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The only publication dedicated to OSS Volume 2, Issue 4 - September 2005 |  |
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The explosion of Ethernet in the enterprise and business market has taught us that the “best” technology isn’t always the theoretically most elegant technology (token ring) or the most versatile and capable (ATM). Perfection is not required, otherwise people would have lost patience with both Windows and Linux a long time ago. Enterprises have learned to deploy equipment quickly and effectively by cutting out some of the complexities we used to assume were necessary for successful deployments. They have been able to do so because bandwidth and Ethernet equipment have both become relatively inexpensive, while the cost of expertise, and the cost of delays associated with excessive thinking have both risen. This success, and how it has been achieved, should be instructive for service providers as they roll out Ethernet WAN deployments for their enterprise customers. In the past, network service providers had the time and resources to aim to deploy technology that was closer to perfection than many enterprises needed. Today, we need to look for a good, stable and secure deployment, but not necessarily one that approaches perfection. Carriers may need to deliver reliability and availability through redundancy and over-provisioning rather than by complex and elegant design. Enterprise customers will value visibility of performance, some level of QoS, and the ability to manage bandwidth to some extent; but they will be even happier with inexpensive Ethernet pipes so big that QoS will not be an issue and so cost-effective that it will not be worth managing bandwidth up and down except to handle significant changes in actual needs. For many companies today, if the service requires them to think about the service every day, then it’s not the service they want or need. They need consistent “good enough” performance, and they want to mostly forget it’s there. In other words, as Ethernet is deployed as a carrier service, carriers should aim to make it as friendly and effortless as Ethernet in the LAN and good enough to minimize the need for thought and intervention on the part of the customer. People in corporations want to spend their time, money, and effort on running their core businesses, and are really quite happy to let the networks run themselves. Extending the Ethernet to the WAN and making it effortless is the big contribution traditional network service providers can bring to communications-intensive enterprises. If it turns out to be anything other than cheap, friendly and effortless, people will find ways of doing it themselves.
© 2005, All information contained herein is the sole property of Pipeline Publishing, LLC. Pipeline Publishing LLC reserves all rights and privileges regarding the use of this information. Any unauthorized use, such as copying, modifying, or reprinting, will be prosecuted under the fullest extent under the governing law. |
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