANAGED SERVICES PULSE CHECK

STADIUM NETWORKS VIDYO OVER THE WIRE THE SUBNET

Multi-tenancy allows me to use the software- defined network to actually build a foundation where another company could run on the same network and use the same IP addressing, because there’s a logical separation. They can share storage and server capacity on the physical host. So you could have two companies running the same network on the same physical host but be virtually separate.

Right now we are looking to—we’re a nonprofit—but we’re looking to make our infrastructure at-tractive to some other companies, maybe other hospitals, that might want to buy an SDN service

from us. We might be able to bring revenue into the hospital. The idea is we could leverage the technol-ogy we have and get more use out of it, and it could pay for itself.

What advice would you give to young networking professionals just starting their careers?Embrace the new technologies. Seek out online labs, for instance—there’s so much stuff out there now. Volunteer. If you see something that nobody’s re-ally doing or needs a champion, volunteer. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and be a team player. n

26 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A R C H 2 0 1 7

CONTRIBUTORS

CHRISTOPHER HEUN is a freelance writer and former edi-tor at InformationWeek. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, BtoB Magazine, Folio, SciFi.com, the Budapest Business Journal and the Hun-garian edition of Reader’s Digest.

ANDREW FROEHLICH is president of West Gate Networks and has been involved in enterprise IT for over 15 years, largely focused Cisco wired and wireless voice network design, implementation and support as well as network security.

ALISSA IREI is features and e-zine editor of Network Evo-lution in TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. Irei was previously the site editor for SearchSDN. Prior to joining TechTarget, she worked as a news anchor, producer and re-porter at NBC affiliates in Montana.

PAUL KORZENIOSWKI is a freelance writer who specializes in cloud computing, analytics, mobility, security and vid-eoconferencing issues. As a seasoned IT journalist, he has had more than 10,000 articles and 1 million words pub-lished. Korzeniowski is based in Sudbury, Mass.

STEVE ZURIER is a freelance technology journalist based in Columbia, Md., with more than 30 years of journalism and publishing experience. Zurier worked as features edi-tor at Government Computer News and InternetWeek.

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Alissa Irei, Features and E-zine Editor

Kara Gattine, Executive Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis, Executive Editor

Antone Gonsalves, Director of News

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Anita Koury, Graphic Designer

Nick Arena, Associate Managing Editor, E-Products

FOR SALES INQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT:

Doug Olender, Senior Vice President/Group Publisher dolender@techtarget.com

STAY CONNECTEDFollow

@NetworkingTT today.

TechTarget, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466

© 2017 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology profession-als. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.

EMAIL Contact us

@WEBSITE Visit us