May 1, 2014, Ethernet Technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Scott Cassell from Comcast described the underlying trends in enterprise networks, and they are not SDN or cloud. Although the big datacenters are all moving forward to greater virtualization, the enterprise users are just trying to get work done.
The significant trends impacting the enterprise network solutions are not SDN, NFV, big data, or cloud. Instead, the biggest concerns are in footprint expansion in Ethernet, improving performance, network migrations, cloud, and wide area networks. These concerns are an outcome from Comcast's move from the small and medium businesses for voice and Internet into the mid market.
The mid-market services include a 100Gb national backbone with many metro-area networks to support the small through mid-market businesses. This infrastructure is helping users increase their own footprints. Comcast is investing a lot of money to connect fiber or high-speed alternatives to buildings. Currently, only 40 percent of the companies with 20 or more employees have access to fiber.
This build-out to add fiber provides access to other technologies like hybrid fiber and copper, usually the local coax cable network. All the access points for these businesses is Ethernet based to simplify deployment and adoption. The service providers and multiple carriers all need standards for interoperability and transport. The Metro Ethernet Forum has one such standard, now in version 2.0. The industry needs more work on transport out of the LAN into the wide area network. A major challenge is that the costs for a WAN connections are higher than those for a Metro area network.
Performance is always an issue for smaller enterprises. Business owners need to balance the costs of infrastructure upgrades with the need for better network and app performance. The local workloads are not just affected by fatter pipes, but have to consider changing relationships and environments. The smaller enterprises need site-to-site performance that comes from network tuning. As a result, they need to work from maximum specifications and not just the average values and plan capacity to deliver performance.
In many of these businesses, network migration from a T-1 line to a 10Mb line. This move into MPLS (Multi-protocol Label Switching) also lets them change to layer 2 switching over Ethernet. At this level, delivering 10Mb connections changes the networks and LAN, and helps to deliver better performance.
The cloud is a factor, but not like the big businesses. The mid and small businesses are starting to deploy private cloud models to their infrastructure rather than a network solution. Their version of the cloud is a over-the-top on the Web for private connectivity. These users need their network quality to be the same as their cloud quality. The entire market needs cloud connectivity standards and interoperability to become useful to the small enterprises. Some of the big providers like Amazon and Microsoft are working on a cloud exchange to allow any-to any cloud provider connectivity.
The small enterprises are looking at a wide area SDN/NFV to allow enterprise via WAN. The intent is to get new services and changes in bandwidth to enable more flexible networks that require less management. The hope is that this WAN-based infrastructure will improve service performance and functions with a simplified deployment model.
All of these issues need a lot of software customization. These companies need to improve response to deploy, improve performance, increase capacity and, overall, to meet user needs. Suppliers need to focus on fundamentals to grow this part of the industry.
