NEXT- GENERATION

NETWORK MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES

New tools and techniques are giving IT organisations better visibility and control

over their networks.

IT inEuropenetworking eDitionSpecial European edition of Network Evolution e-zine | www.searchnetworking.co.uk

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march 2012, volume 2, no. 1

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4G Spectrum is theGovernment’s Most Coveted Networking Asset

Britain’s networking giants are jos-tling for position as they await the release of the 4G spectrum auction by Ofcom. But after years of delays and arguments over liberalisation and ownership caps, it stands to be seen whether British operators can enter the 4G arena without the hindrances that have stalled uptake in the US.

Once extra spectrum for 4G is avail-able, mobile providers will be able to offer faster access to wireless services, easing congestion in existing networks and serving new rural customers at about the rate of today’s ADSL home broadband speeds.

Operators are desperate for this new spectrum since currently mobile tele-phony occupies only 4% of the spec-trum suitable for radio transmissions. The proposed auction of 4G-support-ing frequencies in the 800 MHz and

2.6 GHz bands, now expected to start in Q2 2012, will open an extra 250 MHz to mobile telephony. This will add almost 75% more capacity to the networks, which is 80% more space than was available in the 3G auction in 2000 that netted the Government £22.5bn.

More 4G spectrum will mean more cell traffic on enterprise wireless networksThe release of 4G spectrum could have fall out on the enterprise since it will result in even more mobile data traf-fic—much of which will land on Wi-Fi LANs.

According to Gartner, through 2013, 35% of smartphone wireless data traf-fic will go through private and public Wi-Fi networks. By 2016, the invest-ment in 4G will mean network infra-structure must be poised to support a shift in capacity from voice to data traffic that stems from cellular offload. This shift will introduce new traffic bal-ancing and security challenges.

Phillip Redman, research vice presi-dent in Gartner Research, cautions that

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the changes will test network engi-neers and the ways they control traffic within their enterprise systems.

“Since mobile networks are based on contention, the more users that share the bandwidth, the slower the speeds. Diverting traffic to non-cellular network technology should improve system throughput. Security provi-

sions will need to be in place to protect corporate data because most public Wi-Fi hot spots do not offer encryption technology, but will support corporate encryption methods, such as VPNs, ” said Redman. n

joe fernandez is the news editor for Searchnetworking.co.uK.

in 2002 i wrote an article for TechTarget with my top predictions for Networking in 2003. A decade later I’ve ask myself how much has changed. Sadly, my answer is: Not much.

We had evolutionary change—faster Ethernet and cheaper products, but nothing that really made a difference to the way we work. In 2001 I was plan-ning for IPv6 as the next big thing—10 years later I’m still planning for IPv6. Let’s go through some of my 2003 predictions and see whether they are relevant today:

1. Security will continue to tbe the MoST BorInG issue, again and again and again... IT Security is still boring and remains largely irrelevant. We saw EMC/RSA and hardware tokens get massively compromised this year, and no one was much bothered. Even though there were huge breaches from smallest to biggest companies, which leaked tens

of millions of people’s private informa-tion, not a single government reacted.IT Managers sighed wearily and spent some more money on the next security thing, grumbled about the inability to measure security and promptly forgot about it. Security is still boring and no one really cares. 2. Wireless networking will continue to be massively over-hyped because it’s the only fun thing in the market. It has taken 10 years for wireless net-working to take off, but it had to wait for portable computing to go main-stream in the form of wireless phones, tablets and netbooks.

But wireless isn’t stable yet. Vendors all release varying, non-interoperable products and technical features. The spatial reuse 3x3 spectrum and 4 channel antennas are the current touchstone, but there will be another technology next week.

Has the Networking Industry Changed in a Decade?

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3. Performance doesn’t matter anymore A decade later, this is still true. We have so much server capacity that we have invented the blah blah cloud to use it up. New applications and uses are possible because of the extra capacity, and “big data” uses a lot of compute, but most companies are not worried about performance like they did fifteen years ago when CPU’s, memory, disk drives and networking were genuinely slow.

4. The Big four won’t be so big next year because smaller companies deliver better results and actually know what they are talking about (instead of wearing shiny suits that bill in 6-minute intervals). The small companies from 2002 have all been replaced with lots of new ones. The Big Four networking companies of 2002 (Nortel, 3Com, Cisco and DEC) are all gone except for Cisco. Ten years later we are watching a resurgence in big companies as HP and Dell move to compete with Cisco. I got this half right. 5. HP will work it out, thus forcing dell to change its model. HP did work it out—(“it” was the pur-chase of Compaq Computers). Dell did have to change its model to include professional services and products that weren’t computers. Today, HP and Dell have networking and storage products to round out the product portfolio for

a full service. HP is also building a pro-fessional services business buy strug-gling to get it right.

So what’s actually new this year?Networking is still all about frames and packets. In 2002, it was clear that Ethernet would defeat Token Ring and FDDI and that’s what we have today. In 2012 we will get more Ethernet in the form of 10 GbE. We will get big-ger switches that go faster. We will get more firewalls that few people can operate correctly. Cisco will continue to dominate the networking industry even though HP and Dell are attacking the market.

IPv6 still won’t happen this year because the recession means no bud-gets for upgrades. There are enough IPv4 addresses around for most every-one to ignore IPv6 except in the Chi-nese and Asia Pacific regions.

The only thing that excites me is the rise of software defined networking because after fifteen years of waiting, we really need network management that actually does things. Monitoring is more or less under control, but man-agement and automated configuration is the most exciting thing that might happen this year. I’m tired of configur-ing VLANs; I don’t need to do it any-more. n

GreG ferro is a freelance network architect in the uK working with Fortune 100 companies to design, build and troubleshoot networks.

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Gearing Up for Mobility in 2012Companies are rethinking legacy tools to take advantage of what users get from having access to data and appli-cations across all kinds of devices, according to TechTarget’s 2012 IT Pri-orities Survey.

Of the 225 UK users TechTarget surveyed online in November and December 2011 around their priorities for the New Year, over 70% said they would be implementing mobility initia-tives in 2012 to deal with the increas-ing consumerisation of IT, such as the rise of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) schemes.

The introduction of company-enabled smartphones and tablet PCs dominated the initiatives likely to be implemented with almost 60% of the users surveyed. Both were considered a medium priority for enterprises.

As smartphones and tablets prolifer-ate in the enterprise, IT pros are under

pressure to implement enterprise mobile device management (MDM) systems that can protect enterprise handsets from potential attacks.

Ultimately, organisations aim to sup-port corporate email and other applica-tions on consumer products, but they face tough decisions when it comes to choosing an MDM solution.

MDM software secures, monitors and manages an array of personal and enterprise-issued mobile devices. It also supports over-the-air distribution of applications, data and configuration settings.

TechTarget survey respondents made mobile security and MDM soft-ware their next most important pri-orities with a combined 47% of users saying they would be looking to imple-ment the technology. Of these, 58% of users said MDM was a medium prior-ity while mobile security was made a high priority by 45.9% of users.

The need for enterprise MDM is evi-dent. According to software company G Data’s malware report on current online threats, Android devices are now being targeted as they continue to grow in popularity. Cyber criminals are increasingly using these mobile devices to spread malware code, and the num-ber of smartphones and tablets suffer-ing from mobile malware increased by 273% in the first half of 2011 compared to the same period in 2010.n

joe fernandez is the news editor for Searchnetworking.co.uK.

which of these mobility initiatives will your company implement in 2012?

Smartphones ...........................................................................................28.9%Tablet Pcs ...................................................................................................30.3%mobile device management ....................................................21.1%mobile security .....................................................................................26.1%mobile enhancement of data/applications .............16.9%mobile virtualisation ...........................................................................5.6%none of the above ..............................................................................23.9%Don’t know ....................................................................................................7.7%

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now that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota relies on software-as-a-service (SaaS) for core business processes like claims processing, network performance engineer Barry Pieper relies on deep packet analysis to tap inbound and out-bound Internet traffic in order to ensure his providers are delivering on their service level agreements (SLAs).

But it wouldn’t be worth using costly deep packet inspection for all of his network monitoring needs, so Pieper still turns to good old fash-ioned NetFlow analysis for a broad-er view of what’s happening on the network.

Combined, Pieper uses a Network Instruments Gigastor appliance for packet capture, Compuware’s Van-tage network monitoring product (recently rebranded as Gomez Net-work Performance Monitoring) for analysis of that packet information,

and then Fluke Networks’ Optiview NetFlow Tracker for NetFlow.

“I use NetFlow a lot on our wide area network mainly because it works so well there,” he said. “Our branch offices are T1 and T3 links,

so we would do software distribu-tions with Altiris or Tivoli and that would cause problems for people using our in-house applications or web apps. NetFlow could quickly

DON’T BID FAREWELL TO

NETFLOW!Packet analysis may provide a deeper look

into the network, but NetFlow can offer a broader view. In fact, they work best together. By SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDy

“ I use NetFlow a lot on our wide area net-work mainly because it works so well there.”—Barry PIePer,Network performance engineer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota

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tell us this was Altiris traffic and we could find out if people were streaming radio and things like that.”

Pieper is not alone in includ-ing NetFlow in a next-generation combination of monitoring tools. NetFlow monitoring may not always get the respect it deserves from the network management community, but it can alert engineers to band-width hogs or anomalous behaviour, and NetFlow v9 allows users to pull even more data from flow records.

What’s more, while packet stream monitoring tools go deeper, allowing network engineers to dig into exactly what is happening across the wire, continuous packet monitoring and analysis is not cheap. Probes and taps are expen-sive, and storing the data collected can be pricey, particularly for larger companies that are producing many terabytes a day. Therefore, most enterprises can typically only moni-tor packet streams in select, critical locations on the network, offering only a narrow view of the network at a time when many enterprises are clamouring for more and more vis-ibility.

“The amount of visibility organ-isations need to totally quantify how their applications and infrastructure is running continues to increase,” said Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager for network monitoring and analysis vendor Network Instru-

ments. “There can never be too much information.”

For that reason, Reinboldt has seen increased use of NetFlow mon-itoring by his customers.

“Based on what we talk to our customers about, 25-50% of them do at least some level of flow moni-toring as part of their overall moni-toring solution,” he said. “What flow technology can offer you is a broad-er perspective.”

netFLow For BroaDer VisiBiLitYFor many network teams, NetFlow offers enough information to han-dle about 90% of their problems, and then they turn to deeper tools for the other 10%, said Jim Frey, research director for Enterprise Management Associates.

“I have talked to a lot of folks who use packet instrumentation in important parts of their network. Then they use NetFlow to get a sense of what’s going on in remote sites,” said Frey.

Everett McArthur, a tier-three enterprise network support engi-neer at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centre, monitors his network with a combination of NetFlow and packet monitoring. While his packet capture technol-ogy is instrumented to collect traffic in specific areas of the network, he can turn on NetFlow in any loca-tion at any time when he needs to

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troubleshoot something.Recently staff at a remote clinic

400 miles away from McArthur’s Lubbock, Texas-area location com-plained of bandwidth saturation. McArthur turned on NetFlow on the remote clinic’s router and pointed it at his nearest NetFlow collector.

“We found out very quickly that the inbound link to this clinic was receiving update traffic from Micro-soft, but outbound it was saturated because the clinicians were all hit-ting a particular electronic medical records server,” he said.

“So we had two different prob-lems. It was saturated one way from the updates being run and the other way by people dealing with medical records. We were able to make some decisions on what to do immediately about the issue, and then they increased their bandwidth for the long-term. Without NetFlow, I would have had to go out with a portable analyser and put a tap on the line.”

FinD proBLems with netFLow, Dig Deeper with paCket anaLYsis

Most of the engineers who use Net-Flow get a lot of value out of it for higher level monitoring, Frey said. “Then they use packet analysis for the difficult problems.”

At Integra Telecom, a network communications and cloud ser-vices provider based in Vancouver,

Wash., network support manager Jeff Willard uses CA Technologies NetQoS NetFlow for visibility across his broader network, particularly at the peering transit edge so that he

can detect network threats com-ing from customer locations. To increase visibility, Willard is in the process of adding NetFlow in the aggregation points of his network, too.

“That will allow us to have a bet-ter understanding of our custom-ers’ networks and their usage and improve our ability to assist them with any problems or issues they have.”

NetFlow is useful for adding con-text to better understand the infor-mation obtained through packet capture.

“Having a raw pcap file to sort through with no idea of what you’re looking for can be daunting,” Wil-lard said. “Leveraging NetFlow data

“ Having a raw pcap file to sort through with no idea of what you’re looking for can be daunting.”—JeFF WIllard,Network support manager, Integra Telecom

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to give you a better understanding of what is traversing the link … gives you a frame of reference for where to look within a packet capture.

“Having NetFlow for the visibility and graphical representation of the network and using that for trend-ing and alerting can shed light on hotspots or conditions that we need to investigate further. Then we can sniff the wire for traffic at this par-ticular link or aggregation point.”

integration oF netFLow anDpaCket-monitoring tooLs neeDeD

As network operations teams increasingly use both NetFlow and packet monitoring technologies together for broader visibility, they will need tools that can offer a com-mon view of both sets of data—but there is no easy solution available.

“If you’re trying to use a com-bined set of [packet capture and NetFlow] for monitoring, you need some method for bringing this data together in a common console. There is some work still to be done to bring these together.”

McArthur, of Texas Tech, relies on Network Instruments for both his NetFlow and packet monitoring.

“Since it’s the same interface, it makes it a lot easier to do our analy-sis,” McArthur said. “You’re not having to relearn a different way of doing things.”

As more network engineers combine these methods, it’s likely that a set of integration tools will emerge. n

SHaMuS McGIllIcuddy is the news director for TechTarget’s networking media Group.

as network operations teams increasingly use both NetFlow andpacket monitoring technologies together for broader visibility, they will need tools that can offer a com-mon view of both sets of data—but there is no easy solution available.

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there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of DevOps, but if you’re a network engineer you’ll have to learn about it soon enough. DevOps, a composite of “development” and “operations,” is an IT industry movement driven by the software development community to inte-grate software development organ-isations with IT operations.

As with so many areas of IT inno-vation, the cloud is the catalyst for change when it comes to DevOps and the network. Since both system administration and development can now take place in the cloud, the future will require developers to know system administration and system administrators to know pro-gramming.

In fact, Steve Shah, director of product management at Citrix Sys-tems, sees DevOps as a new wave in system administration. Five years from now, the new systems admin-

istrator will be programming APIs to replace the old school tasks of managing physical infrastructure, he says. Networks will be a part of that, and network engineers will find themselves in meetings with DevO-ps teams asking them about the compatibility of their infrastructure with this new technology.

In this Q&A, Shah offers some background on DevOps.

Why do networking pros need to know about DevOps?Let me start by providing a little bit of context about how we all came into the DevOps ecosystem. Citrix has a special kind of reverse proxy server that is designed to make web applications go faster. So we’re using—as a platform—the largest websites in the world, eBay and Amazon [Web Services (AWS)].

As traffic is flowing into the web-

SOFTWARE TEAMS LEAD DATA CENTRE

ORCHESTRATION System admins and software developers are tying applications and infrastructure together for data centre network automation. By LISA SAMpSON

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based application, we’re able to do to a lot of optimisation on that traf-fic. [This includes] everything from cleaning up TCP/IP and speeding up processing to actually changing the way that applications are accessed so that there’s quality-based access and controls for being able to des-ignate locations for that data. An image, for example, might be moved to one set of servers, and if it’s an application, [it could be sent] to a better set of servers. Managing all of this cost effectively could cause network problems, not to mention financial managerial issues.

Where did the DevOps movement come from?System administrators started look-ing at things like automation when they found themselves dealing with tens of thousands of servers as early as 2003-04. They would come to us and say, ’Someone has written a script that will change configuration and a bunch of software engineers changed some of the commands we were using to automate.’ So, they’d have to go back, change commands, adjust how it worked, etc. Around 2005, we started developing APIs for SILK-based access, and XML was all the rage.

Citrix provided a SILK-based interface that people liked because it didn’t change. Even if the way that information was displayed did

change, you could still count on the configuration. From the developer’s perspective, changing configuration on a version-by-version basis was cumbersome, so each API did a nice job of managing that problem.

Secondly, programmatically accessing data made network automation a lot cleaner. That kind of developed into a loop. And what made it really click for a lot of people—and what became the genesis of DevOps—is the fact that a lot of the admins were early on in this space, and they were all network administrators who knew cables, routers and switches, and a lot them knew how to do basic-level programming. They started turning to these tools to help them

STeve Shah

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churn through their network issues because you take somebody who has a hundred infrastructure devic-es out there just doing network load balancing, and they want to aggre-gate that data. What were all these systems doing at a given moment, and how would servers react as a result? They would poll all of these devices for information, and then they would want to churn it up as data written to an API called Perl to really reach a logical process and come up with a solution to a problem. That way, managers could report back to say, for example, ’Based on what I’ve learned, you to need to change your policy this way. I want you to redistribute the load in the network according to this new information.’

That really drove the start of the idea that we shouldn’t be using gen-eral system management tools, that we should be using programming languages as our primary interface for managing our infrastructure.

This idea has created a whole new kind of system administra-tion. Where system administrators before were valued based on their expertise with devices and infra-structure, DevOps administrators are valued for their programming skills and their ability to understand infrastructure. It has almost become the case, in some places, where the ability to understand infrastructure is secondary to the programming

ability. So with all of that motion happening, the next phase of DevO-ps was formalised around the avail-ability of REST-ful (Representational State Transfer) interfaces.

Why did they feel the need to cre-ate new interfaces?

As it turned out, more people started using automation, and the deeper they got with it, they found that even though automation was great, and they were getting a piece of nice, well-structured data back, a simple piece of data generated a lot of bulky XML as input and more bulky XML as output. There was a smarter way to do that. Web devel-opers started using JSON (JavaS-cript Object Notation) because JavaScript programmers wanted to put a call in and get back a block of data that was literally parsed by the browser’s old JavaScript engine. They didn’t even have to do any additional parsing. It paved the way for people on the server

It has almost becomethe case, in some places, where the ability to understand infrastructure is secondary to the programming ability.

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side—like my engineers, who were having to write interfaces and sup-port them. They could use the URL input or output to see the needed data using PERL. A simplified URL was easier to write and tools were a lot more readily available, so that really broadened up the number of available programmers. That’s the kind of shift that has to happen for DevOps to become a much bigger motion.

How will network engineers work within a DevOps movement?First and foremost, you’ve got to get comfortable with writing scripts, automating basic tasks, even before you get fancy and talk about a lot of automation. That capability has always been there, but not many network engineers can manage it. So for adoption of that field to really become commonplace, you want to get into DevOps, understand it and leverage it. Once you’ve got-ten that foundation, something that you want to be able to do is get comfortable with the interfaces that your devices offer you. A lot of the companies that offer APIs are much like Citrix—we’ve been doing it for a couple of years already. The APIs are mature and documented, so you pick up the documentation and start. It’s easier than it’s ever been.

From there, [rather than] go through how to add a piece of

configuration, change a policy and things like that ... I need to know my end-to-end workflow. I need to go and get, for example, two racks of servers up and running. And then I can really start to see the advantage of scripting. So I turn on the server and make sure its responding to me before I start it in traffic flow. By the time you’re done, you might have a monster amount of code, but you’re able to replicate it into the data cen-tre, so the time it took to write that script might have been the same amount of time to roll out a rack of equipment. But now, out of the 10 to 20 racks I had to deploy, I can take that one rack and roll it out over and over again, and it takes minutes.

Do networking professionals need to open up their infrastructure to be manipulated by these scripting technologies?Short answer is yes. However, the devil’s in the details, so if you want to have access that is roles-based, controls are as important as ever. Like any process that gets defined in a data centre, you will write down steps. Make sure people follow those steps over and over again. You want to have someone looking over your shoulder and make sure it works correctly and that it has no unintended side effects. Then when you execute this, you really have to leverage the API, and before you

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even know how to use the API you should be asking: Who has access, what can they do?

Do you think that networking vendors are going to be introducing new products into the market that will support DevOps?Absolutely, I think if you look at the broader motion of what’s happening in networking, the big topic for all of this is fabric networking. And where you want to go with this is opti-mised routers and switches to make it less complicated, so you have one big full network—though you still have a bunch of other problems related to virtualisation. To play that out a couple years forward, one of the areas you start seeing that is interesting technology is called

OpenFlow. It’s all about being able to do programmatic controls for all the traffic going to the network. OpenFlow really puts DevOps at the centre of how networks get man-aged. Search around OpenFlow and you’ll see links to all the products that have been created around it. It helps you automate all the scripts that you’ll use and so forth. Open-Flow is still an extremely nascent technology. The fabric movement as a whole is still nascent, but it’s hap-pening. Application delivery control-lers are transitioning to be integral to how the fabric operates; it’s a key part of how we see networking evolve over time with DevOps auto-mating policy in the network. n

lISa SaMPSon is the feature writer for TechTarget’s networking media Group.

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Like manY ruraL businesses and towns in the UK, accounting firm Whiting & Partners was struggling to find reliable broadband connec-tivity to ensure WAN performance.

Based in eight East Anglian mar-ket towns in the counties of Cam-bridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, the firm had relied on a Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network with a single DSL-based tail circuit that connected each site. But the MPLS network connection was consistently unreliable, with sites sometimes going down for a week at a time. That simply couldn’t con-tinue, considering the network had to support 16 partners and around 130 staff members.

Chris Haydon, IT manager with Whiting & Partners, said: “Due to our rural locations and the low broadband availability, we wanted a

solution that would effectively be a back-up offering. In the past, if the MPLS went down, we were unable to access the diagnostics of a router to repair the problem, and the ser-vice provider also had trouble get-ting to the root of the problem. This meant we had to wait for a call-out. For a busy accountancy practice, this delay was unacceptable.”

So the firm turned to Talari Net-work’s WAN Virtualisation appli-ances to solve the dilemma. Talari’s adaptive private network appliances aggregate two or more types of net-work connections—including fibre, Ethernet, copper and DSL—into a unified logical network so that there is a backup if one type of connec-tion goes down. The appliance also continually monitors performance of network paths between remote sites and their head office to check

pOOR WAN pERFORMANCE? TRy vIRTUALISATION One rural accounting firm got fed up with poor broadband connection and WaN performance, so it turned to WaN virtualisation appliances that combine multiple forms of access. By JOE FERNANDEZ

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for loss, latency and jitter. Using this information, the appliance can then make real-time engineering deci-sions.

In Whiting & Partners’ case, the IT team chose to negotiate a deal with service provider TalkTalk to provide 10 Mbps Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) to all of the office sites. Additionally, DSL connections have been added at each site. Then the organization began converting the MPLS circuits over to Talari’s Mercury T730 and T200 appliances to combine the circuits and ensure resiliency.

Implementation required days of testing as TalkTalk proved out its Ethernet capabilities in the rural setting while the firm used Talari appliances to accurately track all the traffic moving across the circuit without disruption. Considering how much disruption in service the area generally experiences, testing the circuit switch came about easier than expected and users were able to carry on working throughout the process.

Haydon said: “The most impor-tant thing for us was that we justi-fied the expense of EFM by having multiple lines available. So now, all outgoing traffic is typically directed by Talari over the DSL circuits and should the MPLS connection go down, all traffic is instantly divert-ed.”

The Talari appliances also make

it possible to leverage network bandwidth from multiple sources, using both high-speed Internet con-nections at central locations and broadband connections at branch locations, in order to ensure reli-ability for applications such as VoIP and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

“We needed to really think about introducing concepts like VDI and VOIP,” Haydon stressed. “Just con-tinuing on the ADSL lines and MPLS alone would have seen us struggling to meet customer needs for our expanded business. We had to look to the next generation of network management to ensure our failover time drastically falls from days to seconds.”

Already, using the technology, the firm of general practice char-tered accountants claims to have increased bandwidth by a factor of

“ Just continuing on the adSl lines and MPlS alone would have seen us strug-gling to meet cus-tomer needs for our expanded business”—CHrIS HaydONIT manager, Whiting & Partners

it in europe e-zine • march 2012 17

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five, cut the cost per Mbps in half, and made the network more reliable for their real-time and interactive applications.

The newfound resiliency captured via these new circuits means that

once VDI and VoIP are deployed, Whiting & Partners will have the flexibility to open a new office much more easily with less cost and will open the door to the possibility of further remote working.

“Our ambition is for our node-to-node transfer to work well enough to support remote access across a secure VPN from locations out-side of just the offices, making use of other networks like mobile 3G,” Haydon said. “Being able to access diagnostics for ADSL line problems and solve them without needing to wait for a service provider engi-neer was the first goal of this, but it has so much more potential for the future.” n

joe fernandez is the news editor for Searchnetworking.co.uK

Network Evolution Ezine is a Searchnetworking.com e-publication.

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Whiting & Partners claims to have increased bandwidth by a factor of five and cut the cost per Mbps in half.