In the last Lippis Report we discussed that networking is now in the Dark Ages with corporate capital spending low, an IPO market shut down for nearly two years and venture money nearly dried up. One would think that innovation is dead and, in the service provider market, you would be correct. But following the Dark Ages was a Period of Enlightenment and entrepreneurs now see the light. They have their head screwed on the right way and are looking at the one sure way to successfully enter the enterprise market; deliver value that can be measured with hard Return On Investment (ROI) parameters. Cost avoidance and feature selling are things of the past.

Corporate managers are enlightened too. They are looking at increasing the capability of their networking staff while network managers are seeking to implement intelligence at the network edge as long as a 12-month or better ROI can be proven. This has all the makings for a renaissance in enterprise networking. Part of that renaissance is the realization that, to optimize cost, network managers need to take control of their networking resources. Service providers provide a transport service and are to be played off of each other to obtain the best price. One of the newest categories of networking products allows network managers to do just that and much more. Route Control products from Proficient Networks, RouteScience, netVmg, Opnix and Sockeye networks hope to offer enterprise networkers a choice of connecting sites, customers and partners with more public IP services than Frame Relay and private lines by making Internet connections stable and predicable.

Private lines offer a strong guarantee of service with 60 ms of latency and 99.99% availability. And many service providers are offering SLAs (Service Level Agreements), which spell out guarantees and offer monetary credits if not met. Well, if you believe that collecting on SLAs is worth the time, then you probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy. What if your Internet connections could offer a 100ms of predictable latency and 99.99% availability at a fraction of private line or frame pricing? Budget savings on network transport could be huge well into the 50% range. That’s what Route Control promises, but not all in one step. Keep in mind, Route Control is in its infancy and will have to prove its value to the enterprise market.

Route Control products measure the performance of various links. Some of these links could be your Intranet made up of Frame Relay and private lines plus Internet connections. Latency, loss and jitter are measured across these links, in real time for some products. With performance per link obtained, Route Control can dictate network flow based upon network policy automatically. Policy may dictate use the lowest cost best performing link, or smooth out the flows across multiple links. For some vendors, this can be done on a prefix basis, e.g., all of our customer prefixes use the high performance link, all supplier prefixes use the low cost link, etc. Or, a network manager may want to reduce their cost on private lines so the policy may be to use Internet connections when certain performance parameters are met. The policy is the network managers to make and corporate profit driver’s to link.

The primary enterprise target for Route Control is multi-homed connections. Multi-homed connections are gaining much attention. They are multiple Internet connections to either the same or separate Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Multiple ISP links give organizations additional route diversity to their various destinations be it to remote locations, customers browsing their public facing web servers, suppliers and partners. With multiple paths, the enterprise can boost performance, reliability and optimize cost by selecting the ISP link that delivers the best performance at the lowest cost for each traffic flow. And this is only the primitive service delivered by Route Control. This is a part of enterprise networking that can gain much efficiency, both in economics and performance. Many large corporations employ as many as ten DS-3 connections spread across the country to support these various flows.

The four companies mentioned above are delivering Route Control to optimize multiple “aggregated” multi-homed Internet links through policybased networking. Proficient Networks, RouteScience and netVmg are product-based concerns while Sockeye Networks provides a multi-homing optimization service. But before we explore the solutions, lets flush out the problem and how to analyze it. First, if you’re spending $10K or more a month on ISP charges, read on. Anything less and you may want to waitfor next month’s Lippis Report. Enterprise networking demands and requirements are growing, albeit budgets are either shrinking or being held constant. Enterprise networks are evolving to execute many B2B connections (extranets) and intranet functions over the Internet. Proof point; the number of routes on the Internet is growing at an exponential rate according to Geoff Huston, Internet Architecture Board Plenary Talk, IETF50, March 2001. And currently, 55% of all routes are reachable across multiple service providers, which was not the case a few years ago. Bottom line: there is no ISP stranglehold on Internet destinations. This proves that there are diverse routes to endpoints from many service providers, making multihoming a reality.

Posted 2 April 2002 at 6:35 pm under Lippis Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.