BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

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T H E S U B N ET

Routers, Shmouters—Who Needs Them Anyway?

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I N T E R N ET A S WA N

MPLS: Dead WAN Walking?

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Deluge of Devices Drives High-Density Wireless Designs

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kMASS EFFECTWith the average person now carrying three mobile devices, wireless LANs are getting pretty crowded. Is your network designed for high density?

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EDITOR’S DESK | JESSICA SCARPATI

Deluge of Devices Drives High-Density Wireless Designs

There’s something especially agonizing about slow Wi-Fi at an IT conference.

When you’re on the trade-show floor and surrounded by vendors demoing ridiculously fast networking gear, there is a sad irony in watching your smartphone browser time out on the conference’s wireless network. But in reality, it shouldn’t be that surprising. Performance problems are always going to be a struggle when a wireless network must support hundreds or thousands of people in a relatively small space.

When the conference Wi-Fi is subpar,

you can count on plenty of people making snide comments on Twitter. Others will just roll their eyes, take it as a referendum on the conference as a whole and tell their colleagues not to bother attending next year. Some, like me, tuck away in an empty meeting room or some other behind-the-curtain area in hopes of nabbing a less-congested access point. In any of these scenarios, the event organizers are not happy. And when the event organizers are not happy, you can guarantee their IT sup-port staff is going to hear about it.

But if you’re among the majority of net-working pros, I know what you’re thinking:

Meticulouscapacity planningis the new black.

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You’re not designing and managing wireless networks for massive venues like conven-tion centers, sports stadiums or even air-ports. You set up wireless LANs in normal places like office buildings, schools, ware-houses or doctors’ offices. You might even be running a larger wireless network for a university or hospital, but that still isn’t at the scale for which those other people have to design.

While that might have been true five years ago, the picture to-day looks very different. As of last year, the aver-age person carries around three mobile devices, ac-cording to an informal poll by Sophos Labs. And the number of mobile de-vices is on track to exceed

the human population by the end of this year, according to a Cisco Systems report. Although those devices may not all make their way into the workplace, one thing is clear: Even if you have a relatively small number of users, the number of wireless devices they carry is multiplying. That means high-density wireless LAN designs are going to be a much bigger deal, regard-less of whether you work at a large enter-prise or a small business.

In this issue of Network Evolution, SearchNetworking site editor Chuck Moo-zakis dives into the scalability demands of high-density wireless (“Access for All: High-Density Wireless Gains Traction”), as well as how several organizations—includ-ing Gillette Stadium, home of the New Eng-land Patriots—are tackling those challenges (pardon the pun).

One thing is clear: Even if you have a relatively

small number of users, the number of wire less devices

they carry is multiplying.

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We also check in on the future of MPLS and the viability of replacing it with ba-sic Internet at the branch (“MPLS: Dead WAN Walking?”), and veteran tech journal-ist Antone Gonsalves looks into whether Microsoft has turned the unified commu-nications and collaboration market up-side down since the release of Lync 2013 (“A Tough Call”). And finally, in this edi-tion of The Subnet, we catch up with one

networking pro who thinks routers are becoming obsolete (“Routers, Shmouters—Who Needs Them Anyway?”).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an indig-nant tweet to send out about this lousy Wi-Fi. n

Jessica Scarpati

Networking Media Group Features and E-zine Editor

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Ω On wireless networks, two’s company but three hundred’s a crowd.

In the days when flip phones reigned and tablets were something found only in medicine jars, Fred Kirsch wasn’t con-cerned with how easily someone could log on to a website from a mobile device.

Today, it’s a whole different story for Kirsch, vice president of content for the New England Patriots. Ensuring that foot-ball fans can use their mobile devices while at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., is almost as important to the team as protect-ing the health of quarterback Tom Brady’s throwing arm.

“People expect connectivity,” Kirsch

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Access for All: High-Density Wireless Gains Traction

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says. “We are part of the experience people have in their everyday lives, and nowadays folks want to share those experiences on their device through their various social ac-

counts, so not having Wi-Fi would be a detriment.”

But delivering crisp Wi-Fi performance to more than 68,500 fans crowded into Gillette, many of whom will use their mo-bile devices throughout the game, is art as well as science. It’s no different in Denver, where more than 76,000 fans pack Sports Authority Field to cheer on the Broncos, nor is it different at convention centers, lecture halls and

college campuses worldwide where thou-sands of people—and by extension many thousands of devices—all demand immedi-ate access to data and applications.

In response, Wi-Fi and wireless LAN (WLAN) suppliers have worked closely with their customers to design wireless sys-tems that can accommodate both growing user demands and a ballooning number of devices. And with the advent of the recently ratified 802.11 ac standard—so-called Giga-bit Wi-Fi—in concert with a new genera-tion of equipment specifically tailored to high-density wireless deployments, IT ad-ministrators now have even more tools to get the job done.

It’s all part of a percolating wireless land-scape, says Nemertes Research analyst John Arkontaky.

“There is an awful lot of stuff going on,”

How many devices do your users carry? How many mobile devices per user do you expect your wireless LAN to support?

Source: Wireless LAN survey, TechTarget, April 2014, N=241

One to three

Three to five

Five to seven

Other

63%

18%

13%6%

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he says, citing a Nemertes survey that indi-cated companies bumped up their overall WLAN capacity by 64% in 2013, with an ad-ditional 46% in growth projected for this year.

Scalability Challenges GrowHigh-density deployments are a growing piece of the WLAN landscape. College and university CIOs have always faced the pros-pect of serving large groups of users in de-fined areas—whether they are lecture halls or residence halls. But now, high-density designs are becoming a requirement in large public spaces beyond the campus—at stadiums, convention centers and even en-terprises. And it’s not just enabling sports fans, students or a guest at a fundraising gala to access the Internet or send a text

message; it’s also having the horsepower necessary to transmit a video or other piece of rich media content that’s tailored specifi-cally to that user’s location.

“It’s a matter of scale, of having the tools to monitor the network and to say, ‘Hey, this access point is jammed,’ and being able to stay on top of that and also having the ability to stay in front of user demands and their devices,” Arkontaky says. “That takes foresight and the tools that permit you to have the bandwidth you need [while] man-aging it in an efficient manner so you aren’t overspending in the long run.”

The Patriots’ WLAN infrastructure, just two years old, is anchored by soft-ware and some 330 Extreme Networks 802.11 access points (APs) The network, which blankets the stadium with wireless connectivity, enabled the team to launch

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fan-specific mobile applications and ser-vices—among them Patriots Gameday Live, a comprehensive app that includes video replays and other game-oriented features.

“It went very well,” Kirsch says of the app, which the team launched last season,

“and this season we will add more features.”

Delivering exclusive content is beneficial to fans, but it’s not as impor-tant as delivering access.

“That’s the biggest les-son we learned when we first launched the Wi-Fi network,” Kirsch says. “It was, ‘OK, we will give them exclusive content,’ but re-ally quickly we learned that that [content] isn’t

as important to fans as access. Fans want to do what they want to do. It’s not to say our app hasn’t been popular, but even if we didn’t offer that, we’d need a Wi-Fi network just to meet the expectations of consumers today.”

Analytics: The Next Piece of the PuzzleKirsch says the Extreme system has easily handled peak loads that have eclipsed the 17,000 concurrent-connections mark. And with top bandwidth consumption only at the 45% mark, “we have a lot of room above us.”

The Patriots, and four other NFL teams, are also using Extreme’s intelligent wire-less analytics package to keep tabs on wire-less performance and to ensure that fans are getting the services they need.

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How big is your WLAN? How many wireless access points do you manage today?

Source: Wireless LAN survey, TechTarget, April 2014, N=200

30+24+11+13+14+8+s11%

14%

8%

13%

24%

30% 1-10

50-125

125-300

300-625

other

10-50

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“We can get performance [data] right down to the app level,” Kirsch says. “We know what apps people are using and what URLs they are visiting.”

Mike Leibovitz, director of mobility and applications at Extreme, says Gillette Sta-dium is a good example of how a carefully designed wireless network—even one us-ing the 802.11n standard—can be tuned to serve high-density environments.

“An appropriately designed 802.11n network can certainly provide a huge amount of bandwidth,” he says, “especially in the 5 MHz space. [The wireless net-work in] Gillette was built specifically in mind to take advantage of 5 MHz.” Among the benefits

of that band: less congestion and higher throughput.

Extreme Networks, like other wireless vendors, is also marketing specifically pack-aged high-density wireless systems—ones equipped with narrow-beam antennas, specialized chipsets and other associated components—for use in stadiums, arenas and other high-traffic sites. The company’s IdentiFi high-density products are opti-mized for both indoor and outdoor use.

Coverage Alone Isn’t EnoughInterest in high-density gear has intensi-fied in the past year, according to Gary Ger, director of product management and mar-keting at San Antonio-based antenna man-ufacturer Ventev Wireless Infrastructure, a division of Tessco Technologies.

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“An appropriately designed 802.11n network can

certainly provide a huge amount of band width.”

—Mike Leibovitz, Extreme Networks

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“In the old days it was about ensuring coverage; now it’s not just coverage but ca-pacity per client and per user,” he says.

High-density systems are anchored by antennas capable of generating tightly fo-cused beams, and are engineered to pro-vide users with greater access and capacity. Some systems today feature antennas with beams as narrow as 20 to 30 degrees, about a third of the width that was available on state-of-the-art antennas even a few years

ago, Ger says.“This whole area [of

high-density wireless] has just escalated over the past several years,” says Bruce Miller, vice presi-dent of marketing at Xir-rus Inc. in Thousand Oaks, Calif. “It’s been mandated

that you put wireless service in these [sta-diums and convention centers] because you are competing for attention.”

High-density deployments, Miller says, have other unique requirements, depend-ing on the design and the physical layout of the facility in question. Xirrus defines whether a deployment is high-density us-ing an equation that takes into account the event and the number of people per square foot. A high-density deployment at a concert, for example, would be one engineered to accommodate a crowd where there was one person for every 5 square feet of space; a similarly engineered sys-tem for a college lecture hall would assume one person for every 10 to 15 square feet of space, Miller says.

Take rate—which is the percentage of mo-bile devices connected simultaneously—is

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“In the old days it was about ensuring coverage; now it’s

not just coverage but ca pacity per client and per user.”

—Gary Ger, Ventev Wireless Technologies

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another factor used to determine the need for high-density. Most take rates, Miller says, hover around 30%, which is a level that’s easily handled by most systems in-stalled in the last few years. But the average take rate is expected to grow as consumers bring even more devices and access more applications.

More Devices Per UserStony Brook University (SBU) in Stony Brook, N.Y., for example, has seen the number of devices per student almost qua-druple in the five years since the school first installed an Aruba Networks wire-less system across its three campuses, says Mike Ospitale, associate director of data network services at the university. In 2009, a student had a laptop and perhaps a

smartphone; in 2014, a typical SBU student has a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet and perhaps even a smartwatch or other wear-able device in need of wireless access.

Today, almost 30,000 people—students, faculty and visitors—use the university’s wireless network, and the school is in the midst of upgrading its entire infrastruc-ture to 802.11ac to accommodate future demands.

The main SBU network encompasses more than 3,300 APs sprinkled across 50 residence halls, classrooms, the Jacob K. Javits Lecture Center and a soon-to-be-opened arena. That’s almost a 75% increase in operational APs from just two years ago at the flagship campus, says James Hart, the school’s data network services director. The university also has satel-lite campuses in Southampton, N.Y., and

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Manhattan equipped with their own wire-less infrastructures.

“[Students] want [access] everywhere, and that’s part of why there are so many more APs,” he says.

802.11n vs. 802.11ac In conjunction with the project to upgrade its wireless connectivity, last summer the university retrofitted the Javits lecture hall with a high-density design featuring Aruba’s first-generation Wave 1 802.11ac APs. The goal was not only to increase throughput, but also to have the necessary bandwidth and infrastructure to support technologies that professors might want to use within the classroom, Ospitale says.

“We could have gone with [802.11n] APs, but the reason we went with 11ac is that it

has a lot of horsepower behind it; it made a lot of sense to us,” he says. “If we are going to have a lot of folks onboarding at the same time, we needed an AP that had both [am-ple] CPU and memory.”

One cost-saving upshot of the project: The combination of high-density de-sign and 11ac allowed the school to place only 52 APs in Javits, and only 40 in the 40,000-square-foot arena that’s undergo-ing a $20 million renovation.

Next up: a massive exchange of all the school’s existing 11n APs for 11ac, a project that will begin this summer. Despite the increased performance of the newer APs—each is expected to handle as many as 75 devices rather than the 25 each 802.11n AP now is engineered to accommodate—the plan calls for the university to replace each existing 11n AP with an upgraded one.

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“We’re going to do it this way to stay ahead of the curve, and we also believe there will be an increased demand for bandwidth. We’re going to do it this way for sheer coverage and so we don’t have any dead spots,” Ospitale says.

“We are constantly investigating ways to use the infrastructure we have in place,

so certainly there are a myriad of apps that can be devised, whether it’s teaching with wireless clickers or live feedback through Twitter,” he adds. “It’s a very interesting use of technology, so any time we can provide the rails or the infrastructure to allow innovative teaching to occur, it’s very powerful.” n

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n=1,000; Source: Uptime Institute’s 2013 Annual Data Center Industry survey

k What are your top goals for SDN?

k What Ethernet speeds are you using in the data center?

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Make the network more agile

Implement multi-tenant networks

Centralize network management

Address server virtualization challenges

Make configuration changes faster

31

42

28

26

47

Respondents could select more than one answer.

We asked 74 networking pros planning to invest in software-defined networking (SDN) this year to weigh in.

Numbers in percentages.

Source: 2014 IT Priorities survey, TechTarget, N=520 North American IT pros

17% 40 Gigabit Ethernet

61% 10 Gigabit Ethernet

55% 1 Gigabit Ethernet

TRUE FALSEMicrosoft Lync is as good as or better than Cisco UC:

51%49%

“ Do we want network admin guys writing programs? No. Do we want programmers designing networks? No. But we do need to talk to each other.”

—IVAN PEPELNJAK, CCIE No. 1354 and ipSpace.net blogger, speaking at Interop Las Vegas 2014

Source: Spring 2014 UC Purchasing Intentions survey, TechTarget, N=526

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n=1,000; Source: Uptime Institute’s 2013 Annual Data Center Industry survey

k Wireless security cheat sheet

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Encryption standard Fast facts How it works Should you use it?

WIRED EQUIVALENT PRIVACY (WEP)

First 802.11 security standard; easily hacked due to its 24-bit initialization vector (IV) and weak authentication.

Uses RC4 stream cipher and 64- or 128-bit keys. Static master key must be manually entered into each device.

No

WI-FI PROTECTED ACCESS (WPA)

An interim standard to address major WEP flaws. Backwards compatible with WEP devices. It has two modes: personal and enterprise.

Retains use of RC4, but adds longer IVs and 256-bit keys. Each client gets new keys with TKIP. Enterprise mode: Stronger authentication via 802.1x and EAP.

Only if WPA2 is not available

WPA2 Current standard. Newer hardware ensures advanced encryption doesn’t affect perfor-mance. Also has personal and enterprise modes.

Replaces RC4 and TKIP with CCMP and AES algorithm for stronger authentication and encryption.

Yes

k Why are you upgrading your data center network? Respondents could select more than one answer.

To handle more applications

and data

To support complex virtual environments

To converge data center and stor-

age networks

To accommo-date growing

business

To support private cloud

To support hybrid cloud

To use SDN or network pro-grammability

To support an IPv6 upgrade

45%35% 29%

23% 19% 14% 13% 6%

Source: Data center networking survey, TechTarget, May 2014, N=307

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Ω MPLS has had a good run, but now Internet services are faster, cheaper and more reliable than ever. So MPLS is as good as dead now, right? Not quite.

Mike Rinken would like nothing more than to say goodbye to MPLS.

It’s been a rocky relationship from the start. Shortly after upgrading to a 10 Mbps managed MPLS service, Rinken, director of IT at the engineering and design firm Maz-zetti Inc. in San Francisco, saw traffic on his wide area network (WAN) slow to a crawl. It took some investigating, but he eventu-ally found the culprit: His service provider

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MPLS: Dead WAN Walking?

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had set up Quality of Service (QoS) poli-cies by default, without any notification. Those policies had caused dropped packets to form a bottleneck in the outbound traffic stream.

“Given the complexity of [MPLS], I would rather find whatever I can find at every of-fice and just get as fast a pipe as possible—even if it’s Internet,” Rinken says. “If I had

engineered the solution that we have now, which I didn’t—I inherited it—I would have gone in that direction.”

Not too long ago, the prospect of replacing a re-liable, private MPLS WAN link at the branch office with a virtual private net-work (VPN) over basic

Internet access would make many net-working professionals laugh. These days, however, more enterprises are having trou-ble saying no to business-class or even con-sumer-grade Internet services, which offer more bandwidth than traditional WAN ser-vices at a fraction of the cost and with faster provisioning.

The shift is not just anecdotal. Two years ago, 30% of companies were using an In-ternet connection in place of a traditional WAN link in at least one location, accord-ing to Nemertes Research. That number climbed to 50% in 2013 and could reach 55% this year.

It’s tempting to look at those numbers and conclude that the private WAN’s days are numbered. But for most enterprises, the reality is far less radical.

“There is a trend toward using the

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Top WAN optimization vendors Ranked by market share, as of the fourth quarter of 2013.

Riverbed Technology

Cisco Systems

Blue Coat Systems

1

2

3

Source: Infonetics Research

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Internet, but it’s nowhere near as dra-matic as: ‘The private WAN is dead. Long live the Internet!’” says Johna Till John-son, president and founder of Nemertes.

“[The growth] is inter-esting and provocative, but doesn’t necessarily mean people are using the Internet as a WAN.”

For all its headaches, MPLS will continue to play a major role in WAN architectures. En-terprises will likely favor a “hybrid WAN” model that uses both MPLS and high-speed Internet or carrier Ethernet in a single location or al-ternates between them

throughout the WAN, according to Andrew Lerner, a research director at Gartner.

“[MPLS] is not dead,” Lerner says. “It’s still a backbone of most WANs. It’s just be-ing supplemented with other technologies like Ethernet and Internet.”

Rinken finds the hybrid model compel-ling. Hooking up new buildings with stan-dard Internet connections and site-to-site VPNs instead of MPLS saves money and speeds up provisioning, and he says he can always deploy Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead WAN optimization appliances at those sites to mitigate performance con-cerns. But financial, cultural and logistical barriers will prevent him from replacing all his MPLS links, especially those that are tied to long-term contracts.

“I think in 10 years we’ll still have MPLS WANs. We’ll still cling to that known

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What are your must-have features in a WAN optimi- zation product?We asked 47 IT pros planning to buy them this year.* Numbers in percentages.

*Respondents could select multiple answers.

Compression

Protocol optimization

Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic prioritization

Bandwidth aggregation

Traffic monitoring

Traffic shaping

58

64

40

38

36

70

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quantity, so to speak, because we’re not risky enough to take that leap,” Rinken says. “But that may be a consideration, where I just say that all our future acquisi-tions and future branches go out through [the Internet].”

Cloud Challenges Old WAN ModelWhile MPLS isn’t close to being fossilized, experts say several trends are making a to-tal or partial Internet-as-WAN approach increasingly viable.

With the growing popularity of public cloud services, employees are often going straight to the Internet anyway to access corporate data and applications.

“If you’ve moved the majority of your ap-plications out to the cloud service, that’s where life gets really interesting,” says Till

Johnson. “That’s where having a private WAN may not make any sense.”

Software as a Service applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce.com and Google Apps have created inefficient traffic flows on traditional WAN architectures, says Gartner’s Lerner, who notes clients typi-cally name application performance as their biggest WAN challenge these days.

“It’s no coincidence that traditional WAN architecture doesn’t map to the prevailing [model of ] compute and applications. There are still a ton of apps in the corporate data center, but there are also a ton of apps in the cloud,” Lerner says. “If you go with the traditional WAN architecture, the cloud apps will suffer. If you go all Internet VPN architecture, the corporate apps suffer.”

The hybrid WAN model addresses these concerns, he adds. Network equipment

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vendors are also making it easier to “load share,” or segment specific types of traffic for a given connection, so the MPLS link isn’t clogged with incoming traffic from YouTube cat videos, Lerner says. It has been easy enough to choose which pipes send outbound requests to the Internet, but ensuring those policies remain intact when that traffic comes back in had been a challenge until recently.

Cost Savings Drive Move to InternetThe challenges of conventional WAN ser-vices—complexity, high cost and long provi-sioning times—are well-known. But several factors are exacerbating these problems and leading more networking pros to con-sider alternative connectivity options.

Bandwidth requirements are set to grow

dramatically and rapidly. Gartner estimates enterprises will need 28% more bandwidth, a compounded annual growth rate, each year through 2017.

“Budgets aren’t keeping up with that rate,” notes Danellie Young, a research director at Gartner. Cost is the top rea-son companies may use the Internet as a WAN connection, with 80% of IT pros who have made the leap identifying savings as their main motivator, says Nemertes’ Till Johnson.

“Whereas five years ago you would not think twice about dropping an MPLS con-nection to a small office,” she says, “these days you might be saying, ‘Hey, can we get that sales office interconnected over the Internet?’”

For many enterprises, a WAN that uses both MPLS and Internet services is an

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acceptable compromise. “A lot of people ask us, ‘Why am I paying

$250 a month for a T1 on MPLS when I go home and, for $69.99, I get 50 megs?’ It’s hard to argue with 30, 40 times the band-width at one-fourth the cost,” Lerner says. “That doesn’t mean you have to go to every branch and install an Internet circuit—be-cause that’s hard to manage and it’s hard to secure. Some people are doing it, but it’s not the only approach.”

As part of a recent acquisition, Rinken is getting ready to add an office in Seattle to Mazzetti’s WAN. After his service provider told him that getting MPLS turned up there would take 90 days, the Internet connectiv-ity already available on site started to look pretty good.

“We’ve got 100 megs in the building [we] can have right now for $600 a month. Why

would I not do that when we’d be paying $1,500 or $1,600 a month for that MPLS link?” he says. “Yeah, I get that there’s a Quality of Service that comes along with [MPLS], but at the end of the day, if we give them a ton of bandwidth—well, it doesn’t negate latency, but it kind of negates a lot of other [issues].”

Sometimes the cost savings of high-speed Internet services are overstated, however. Gartner estimates that the price gap be-tween MPLS and business-class Internet services ranges from 5% to 30%, depending on geography. The gap is greater when com-paring MPLS to consumer-grade Internet services, where the savings range from 20% to 40%, but the service quality gap is also more pronounced. Cost calculations, how-ever, involve more than monthly fees and annual contracts, according to Greg Ferro,

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a U.K.-based freelance network engineer, blogger and podcast producer. Operational expenses of private WAN services can also add up.

“Complexity is expensive. Every time you take a WAN and add a router to it, you’ve made it more complicated,” Ferro said while speaking to an audience dur-ing a presentation at Interop Las Vegas in April. “And every time we add [additional] tools—a proxy server, QoS configurations, dynamic routing or redundant links—we actually build complexity and, inherently, failure into our systems.”

Weighing Performance and ReliabilityFew enterprises make their networking decisions solely on cost, however. The big-gest barrier to the Internet displacement

of private WAN links is the possibility of poor performance. Thirty-eight percent of IT pros do not use the Internet as a WAN for that reason, according to Nemertes’ Till Johnson.

MPLS providers offer several guarantees in the form of service-level agreements, typically specifying uptime metrics, per-formance benchmarks and trouble-ticket response time. While business-class Inter-net services do offer some customer service perks over consumer-grade Internet, no one can guarantee performance or avail-ability on the Internet. It is, by definition, a best-effort service that no single entity controls.

MPLS services support end-to-end QoS. While network engineers can implement QoS on their edge routers to give some In-ternet-bound traffic priority over others,

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they lose control once it hits the Internet. But as carriers invest more in the net-

work infrastructure that supports Internet services, with Google and more recently AT&T committing to the Gigabit Internet market, some say the old fears about con-stant outages and crippling congestion are dissipating.

“If you think about 15 or 20 years ago—even 10 years ago—people were really con-cerned about that reliability factor, and it’s just simply not an issue anymore,” says Wes Durrett, senior IT operations manager at Room to Read, a San Francisco-based non-profit that works to improve literacy and education opportunities in Asia and Af-rica. “For my office in New York, we could have any type of connection we wanted. We have just a straight Internet connection for which the round trip to our data center in

California is usually less than 20 millisec-onds. It’s reliable, it’s up all the time, and there are zero issues with it.”

Durrett exclusively uses Internet con-nections with site-to-site VPNs throughout his WAN—a decision largely driven by cost and the availability of services where Room to Read does its work. Several branches also have Riverbed Steelhead appliances deployed for WAN optimization, and the network supports Citrix XenApp-delivered applications and voice services via Micro-soft Lync without issue. He acknowledges that his approach may not work for an en-terprise with strict latency requirements or highly sensitive applications, but Durrett believes it’s “definitely doable” for most organizations.

“It works fine for us, and I don’t think we would ever go back and change that now,

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even if other services were available,” he says. “If somebody’s making a call in New York, that traffic is coming all the way to San Francisco and going out our voice gate-way there—and it’s perfect.”

Private WANs: Still Safer Than the Internet?Security is also frequently cited as a reason to stick with MPLS. Although an MPLS net-work is a shared medium, it is not directly exposed to the Internet and all the dan-gers that lurk on it, ranging from denial of service attacks to the recently uncovered Heartbleed vulnerability. Carriers generally have better support for security issues on private links.

“The general consensus among our cli-ents is that private WAN is safer, but that

VPN over public Internet is almost just as safe,” says Gartner’s Lerner.

Ferro, who advocates for an all-Inter-net WAN, argues that last year’s revela-tions from former CIA contractor Edward Snowden have chipped away at the notion that MPLS is more secure than the Internet. Meanwhile, he adds, the next generation of HTTP, HTTP/2, will have Transport Layer Security encryption enabled by default.

“You can no longer assume your WAN services are secure, but for the sake of con-venience, we do continue to do so,” Ferro says. “We now know that the government, for better or for worse, is probably looking into your circuits—and by extension, if it’s not the government, it is your competitors or Anonymous or somebody else. It’s ac-tually quite easy to hack into a carrier and take control of those WAN services.” n

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Pulse Checkk Network monitoring: Keep it simpleWhat features are most important in network monitoring tools? We asked IT pros to weigh in.

Respondents could select more than one answer.

k Networking jobs see above-average growthU.S. network architect jobs are projected to grow 15% in a decade.

• That’s faster than the growth of all occupations nationally (11%), but slower than the average overall growth for computer and IT jobs (18%).

U.S. network administrator jobs are projected to grow by 12% in a decade.

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Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Source: Network management survey, TechTarget, April 2014, N=144

Simpler graphic user

interface

Reporting tools with

customizable alerts

Reporting tools with

simpler alerts

Integrated wired/

wireless management

console

Remote management

via mobile devices

80%

63% 62%

42% 40%

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2012 2022

15% projected job growth

143,400 164,300

2012 2022

12% projected job growth

366,400409,400

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Ω Microsoft made significant improvements to Lync 2013’s telephony features, but is it ready to replace legacy PBXs?

For more than a decade, traditional telephony vendors owned unified commu-nications, with enterprises seeing Micro-soft as a niche player in communications at best. But then Microsoft got serious about voice with Lync 2013, and enterprise inter-est in the platform has grown significantly since its release a year and a half ago. Now the software giant is poised to give its com-petitors a run for their money.

The latest version of Microsoft’s unified communications (UC) and collaboration platform brought tight integration with

Lync Telephony

A Tough Call

BY ANTONE GONSALVES

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other popular products from the software maker and a well-designed user interface to move easily from a chat session to au-dio or video conferencing. While Microsoft doesn’t manufacture desk phones or room-based video-conferencing infrastructure, it

has partnered with other vendors to supply everything needed to replace legacy tele-phony hardware with more flexible soft-ware running on commodity servers.

Because enterprises are already steeped in other Microsoft software—such as Ex-change, SharePoint, Active Directory and Outlook—many are willing to listen to Microsoft salespeople pitching Lync as a replacement for an aging time-division multiplexer (TDM) private branch ex-change (PBX), IP PBX or hybrid system. The combination of the Lync 2013 server, Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization plat-form and Windows Server 2012 provides a flexible software layer that sits on top of the technology needed for a fully func-tional IP-based telephony system.

“It’s definitely a game changer,” says Irwin Lazar, vice president and service

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The fastest-growing UC applications While voice and messaging remain vital to enterprise UC, current adoption rates aren’t breaking any records. But these four UC apps are making the biggest gains:

Video conferencing

Web conferencing

Collaboration Social networking

88% 83% 83%

58%

100

80

60

40

20

%0

Source: UC cloud and on-premises survey, Infonetics Research, N=156 UC purchase decision-makers

71%65%

54%

38%

n Using now n Will use by Feb. 2015

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director at Nemertes Research. “It’s prob-ably the single biggest topic of discussion that I have with my clients.”

Microsoft did not start the trend toward software-based communications, nor is it the only vendor to take such an approach. All the major PBX companies, such as Cisco, Avaya and Mitel, compete with Lync in providing a single user interface for in-stant messaging, audio and video confer-encing, Web collaboration, and softphone functions for PCs, tablets and smartphones.

However, since the 2003 release of Live Communications Server, which was used primarily for enterprise instant messaging, Microsoft has been driving the market for-ward with a string of releases—first Office Communicator Server, then Lync 2010 and now Lync 2013.

“They were certainly at the forefront

of the move to software,” says Richard Costello, a senior research analyst at IDC. “Whether they were responsible for it, I don’t think so, but they were certainly a major part of it.”

Microsoft’s tenacity has made it a player in the unified communications and col-laboration market, which is expected to top $21.5 billion in worldwide revenue this year, according to IDC. Microsoft will have to use that same doggedness to become a winner in the enterprise telephony market.

Can Microsoft Crack Telephony?Two sides of the UC and collaboration market are battling opposite perceptions. The traditional vendors are seen as too hardware-centric in increasingly software-oriented and virtualized data centers, while

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upstart Microsoft has to show its telephony alternative can meet enterprise require-ments for reliability and quality.

Traditional PBX vendors aren’t trying to emulate Lync; instead, they are playing up

the benefits of building their UC and collaboration interfaces on top of their hardware for tighter integration. Some enterprises, however, prefer to not have their phone and UC systems so tightly coupled to avoid being depen-dent on a single vendor. But oth-ers find having a single vendor for UC and all telephony compo-nents simplifies the maintenance and management of communica-tions infrastructure.

Proving the value of Lync 2013 will take longer than the year

and a half or so that it has been available. “I can’t say that I’ve seen a lot of interest in Lync for enterprise voice,” Costello says. “I’ve seen some interest in it.”

Costello says IDC estimates that about 5% of enterprises worldwide use Lync as a PBX replacement. However, that figure is only an estimate, he points out, because Microsoft won’t release such detailed sta-tistics on Lync deployments.

Lync adoption appears to be strongest in North America, where a Nemertes sur-vey of 200 small, medium and large com-panies showed 13% using Lync as a phone replacement.

“That’s almost the equivalent of new companies that are adopting Avaya, for ex-ample, but it’s still significantly less than those that are moving to Cisco,” Lazar says. Cisco has 23% of the UC and collaboration

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Top five UC apps deployed in the cloud Ranked from most to least popular.

Email

Instant messaging

Voice

Conferencing

Collaboration

Source: Infonetics Research

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market today.But by next year, Microsoft and Cisco

are expected to have equal market share in North America, followed by Avaya in second place, according to Nemertes Research.

The majority of companies using Lync today already have licenses for lots of Mi-crosoft software, analysts say. Most of these customers are using Lync for instant mes-saging and Web conferencing from the desktop.

Cardinal Health, a $101 billion healthcare services company based in Dublin, Ohio, racks up 7 million minutes of Web confer-encing on Lync each month.

“Lync has become almost impossible to live without as far as our day-to-day opera-tions,” says Ryan Ritter, manager of unified communications at Cardinal Health.

The company, which has 24,000 employ-ees, has Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens PBX systems supporting conventional desk phones in 300 offices and warehouses in and outside the U.S. Over the next three years, the company plans to use Lync 2013 as a replacement for all its PBX systems, except those that route calls solely within a facility, Ritter says.

To get high-quality audio and Web con-ferencing with Lync today, Cardinal uses Acme Packet’s session border controller (SBC) to connect Lync to Verizon Business’ Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking service. The IP PBX also connects to the SBC, providing interoperability between Lync, the IP PBX and the SIP trunks, as well as security and business-quality voice and video.

The company expects to expand its use

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of Lync from voice and messaging to video conferencing on a large screen in a meeting room. To do so, Cardinal will need to work with one of Microsoft’s technology partners to supply the equipment and integration. Ritter and his team are testing products from multiple vendors, including interac-tive whiteboard vendor SMART Technolo-gies and combined products from Polycom and Crestron Electronics, which makes audio/video control systems for homes and businesses.

Integration Vital to Lync SuccessHow well Lync does as a replacement for a traditional telephony system will depend as much on Microsoft partners as on the software maker’s own product. That’s be-cause Lync requires an IP-based telephone

system to route calls to and from the public switched telephone network.

In June, business-consulting firm Blum-Shapiro, based in Boston, plans to test Lync as a replacement for its Mitel IP PBX, which serves 400 employees in five offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The test will require SIP trunking ser-vices from a provider such as AT&T or Earthlink to replace the firm’s T1 and ISDN PRI lines, says Mark Schwartz, chief infor-mation officer at BlumShapiro. In addition, the company is planning to use an SBC from AudioCodes and a hardware load bal-ancer from KEMP Technologies. The load balancer moves traffic to different servers if one suddenly goes offline.

The small group of employees in the test will use Lync as a phone system and

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a collaboration platform, Schwartz says. If the pilot works out, then BlumShapiro would need 12 to 18 months to roll out the system to everyone.

Systems integrator DynTek will help BlumShapiro in setting up the system, but once it’s deployed, Schwartz and his team plan to handle most of the maintenance—a departure from outsourcing the ongoing management of its Mitel system to another provider, Total Communications.

“We may have to, here and there, bring in somebody for some assistance. But as

a general rule, we’re go-ing to be able to support Lync,” Schwartz says. “The annual maintenance costs, management costs and frustration in dealing with a vendor will kind of

all go away.”Lync won’t be less expensive than stick-

ing with Mitel and going with its compet-ing product, Schwartz says. “I’d say it’s a lot closer to equal, but we’re going to get a lot more value, a lot more features.”

As a general rule, Lync’s total cost of op-eration tends to be about two times more than Cisco or Avaya, says Nemertes’ Lazar. That’s because Lync requires the integra-tion of different platforms from multiple vendors.

Sticking with Avaya or Cisco for tele-phony and adding their UC and collabora-tion clients on top keeps everything simple by eliminating the need for integration and running separate platforms. The two com-panies’ partner ecosystems are currently ahead of Microsoft’s in this regard as well.

“The maturity levels of the [systems

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integrators] that are providing Lync ser-vices are still not quite there,” Lazar says. “Because they’re a little on the new side, they’re still defining processes, getting up to speed on training and support, and so on.”

While the integration challenge “cer-tainly gives them pause,” enterprises that can hire Hewlett-Packard, AT&T or Verizon to handle the integration and then man-age the hybrid Lync-telephony platform will find the cost of operations will be much lower, Lazar says.

BlumShapiro found that Lync 2013 had improvements “under the hood” that were

pivotal to the firm considering it as a PBX replacement. The enhancements included tight integration with Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualiza-tion platform, enabling Schwartz to more easily add Lync servers as the number of employees grows and to route communica-tions from one server to the other during outages or maintenance windows.

“With Server 2012 and Hyper-V, we can create a very stable, highly available and ro-bust server infrastructure to be able to host an application like Lync that’s pretty de-manding,” he says. n

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THE SUBNET | Q&A | JESSICA SCARPATI

Routers, Shmouters—Who Needs Them Anyway?

When overseeing a network that serves thousands of users and hundreds of sites, efficiency is a network manager’s best friend. For this edition of The Subnet, we caught up with Forrest Schroth, network manager at Atlanta-based staffing agency Randstad US, to find out how he handles the challenges of running a network that supports 300 sites.

What are you working on these days?Integrating VoIP to leverage more SIP functionality, creating tighter security zones to segment what users can access in the environment based on user credentials,

moving away from DS1/DS3 technologies to Ethernet to make things more scalable, removing routers on Ethernet sites because switches have gotten smart…

Let’s stop there. Can you tell me more about that last one?Routers were grounding points for tech-nology that has really kind of gone away. On our MPLS—which is an internal, pri-vate environment—I used to run routers because routers could do routing and talk to switches. But switches got really smart; they can run BGP and policy maps and do QoS. At the end of the day, a switch could do

n Forrest Schrothn Network Managern Randstad USn Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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everything I needed a router to do in a pri-vate [network]. The only reason I was keep-ing routers around was to terminate T1 lines, but as more and more vendors offered Ethernet as a means for transport—instead of [only offering] T1s, OC3s and DS3s—the switches got smart enough to be able to do everything I needed to do in a router. So, why support two objects when really you only need one?

Now, a lot of times my routers were supporting telephony stuff for VoIP. I

would actually terminate a phone line in the router, so I kept the router around. But as I’ve moved some of those sites over to SIP and there’s more of a data-based system, I don’t need to put phone lines or T1s

in the router because it’s an Ethernet hand-off. So, I’ve been getting rid of routers.

How does that feel?It’s fewer points to manage. I mean, I like saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got 20,000 nodes on my network to manage,’ so now I’ve got half of that. But my support contracts on nodes are smaller and it’s fewer points of failure. Really, it’s just easier.

If there was a networking genie who could grant you three wishes, what would you ask for?Here’s what I want from the networking genie: I want [carrier] Ethernet in 30 days, not 90 days. [Local exchange carriers] pretty much quote any turn-up on an Eth-ernet circuit at 90 days. I would say turn it up in 30 days like you would T1s. That

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would be very exciting to me.Second, tiered Internet would disappear

and net neutrality would triumph.And third, easier reroutes in BGP—the

whole [issue] of, ‘I’m on the Internet and I have to route BGP because that’s what ev-erybody routes on the Internet, and I fail a circuit and I want to fail over to another one.’ There’s some new protocol out called BGP PIC that’s trying to do some fast re-route stuff, but it’s tricky at best. So my big-gest challenge really is in a BGP cloud, which I have to run on MPLS to get a faster reroute.

When and how did you figure out you wanted to be a network engineer?DEF CON ’95. I saw people doing really cool stuff on the Internet and I wanted to learn more about it.

What TV show are you addicted to right now?I don’t watch a lot of TV—I watch movies and I watch The History Channel. But if I had to pick a show, I would go with ‘The Big Bang Theory’ because nerds are finally cool. n

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CONTRIBUTORS

ANTONE GONSALVES is a journalist who has covered general, business and technology news for more than 25 years for a wire service, magazines and websites. You can follow him on Twitter at @antoneg.

CHUCK MOOZAKIS is the site editor for SearchNetwork-ing. He has covered networking, telecommunications, new media, and newspaper and magazine production technologies for more than 25 years. Prior to joining TechTarget, Moozakis was editor-in-chief at News & Tech and also served as senior editor for InternetWeek.

JESSICA SCARPATI is features and e-zine editor of Network Evolution. Scarpati was previously the site editor for SearchCloudProvider and the senior news writer for the Networking Media group. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: ELLAGRIN/THINKSTOCK

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Rivka Gewirtz Little, Executive Editor

Shamus McGillicuddy, Director of News and Features

Jessica Scarpati, Features and E-zine Editor

Kara Gattine, Senior Managing Editor

Brenda L. Horrigan, Associate Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis, Site Editor

Tessa Parmenter, Site Editor

Gina Narcisi, News Writer

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Neva Maniscalco, Graphic Designer

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©2014 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. TechTar-get reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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