The recent Ethernet Expo Europe conference, organised by analysis group Light Reading, brought together telecom service providers and enterprises in a robust exchange of views over the benefits of Carrier Ethernet. This LAN/WAN solution has been rumbling on for a while now, but has not attracted the headline-grabbing attention of other so-called disruptive technologies such as SOA, Cloud Computing, virtualisation, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS); but judging by some of the tart sentiments expressed on the day, Carrier Ethernet is capable of provoking strident opinions among users and suppliers of the services.
The message from the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), the consortium of service providers and equipment vendors in charge of technology and standards in the field, is that global end-to-end carrier Ethernet services delivering IP traffic are now totally reliable even when they span multiple operators, and have consigned legacy ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) and SDH/SONET technologies to history.
“We’re beyond the stage where we are worried about putting our traffic on an Ethernet service,” declared Phil Tilley, European marketing co-chair for the MEF, and head of marketing for the IP division at telco equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent.
Most enterprises do agree with that much, as was indicated in one of the conference sessions by John Lyons, global head of network architecture and design at Thomson Reuters, the global business information services company. “What attracts us to Ethernet is the price-per-megabit equation,” said Lyons, referring to the economies of scale, and greater efficiency, through better bandwidth utilisation of Ethernet compared to legacy WAN protocols.
But Lyon argued that the MEF still had work to do enabling Ethernet services to be tightly defined on a global basis. “The work the MEF has done is great, but only defines the network edge,” said Lyons. “We do worry about the Ethernet cloud, and the MEF needs to come up with a common language to define services.”
The MEF believes it does now have such a common language in the shape of its provisioning templates, which allow telecom operators to liase in providing end-to-end connections crossing several networks. Enterprises can contact service providers directly and specify the level of service they want on an end to end basis in terms of latency, bandwidth, and other parameters. Furthermore the MEF has just launched a Global Services Directory listing by region the carrier Ethernet services available from each provider, so that enterprises can shop around and in effect create their own end to end networks.
There was though a feeling swirling around the Ethernet Expo that service providers should shoulder more of the responsibility not just for provisioning but also monitoring and troubleshooting, as Lyons hinted. “We measure latencies and so on, and quite often we tell the service provider when something has gone wrong. If this could be embedded in the network, that would interesting.”
Service providers should also stop hiding behind contracts based on metrics specified in SLAs (Service Level Agreements), and concentrate all their efforts on the fundamental business of keeping network running, according to Bhaskar Dasgupta, head of programme management for global finance at HSBC, the “world’s local bank”. Services based on SLAs were not working for large enterprises because they failed to establish sufficiently close partnerships with the service providers, Dasgupta contended. “Every time I have seen a service managed to a contract it has failed,” he claimed. “A relationship based on penalties for breach of contract is a bad one.”
In particular, Dasgupta has it in for dashboards, which have become fashionable with some telcos: “If the network fails, I couldn’t give a toss about the dashboard,” he snarled, “I just want it fixed”.
Carrier Ethernet may make bandwidth cheaper and allocate it more efficiently, but on its own it does not improve levels of service. That was the message a number of somewhat chastened service providers left the Ethernet Expo with.
But the traffic of constructive criticism was not all one way. The MEF’s Tilley suggested that enterprise should take the opportunity to clean up their own networks and decommission ageing and inefficient legacy circuits while migrating their long distance traffic to Ethernet.
More information:
www.metroethernetforum.org
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