Infra Matters

Have you ever thought of the reason why Pseudo-wire configurations over MPLS cloud are getting popular? Pseudo-wires are common in wireless especially in Long Term Evolution (LTE) to transport traffic from eNodeB to EPC (Evolved Packet Core). Over and above this, pseudo-wires are being used for international point to point connections. Pseudo-wires are even used as a replacement to international SDH/Sonet circuits. By using pseudo-wires, you get the same Quality of Service and operational specifications similar to transparent transmission circuits which are created by combining multiple vc4's in Vc41v configuration.

Latin American suppliers, in particular, have been using pseudo-wire as an upcoming trend for their customer's point-to-point connectivity requirements. This is achieved over their MPLS cloud with major destinations.

So what are the parameters a customer should anticipate from a service provider who provides a point-to-point connectivity over their MPLS cloud in the form of pseudo-wire?   

·         VLAN ID transparency: The circuit must support IEEE 802.1q VLAN trunking and be VLAN transparent. It must not be necessary to inform the supplier of the VLAN IDs in use or the bandwidth required by each VLAN ID. The supplier must comply with this requirement.

·         Quality of Service: Service providers mostly use the highest QoS level which can be premium.

·         Security: As an internet carrier on the same L3 platform especially in the global routing table is considered as an unacceptable security risk. But the service provider is transporting the point-to-point circuit directly over MPLS. So there is no layer 3 or internet element involved.

·         MTU: It can provide MTU which is 1722+ (Ethernet MTU)

·         Latency: In most of the cases the latency will be little higher compared to the sonet/sdh implementation. This should be taken care during the planning stage.

·         Availability: The availability can be as high as 99.999%.

Why do service providers prefer to use Pseudo-wire or what can be the service providers business benefit while using pseudo wire concept?

The main advantage is all about cost savings - savings by not installing any cross connects, fibers, DACS or fibers or DWDM systems specific to create SDH/SONET network as well as associated sync network. All traffic will pass through the MPLS cloud and the slices of bandwidth will be configured in MPLS network according to the requirement from client.

As I said if there is no sync network, then how is sync chieved?  Although packet timing and synchronization has not met universal adoption yet, it is no longer a barrier to rolling out packet backhaul, with widespread acceptance of IEEE  1588v2 products, and SyncE coming along as an added option.

With these advantages, there is little wonder that Pseudo-wire configurations over MPLS cloud have become one of the hottest trends in the Networking space.

Posted by Shaji Kumar at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gumbo anyone?

This year's Knowledge 12 conference is being held at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, the annual user conference hosted by ServiceNow.

Continue reading "Infosys@ Knowledge12 Conference" »

Posted by Shalini Chandrasekharan at 6:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As experience always dictates and what typically people with grey hair always say - 'Knowledge is present everywhere. It is up to an individual to learn and understand.' But in today's world, knowledge is essential; knowledge is solution to an issue which in turn means that knowledge is customer satisfaction. The one who has more knowledge actually is better-placed to excel. It could be as simple as possessing a word document that everyone is searching for or as complex as understanding a concept that others are finding it difficult to grasp! To know more, read on...

 

Continue reading "What you (want to) 'Know' is what you (want to) see!" »

Posted by Ravindran A. Varier at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having been in Mainframe technology for many years and having worked on one of the most scalable and secure computing environments, I was thinking - is System z missing the Cloud buzz..?

The current platforms from IBM such as zBX and zEnterprise servers are able to support heterogeneous work loads of Mainframe, Unix, Java etc., have a seamless capability to upscale or downscale and are packed with ability to create new images without system down time. All this with unparalleled security of EAL5 level!

Given all of this, would system z be a competitive platform for Cloud environment? What do you think..?

Posted by Girish Totloor at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ITSMF Australia SIG on "Cloud Service Management" was successfully launched on 14^th March at the Infosys Docklands office in Melbourne. We had a great group of around 25 participants gathered to share their experiences on cloud service management. Topics discussed were various cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS!!), their impact on Service Management functions such as financial management, compliance issues and participants experiences of cloud services among others. What a session it was !

 

To note just a couple of interesting points that the group discussed ...

 

On configuration management - what CIs will CMDB capture for elements on Public Cloud Infrastructure? One way is to capture public cloud infrastructure elements as "Service CIs" in the CMDB with the relevant CI attributes. However, the challenge to discover and track them needs to be addressed. On the other hand - do the public cloud elements of infra / service really need to be captured into the CMDB, given that the resolution liability will be with the public cloud provider along with the SLAs. In which case, only need would be to provide Cloud Service Reports for transparency and tracking.   

 

On roles - if in future all the services, applications and infrastructure will be on the cloud, then predominantly the roles of internal IT would be that of service integrators. Interesting thought ! One insightful experience quoted from an organisation was where specific service roles such as cloud service architect and cloud service packaging were defined for greater focus on initial private cloud capability building.

 

Potential topics for next SIG session noted were - Financial Management, Cloud Skills for Service Managers or Fundamentals of Cloud Technology for effective cloud service management. Keep watching the ITSMF Australia Events page for the exact date and topic for "Cloud Service Management" SIG.

Posted by Gautam Nadkarni at 2:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous post , I was discussing some of the probable solutions to tackle the IPv4 address depletion problem. In this blog, I would like to list down some of the most popular alternatives being adopted and try to arrive at a best fit.

a .Carrier Grade NAT (CGN): Traditionally enterprises have used NAT (Network Address Translation) as a mechanism to allow multiple internal "private" machines to share a unique public IP address.  This 'blankets' the enterprise network from the internet and provides a layer of security. The same concept is replicated in CGN on a larger scale, where the ISP assigns a single public IPv4 address to multiple clients, and the customers in turn share this address between the systems in their local network. Even though this might provide a temporary stop-gap solution, in the long term might not be scalable and result in increased levels of complexity and overhead in managing the networks.
b. Purchase additional IPv4 addresses: By the looks of it, this doesn't seem to be a very encouraging alternative.  The lack of IPv4 addresses has given rise to a vibrant market for trading addresses and efforts are on to put in place policies for legitimate address trading. The fallback is that, there is a possibility that organizations having more IP addresses than they need, can hoard the addresses. Again, this would only offset the crisis till a more viable long term solution is available.
c. Migrate to IPv6: During the early 1990's when it was realized that the IPv4 would eventually run out, work was started to develop a new version of the IP protocol and in 1998 IETF(Internet Engineering Task Force) came out with the first version of the new IPv6 protocol. An IPv6 address is 128-bit long and approximately 3.4 x 10³⁸ addresses. To simplify understanding, we can do with an analogy. If we assume that total IPv6 address space is the size of the earth, two IPv4 addresses spaces would fit inside a single tennis ball! So this is literally a limitless supply of IP addresses.

Running through some of the parameters like capex, opex, scalability, flexibility, long term growth and extensibility, NAT (Network Address Translation) appears to be the least appealing, probably only scoring as far as capex is concerned. Evaluation of the second option - 'Purchase of additional IPv4 addresses' doesn't tip the scales on either side after taking the parameters into consideration. The only option which fits the bill now is the IPv6 Migration.

Since early IPv6 days, network equipment vendors had started work on incorporating support for IPv6 in their product suite. The major players continually released newer versions of their products with built-in IPv6 support. But the end users/enterprises were mostly unaware and complacent. Unless there is a compelling reason to shift, most of them would rather stick to easier alternatives. This is what has happened, and there is no real demand for IPv6. If the Equipment vendors are IPv6 compliant but the service providers/enterprises that deploy this equipment are not ready to migrate, it does not make sense at all. It would be like fighting for a lost cause unless there are collective efforts from all quarters. So it is pretty much like a vicious circle, with each waiting for the other to make the move, the IPv6 implementation taking a beating in the long run.

In the next blog, I would wish to explore more on the common IPv6 transition techniques and methodologies.

Posted by Kaustubh Mhatre at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cloud has started to become ubiquitous in the world of technology and none of the practitioner discussions or plans are complete without keep cloud technologies on the horizon. Till a few years back, Service Management professionals were busy in discussions on - how do they need to change their management methods in order to manage the cloud? Compare that with the present, where the cloud technology has matured such that it is being used as one of the critical vehicles to deliver service management.

 

With a view to enable experience sharing within the community and for service management professionals to take advantage of peer knowledge, ITSMF Australia Victoria Chapter is launching a Special Interest Group (SIG) on Cloud Service Management. The first SIG will be held on 14^th March 2012 in the Infosys Docklands office at Melbourne, Australia. Topics of interest for discussion are quite open and some of topics to be discussed may be Service Management for Cloud, Impact of Cloud on Processes, Cloud use cases for efficiency and effectiveness, Skills and trainings for Cloud readiness, etc.

 

Join us at the launch of this "Cloud Service Management Special Interest Group", an open discussion moderated by me and my colleague Rishi Pattnaik. Visit the event page to register and find more details on the session.

Posted by Gautam Nadkarni at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day I was searching for something on the internet and just when I thought that I'd found what I was looking for, the website I opened threw a '404 -Page not found error'.
This got me thinking, what if you woke up one morning and tried to connect to the internet and you find that everything is down. I know this sounds extremely far-fetched, but there is no denying the fact that the internet is so closely intertwined with our daily lives that even small glitches/changes have the potential to snowball into major disruptions.

Continue reading "Depleting IPv4 addresses: Is it time to start transitioning to IPv6? - part 1" »

Posted by Kaustubh Mhatre at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Cloud Computing continues the march towards all of the enterprise. Nowadays it's almost become cliché for technology companies to talk about products as 'Cloud-Enabled' or 'Cloud based'. In fact if tech startups do not have cloud 'baked' into their business plan, they will not get too far in the funding rounds. For Enterprises as consumers of cloud services, there are many options to choose from, as they start to bring cloud computing into their mainstream strategy.

However one of the areas that has not been talked about much, is the management side of the house. ie how does one 'manage' the cloud. Or does such a situation even exist. Isn't cloud supposed to enable one to do more and of course automatically!.

 Isn't Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) really an automated programmatic interface served on top of commodity infrastructure? Will SaaS platforms eventually eat into PaaS ones or is that the other way around? And the bigger question is about ITIL. Can cloud do without ITIL or is ITIL archived away in some silo?

These 'management' questions had also troubled us early on and we at Infosys have been very focused on successfully solving these issues for our customers as a Cloud Ecosystem Integrator. In today's uncertain economy with pressure on spends at all levels, enterprises are looking to learn quickly from relative experiences to adopt the cloud journey rapidly.

Join us at next week's premier annual conference for IT Service Management - itSMF UK Conference & Exhibition. Our speaker Prashanth Prabhakara will be talking about key ITSM design principles for the cloud with examples. He will be sharing valuable insights and learning's from his own 'cloud journey'! Visit the event page for more details on the session.

Posted by Ramshankar Ramdattan at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was an awesome day today. To follow up on my previous post about our participation at the annual itSMF Arizona Local Interest Group summit, this was indeed the day for sharing best practices - a packed, day-long event filled with industry veterans and luminaries. 

Continue reading "Infosys' day out at the annual itSMF AZ LIG summit" »

Posted by Ramshankar Ramdattan at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)