Ethernet Innovation Summit

Global Press & Analyst Summit

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Transitioning from a concept to a network technology was a tough call, but the vision was clear: move from a box-centric model to a distributed computing model that would eventually allow hundreds of PCs to be deployed on every desk, linked to shared printers and servers; get rid of the “rat’s nest” of cables. The challenge included the need to enable clocking in the data stream, which was enabled using Manchester Encoding, the key breakthrough, followed by Collision Detection (CSMA/CSCD) and the 6-byte address. In addition, when there was the not insignificant 10-year challenge that came from IBM and it’s Token Ring technology, but Ethernet and open standards prevailed over Big Blue. David, not Goliath, won the LAN war.

Looking forward, Bob indicated that he expects to see much-needed disruption arrive in video, mobile and embedded traffic as well as in the energy, health and learning sectors.

The first day comprised an additional twelve panel discussions and it would take too long to summarize all the individual contributions, so we will focus on the take home messages on which all panel members agreed.

Standards are good, but open standards that adapt over time enable evolutionary progress and that is what Ethernet has given us. It runs over all mainstream media, from coax and twisted pair through the wireless backhaul. The technology has evolved: for example, collision detection has left the scene and been replaced by network intelligence at level 3.

But, and this is a key message, the packet format hasn’t changed, nor has the type field, and that has allowed innovation to be built on a foundation that is not only robust, but also one that provides backwards compatibility. The frame is the jewel in Ethernet’s crown.

The technology has clearly stood the test of time. It underpins Wi-Fi and wireless backhaul in cellular networks; data rates have ramped up from 1G to 10G and 40G and there is no obvious reason why they should stop. In addition we now have Carrier Ethernet, which brings standardized service offers to the markets, thereby enabling end-to-end Ethernet: desktop to LAN to WAN and the Cloud and back to the desktop.

In a nutshell, Ethernet equals Connectivity — both in the enterprise environment and the service provider space. It’s a key enabler for tomorrow’s Connected World.

The innovation process and the environment in which Ethernet was conceived were discussed in a morning session. Xerox was seen as a company that generated interesting ideas but did not carry them forward to the marketplace. Government funding of labs like PARC was a way of taking good ideas and marketing them successfully, but government funding has diminished. Investment companies want a fast return and that does not allow basic research to be conducted. Major industrial research labs like Bell Labs have disappeared. There is gap and we run the risk of the innovation well running dry. Another issue is the fact that today most everything is inter-disciplinary; it doesn’t fit into neat defined boxes.

Other sessions focused on standards, the status of Ethernet and the way ahead. The ability to bridge the former gap between the LAN and the WAN means that Ethernet is becoming a universal language. It increasingly looks less like a networking technology and more like a service offer and this has serious implications for carriers.

Virtualization, which removes the rat’s nest in data centres, was also discussed at length along with the rapid take-up of the cloud by the market. This development has enabled the fast deployment new services, for example, getting Exchange up and running in five minutes versus two weeks. But the best is yet to come. Now we have virtual networks, so there is no need to take deep dives into network technology. And in future we’ll surely see kids in their teens and early 20s coming up with wild ideas, the best of which can be brought to market in short timeframes.

Along the way we had various one-liners, e.g. “Nothing happens until something is sold”, as well as a poem about the spanning tree protocol and a limerick about standards. On privacy: “it’s the person who hacks into Google you need to worry about not Google”.

The last session of the day saw big believers in Ethernet including a merchant silicon vendor – Broadcom – discussing SDN and silicon photonics, HP’s networking division (including 3Com which Bob Metcalfe referred to the next day as having taken over HP), Brocade, and Arista, which makes high-performance switches. Among the predictions were changes in healthcare including a chip in every person to monitor our personal health and functions.

The last word in this summary of a day that was packed with interesting reflections and ideas from the 40 participants goes to PARC, which is where the whole thing started. PARC’s culture was based on the ability to nurture practical creativity and today it is continuing in the Emerging Networks Consortium, which is an initiative formed to advance the development of the next-generation Internet based on Content-Centric Networking. This shows that the organization continues to be in the business of breakthroughs.

The second, press-only day saw presentations on future uses of the Internet from USIgnite, a private-public partnership and discussions around Ethernet’s role in the cloud, in SDN, and the datacentre – who knew that most network links in the datacentre are still only 1Gbit?

New words we heard include ‘locavore’ – someone who selects products grown or created locally – applied to facilities such as AOL micro-datacentres moved close to end users to minimise latency. Good security quote from Brian Smith, Click Security: “In last 20 years we have been armouring the sheep. Now we need to start hunting the wolves.”
News: the creation of the Carrier Ethernet Forum ti help create standards for interoperability between datacentres. Also: the number of physical Ethernet ports is on the decline, as the growth is in wirelessly-connected devices – tablets, phones etc. – while sales of laptops and desktops flatline.

Wireless debate on next standard 802.11ac raises the question of whether it will be a bit of a damp squib. It offers faster throughput but not without disadvantages, especially when several access points are densely packed. Enterprise demand isn’t expected to arrive until next yea at the earliest, but clients are ready now so take-up more widely is likely to be quick.

Bob Metcalfe’s keynote wrapped the event – certainly a highlight, possibly the highlight of the show. The audience was captivated by his war stories – like being told the commoditisation of Ethernet would doom 3Com. In fact, the volumes meant the company made even more money. “3Com is most successful acquisition HP ever made,” he said to applause.

Metcalfe pointed out that the reason Ethernet first ran at 2.94Mbps was because there wasn’t room on the network interface card for a clock chip, so he and co-inventor Dave Boggs derived a signal from the system clock.

He told the story of how Ron Crane was tasked with developing the Etherlink chip. It was late as Crane was working on designing in protection against lightning, which was neither in the spec nor asked for by customers.

3Com then sold 1,000 cards to a New York bank which hedged its bets by buying 1,000 cards from a competitor. Lightning struck, the 3Com cards carried on and the others were fried. 3Com sold another 1,000 cards as a result.

“Why did 3Com win in those days?” Metcalfe said. “We had a time machine. We went to Xerox PARC and knew what the future would look like. Others such as Ralph Ungermann worked on cards for dumb terminals but we knew there would be PCs on everyone’s desks.”

And why would Ethernet keep getting faster? Metcalfe’s philosophy is: “Build it, and they [the applications] will come”.

The session overran by about half an hour – but it made a great ending for the event.

The post Ethernet Innovation Summit appeared first on NetEvents.

So, as the networking community comes to celebrate 40 years since the invention of Ethernet, it has chosen to focus more on the culture of innovation than on past glories.

Celebrating Ethernet

The birth of Ethernet – and so of modern networking – can be traced back to Xerox PARC and May 22nd 1973 when Bob Metcalfe drew a diagram and sent a memo outlining the Ethernet concept for the very first time. As Bob explains: “David Boggs and I were the principal inventors of Ethernet, but we had a lot of help”. Also named on the patent were Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker who contributed a lot. Tat Lam, a contractor at Xerox PARC helped develop the transceiver, then there was David Liddle and the list goes on, according to Metcalfe.

Ethernet sketch drawn by co-inventor Bob Metcalfe.

The place was Silicon Valley, the time was the 1970s and innovation was in the air. It’s a great story, but to call it the Golden Age of Innovation misses the key point. Because the global spread of Ethernet has created an even more fertile culture of innovation, as Bob assures us: “We didn’t have Google, we didn’t have the Internet. Today’s innovators can find out in the twinkling of an eye almost all the previous work and people working in their field. They can begin collaborating from afar. So we now have what I call collective intelligence that’s been created through the connectivity of the Internet and that is actually accelerating innovation.”

So Ethernet, an innovation of 40 years ago, is paving the way for an even greater future. How can we make sure this happens? How best to maximise this opportunity?

PARC – nowadays a wholly owned but independent subsidiary of Xerox – the Computer History Museum and the MEF are working together to mark Ethernet’s 40th birthday with three consecutive events based at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

May 22nd begins with a conference organized by PARC to explore the history of the innovation process and culture that created Ethernet. This will be followed by an evening Gala – including a tour of the Museum meeting face to face with famous Silicon Valley inventors, a charity auction, award ceremony, Gala dinner and opportunities to rub shoulders with the industry’s movers and shakers. The Museum includes a display outlining the rise of Ethernet from a 2.94 Mbps network running on thick co-ax cable to today’s high-speed Ethernet running over fibre, copper or wireless.

Ethernets 40th Birthday will be celebrated on May 22, 2013 at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View California, USA

Then, on the 23rd, there will be a NetEvents-style day of discussions, hot debates and industry briefings, where the leaders of the Ethernet industry – now a $100 billion a year market – can sit down with the world’s IT press and industry analysts from more than 35 countries across the globe.

Thanks to Carrier Ethernet and the pioneering work of the MEF, we will be broadcasting sessions from both days across the globe as an educational opportunity for tomorrow’s young innovators – while providing massive additional coverage for the events.

How it all began

According to Bob Metcalfe: “The first Ethernet was a one-node Ethernet, which isn’t very interesting. It was a one-node Ethernet, which isn’t very interesting. It was a node that could transmit to itself for testing and de-bugging purposes. Then we had two nodes – which incidentally we called Michelson and Morley who happened to be the two physicists who disproved the existence of the Ether, so we thought that was ironic – then eventually the cable got strung all over the building.”

Ethernet was invented at PARC on May 22 1973

What was the real innovation, as they saw it then? “In those days our big innovation was putting a computer on every desk – I know that’s hard to believe! We put one on every desk then ran this co-ax down the middle of the corridor and everybody tapped into it from their PCs. So it grew to fill this building.”

The benefits were immediate, and so other departments wanted in on the network. “The labs wanted to be connected so, with an Internet protocol, we built an Internet that spanned the research laboratories of Xerox. It wasn’t until the late seventies that we began leaving Xerox and installing Ethernets elsewhere.”

Bob went on to found 3Com, makers of the first commercial Ethernet cards. Within 20 years Ethernet saw off competition from token-based networking and came to dominate the LAN space, covering every continent with islands of Ethernet connectivity.

Nan Chen: President, MEF “In future there will be a single language linking business worldwide. It won’t be English. It won’t be Mandarin. It will be Ethernet”.

But it was not until the last ten years, thanks to the work of the MEF, that Carrier Ethernet was developed to enable those islands of data to be connected via Ethernet, rather than more complex and costly WAN technologies such as Frame Relay and ATM.

Appropriately for this celebration, last year marked a turning point: for the first time Carrier Ethernet sales exceeded that of all other WAN technologies combined. Ethernet has now more or less taken over the world.

As MEF President Nan Chen once predicted: “In future there will be a single language inking business worldwide. It won’t be English. It won’t be Mandarin. It will be Ethernet”.

Keeping the flame alive

It is easy to be nostalgic about those pioneering days in a world still ruled by the telephone and typewriter. Bob reflects: “Even by then in the ’70s Silicon Valley had a tradition of innovation going back decades. Within that tradition it was expected that you would innovate and innovation was supported. We had all that going for us in the ’70s here in Silicon Valley.”

That makes it all the more vital to identify the key elements of that tradition in order to encourage them today and keep the flame of innovation burning. As Bob explains: “It starts with people – people drawn into this epitome of the free enterprise system, a system with great respect for science, education, engineering, entrepreneurship and business”. Ever the pragmatist, Bob adds wryly: “And the weather by the way – have I mentioned the weather?”

Heir to this great tradition is Steve Hoover, the current CEO of PARC. He points out the importance of an open spirit of enquiry to balance the intense commercial pressure to deliver results: “One of the key things is recognising that innovation is going to require failure. So you can’t start something and not believe that it’s possible to fail…. of course it’s not about failing, failing’s not good, but it’s about learning.”

Steve Hoover: CEO, leading an open spirit of innovation at PARC “…partnership is really important”.

Steve compares this innovative culture to a class of five-year olds: “It’s all the questioning … it’s why? Why? Why?! That leads to really good innovation because people are getting to the fundamental ideas, they’re questioning the status quo, they’re willing to change it and break it. Fail on the way and then pick yourself up, dust yourself off and move on to the next.”

The vital contributions of government and academia

A key element of the 40th birthday celebrations will be discussion around the need to foster and maintain this dynamic spirit of innovation in today’s globally competitive environment. This goes beyond purely business concern, innovation is vital to national pride and prosperity – even to survival. It is, therefore a concern for governments too.

Steve Hoover points out that the business world sometimes forgets the contribution made by past governments: “If you look back at the history of the Internet, Arpanet was government-initiated. The tremendous commercial impact I don’t believe would have occurred without their foresight in investing in those fundamental capabilities.”

“Today at PARC we are working to repeat that model over and over and over again.” Steve is very keen to enrol government support for this work, pointing out the need to recognize that: “The government does identify fundamental research areas to work in and is willing to invest. That partnership – of government investing in core capabilities, in new areas, taking some of the higher risk, plus industry’s ability to capitalise and leverage it – that partnership is really important.”

In the May conferences another key partnership will be welcomed to the debate – the partnership between business and academia. Among Bob Metcalfe’s many roles, he is now Director of Innovation at University of Austin, Texas. This gives him a unique insight into what really motivates today’s innovators: “We’re after freedom and prosperity, and innovation is the engine that drives that virtuous circle.”

Bob Metcalfe: co-inventor of Ethernet, “We’re after freedom and prosperity, and innovation is the engine that drives that virtuous circle.”

Bob recognizes that there are many forms of innovation and many ways to encourage it, but in this role he is particularly focused on the sort fostered by places like PARC and research universities, where the professors don’t just teach but also do real research: “They produce research as a product; they produce students as a product. And then the students are the best vehicles, the embodiment of the innovations, as they take those innovations out into the market.”

This seeding of innovation into the commercial world happens in two ways, he explains: “There’s the taking of those innovations into large existing companies through the open innovation processes there, then there’s my favourite kind – the creation of innovative start ups that take those innovations and package them properly and scale them up into world markets.”

Welcome to the future

Carrier Ethernet technology will be utilised to transmit this conference around the globe.

As Bob explained, networking and the Internet has given this generation “collective intelligence” and so much more to play with in terms of access to all that has already been achieved, both the successes and the failures of the past and present. So who knows what form Ethernet’s 50th anniversary will take in ten years time? What’s in store for the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs?

Click here for full details of the events on May 22/23

‘TUNE-IN’ on May 22 and 23 and watch this conference live: Live Broadcast

In the meantime, watch the video about this upcoming event including interviews with Bob Metcalfe and Steve Hoover:

The post Celebrating Innovation – and how Ethernet can drive it forward appeared first on NetEvents.

April 15th 2013, Mountain View, California. Innovation Awards 2013 celebrates organizations and individuals leading the world by innovation and performance in the networking and telecommunications sector. An independent panel – including leading IT industry gurus and senior figures from the foremost international technology press and industry analyst organizations – will judge the awards, which will be presented at Ethernet’s 40th Birthday Party in the Charity Gala Dinner on May 22nd 2013 at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, USA. All proceeds from the entry fees & charity auction will be donated to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education project.

The deadline for entry is 30th April 2013 and entry is open to any suppliers of technology products and services launched over the past 18 months up to and including May 22, 2013. The nominal fee for award submissions will be donated to STEM Education. Award details and entry forms are available from www.NetEvents.org. There are seven award categories for organisations, plus one individual “Ethernet Idol” award that requires no entry fee.

• Carrier Ethernet Business Services – for the most innovative new business service to enterprise clients within the past 18 months.
• Telecoms Product – for ”best in class” infrastructure equipment and innovative solutions to Service Providers’ current challenges.
• Enterprise Wireless Solutions – for the most innovative solution to managing the BYOD challenge.
• Cloud/Datacenter Solution – for the most innovative Cloud/Datacenter solution, providing major business benefits.
• Security Solution – for the most innovative contribution to countering the latest threats, including organised crime and government-sanctioned hacking and cyber attacks.
• SDN Solution – for the most innovative SDN or OpenFlow solution.
• Hottest ‘NEW’ Networking Company – not for a company that meets specific criteria, but rather one that surprises the judges with something truly fresh and original. But it had better be useful as well as clever!

You are also invited to nominate an ‘Ethernet Idol’ – someone who has successfully picked up the mantle from the original Ethernet inventors and contributed most to the on-going Innovation of Ethernet over the past 15 years.

“Whether network vendor or a Service Provider, these awards offer a rare opportunity to gain industry-wide recognition before a massive global audience of high-level decision makers and media gatekeepers” explains Mark Fox, CEO NEtEvents. “The Ethernet 40th Birthday Celebrations will extend over two days, attracting big names from the IT media and industry. Highlights of the events will also be broadcast to educational and training organizations across the globe. Together with the donations to STEM, it adds up to a unique opportunity to help educate tomorrow’s innovators.”

Earlier on May 22nd, PARC is organizing a conference program about innovation, focused on 40 years of Ethernet Innovation. The following day international press and analysts are invited to a series of briefings with leading network industry players on the current state of the industry. Click here for full details of the events and program.

For more details please contact:

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Bob Metcalfe
Co-inventor of Ethernet & UT Austin Professor of Innovation

Andy Bechtolsheim
Founder, Chief Development Officer & Chairman

Henry Samueli
Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Technical Officer

Martin Fink
HP Labs Director & Chief Technical Officer

Gordon Bell
Principal Researcher

Basil Alwan
President IPD

Howard Charney
Senior Vice President, Office of the President

Arpit Joshipura
Vice President Product Management & Marketing

Nan Chen
President

Ihab Tarazi
Vice President Global Product Technology & Strategy

John Shoch
Venture Capitalist

Rohit Mehra
Vice President of Network Infrastructure

Rami Rahim
Executive Vice President, Platform Systems Division

Steve Hoover
Chief Executive Officer

Glenn Ricart
Founder & Chief Technical Officer

Check out the latest conference agenda:
(double click to zoom in & out)

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This year’s APAC event combined both press and service provider summits which ran coterminously at the JW Marriott Hotel, Phuket, Thailand.

Software-defined networking (SDN) was a major topic, occupying most of the first morning of the two-day event. Among the key speakers were Rick Bauer, Managing Director, Technology, Open Networking Foundation who updated the conference on why service providers should be considering SDN.

The conference went on to talk about datacentres, network applications stores, and BYOD, followed by a pre-lunch presentation from Kash Shaikh, Senior Director, Product & Technical Marketing, HP. Shaikh talked about his company’s deep commitment to SDN and its extensive range of products supporting the new way of doing datacentre networking.

After an afternoon’s round-table discussions between analysts, press, service providers and vendors, the conference reconvened the next morning. Doug Schultz, VP of Asia Pacific/Japan, FireEye, opened proceedings with a keynote on new cyber-attacks. His company was well-placed, he said to detect new unknown attacks, which were hard to counter using traditional signature-based methods.

NetEvents then went on to debate the nature of those new attacks and ways of countering them, followed by a guest presentation from Robert Kuse, MEF Board Member & Director on the latest progress of the MEF, and the growing importance of Carrier Ethernet as a cloud services delivery mechanism.

The need for a solid foundation for tomorrow’s 4G networks was the next topic, with Carrier Ethernet being among the backhaul options for operators.

Following a discussion on how wholesale operators could increase ARPU, the final conference plenary wound up with a quick fire session between two managed service providers. This took the form of a presentation each from Nitin M. Jadhav, Associate VP, Trimax IT Infrastructure & Services, and David Rosengrave, Practice Manager, IT Solutions – Global Services, Verizon, followed by questions from NetEvents Editorial Director Manek Dubash, and from the floor.

NetEvents CEO Mark Fox then closed the conference with a preview of the next special event, to be held in May 2013, in Palo Alto, California, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ethernet.

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The second day of NetEvents opened with a guest speaker presentation by Doug Schultz, VP of Asia Pacific/Japan, FireEye, entitled Proactive strategies against today’s new breed of cyber attacks.

Schulz said that $40 billion is spent every year on IT security but that most of it is spent on signature-based counter-measures. This prevents known attacks but cannot detect unknown attacks which is what most attacks now are. He said that one big US government department found that unknown attacks overtook known attacks in mid-2011 and the ratio was increasingly moving that direction.

He said that there are three main vectors, web browsing, email and infected files, especially in the form of advanced malware that’s gone dormant but is inside the network, residing on file servers.

The main malware actors are, Schulz said, nation states – over 100 of them – plus political activists turned hackers, and criminals, aiming to steal intellectual property or valuable data.

He said that the virtual execution model his company’s products use for protection is dynamic, signature-less, covers known and unknown threats, and is scalable. It sends no data back to base, to another country or to the cloud as banks and governments prefer this for security reasons.

He said that FireEye’s system looks at web and email traffic, and data in a proprietary VM which cannot be detected by malware. He said the company’s customers include large telcos, manufacturers, energy companies and banks, and that in Japan and Australia, some service providers offer FireEye’s benefits as a service.

He was then interviewed on stage by NetEvents Editorial Director Mank Dubash.

Debate IV: “You ain’t seen nothing yet” – new security attacks and how to prepare for them
Panellists: Neeraj Khandelwal, Product Manager, Barracuda Networks; Doug Schultz, VP of Asia Pacific/Japan, FireEye; Craig Skinner, Senior Consultant, Telecommunications, Ovum; Nelson Soon, Senior Regional Sales Manager, IXIA

The debate was introduced and chaired by Dustin Kehoe, Associate Research Director – Telecommunications ANZ, IDC, who opened by saying that cyber-criminalism “is a great business because I can breach and steal in minutes and it will take you weeks or months to find out.”

He said that the motivation for breaches now primarily financial, and this causes the most damage in terms of actual loss, as well as angering customers and suppliers. Yet, he said, only 20% of organisations have a security policy. In future, most attacks will be at the endpoint given the growth of BYOD. “There’s no perimeter any more,” he said.

In the light of this, he asked the panel if traditional anti-virus software was irrelevant.

Doug Schulz said that was no need for AV for remediation.

Neeraj Khandelwal disagreed, saying that you still need that lock on the door for deterrence.

Nelson Soon said that attacks are an increasing trend so you need probes in the network. He added that government agencies and large enterprises are nervous about attacks so they are looking for the ability to simulate attacks such as DDOS in a controlled environment.

Craig Skinner said that you need a suite of solutions to detect prevent and remediate. You need to know where the traffic coming from to help you lower the risks.

Schulz said that there are malware toolkits that allow people to create malware that can’t be detected. “We use a VM for real-time analysis,” he said. “This allows IT to report what an attack was and what happened.” Telcos are a good market channel for FireEye, he said, as they are in touch with customers who need protection against advance persistent threats (APTs).

Other panellists agreed that telcos were a useful route to market.

Asked how governments or enterprises can have any confidence when today’s security is just damage control, Schulz said that FireEye does its best to collaborate within the IT security industry and with governments to home in on malicious attacks.

A question from the floor asked whether this is a never-ending arms race, and whether malware distributors could be prosecuted.

Schulz said: “It takes collaboration to find these people, their hosts and servers.”

Khandelwal said that we need an attack control between nations and that botnets get participation from some governments. He said that malware authors look for sitting ducks and use them as a stepping stones for next target, so security is essential even if you’re not the direct target.

Soon said that Android will be next battleground especially at the application level, such as email and Dropbox. “Mobile threats will be mainstream attacks in future,” he said.

Schulz agreed: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Guest speaker presentation by Robert Kuse, MEF Board Member & Director
Ethernet – bringing the Cloud down to earth

Kuse said that cloud providers are trying to move enterprise applications into publicly managed datacentres. He said the MEF predicted that 80% of bandwidth service connectivity will eventually begin and end in just 1,000 facilities globally – there will be fewer corporate datacentres.

What’s needed to be successful, he asked?

The Internet is the predominant method of cloud services delivery, so large enterprises are reluctant to move mission-critical applications into cloud over the Internet. There’s no security guarantee, no SLA, performance is best-effort only – but it’s global and it works. You can get HD video over the Internet so best effort is pretty good, he noted.

He contrasted this with Carrier Ethernet (CE) for cloud services delivery. It gives predictable performance, is secure, and provides regulatory compliance and data governance. And there’s massive bandwidth between datacentres today, with cloud services delivery a top MEF priority.

Today’s CE removes Internet delivery issues for mission-critical applications, connects cloud providers and their customers, and is an opportunity for service providers to generate supplementary revenue. Carrier Ethernet could fit into the datacentre, Kuse said, adding that the fruits of the MEF’s work on using CE for LTE backhaul will also be found in datacentre connectivity. Use of CE for mobile data backhaul is in its infancy, he said, and it’s still low compared to wire line.

Moving on from CE 2.0, we see the future as a dynamic automated network, Kuse said. He said we want to reduce costs and complexity, and so improve scalability.

Conference Debate Session V: Rock, not sand – laying a solid foundation for 4G networks
Panellists: Craig Easley, Founder, The Carrier Ethernet Academy; Nils Kleeman, Head of Mobile Broadband Solutions for Asia Pacific, Nokia Siemens Networks; Robert Kuse, MEF Board Member & Director; Nelson Soon, Director of Sales for SEA/ANZ and Taiwan, Ixia

Introduced and chaired by Clement Teo, Senior Analyst, Asia Pacific, Forrester Research. Teo said that LTE connections will under 1% of mobile connections this year but that LTE will be 45% of traffic by 2017, and APAC mobile data traffic will grow 21x from 2011-2016.

Teo said that the need to connect mobile devices to business grade networks is critical. He asked the panel if operators have under-invested in mobile backhaul.

Nils Kleeman said that most operators are increasing backhaul capacity.

Robert Kuse said that they are under-invested. “They know it and are managing through, the question is when the bandwidth will grow and how fast. It’s hard to get it right.”

Craig Easley said some areas are over-invested, while some are under-invested. New content-rich applications and video are driving the data tsunami.

Nelson Soon said that last night [at the conference hotel] the power failed, surprising people. Telecommunications is like electricity now, he said, as we expect it to just work, and this is a challenge for service providers.

Teo asked how operators could ensure that applications arrive?

Soon said that LTE is data-centric and people can’t accept downtime.

Kuse said that the MEF’s multi-class of service work was essential.

Easley said that management tools that extend CE provide powerful tools for network monitoring to allow SLAs to be met.

Kuse said that 3.5G builds was the first time operators started purchasing CE backhaul. Also LTE backhaul created the first large commercial implementations of CE that needed SLAs – operators needed to prove that specifications could be met.

Kleeman said that the big picture goes beyond LTE – we still have small cells, 2G, 3G, and LTE doesn’t handle voice so voice applications need a circuit switch fallback. He said that LTE is complex and needs to be managed.

On the role of SDN, Kuse said that automation interfaces were needed. Carriers are looking at incorporating over-subscription, at bursting capabilities, and management of the network. LTE will change traffic patterns dramatically so you need to automate management, he said.

Easley agreed, saying that SDN will help and will be an exciting application for SDN. He added a rider that carrier gear tends to be robust and be designed to work outdoors while SDN equipment might not be there yet.

Conference Debate VI: Cost vs Quality – how wholesale carriers can boost ARPU
Panellists: Andrew Dodsworth, COO, BT Global Telecom Markets; Mr Yulianus, Division Head, Indosat; Nils Kleeman, Head of Mobile Broadband Solutions for Asia Pacific, Nokia Siemens Networks; Passakorn Hongsyok, Department Director, International Business, UIH – United Information Highway Co

Introduced and chaired by Craig Skinner, Senior Consultant, Telecommunications, Ovum. Skinner talked about global communication trends such as the rise in the numbers of connected devices, which are increasing rapidly in most countries. There’s more accessible content online, and the volumes are getting bigger; more outsourcing and horizontal specialisation, and a shift of emphasis by telcos from revenue growth to margin growth.

Along with lots of OTT content, VoIP in the form of Skype etc is on the rise, plus more IP transit and peering although larger ISPs are being more restrictive over whom they’ll peer with.

He asked the panellists whether there was still innovation in the wholesale market.

Andrew Dodsworth said that the voice market is changing, with prices going down – a voice minute costs half a cent or less and has become commoditised so margins are very thin. He noted though that mobile roaming remains very expensive as those minutes are not sold at commodity prices, so mobile operators are making very high margins. “Data roaming is even worse,” he said, “So I use WiFi for data and Skype for voice.”

Mr Yulianus said that in Indonesia, operators’ strategy is to get aggressive. We see demand in IP transit and mobile backhaul and lots of opportunities there, he said. “We have significant revenues from that.”

Nils Kleeman asked what mobile operators are looking for. He said it is the business of the wholesale operator to provide a high quality service and not compete with its telco partners.

Dodsworth said that the term wholesale is broad and can mean a number of things.

Kleeman said it can be just transport or running the whole show.

Dodsworth said that operators get licences based on promises of coverage. In India, he said, operators must share to deliver on their promises as a carrier can’t always go it alone.

Asked how demands are changing, Passakorn Hongsyok said he saw more wholesale in future, though not much margin even if revenue is high. We have become border to border players – some players buy from us, mark up and resell. “That’s OK,” he said.

Asked about how to change the cost of roaming, Dodsworth said that when telcos lose too much market share, the opportunities are gone. The outcome is that higher revenue customers use OTT services so the mobile operator becomes a bit carrier.

“Then nothing happens. There needs be an incentive to change. I’ve had discussions with those players and I see no change likely,” he said. “They protect what they’ve got, not what they’re losing by not changing. How do we convince them they will gain if charges were more reasonable?”

Dodsworth said that high charges mean lost revenues but mobile operators should instead be passing this problem onto OTT providers such as Skype. He cited a hotel in Slovenia where international phone calls are free because they’re passed over Skype.

Quick Fire: Show me the money – What new managed services will be top APAC enterprises’ wishlists in 2013?
This took the form of a presentation each from Nitin M. Jadhav, Associate VP, Trimax IT Infrastructure & Services, and David Rosengrave, Practice Manager, IT Solutions – Global Services, Verizon.

Each presentation from the managed service providers of around 10 minutes covered their overview of the market and their solutions, and was followed by a Q&A conducted by Manek Dubash, Editorial Director, NetEvents.

The post NetEvents APAC Summit, Phuket – Day 2 appeared first on NetEvents.

The 2013 APAC combined press and service provider summit, held in Phuket, Thailand, opened with a keynote from Rick Bauer, Managing Director. Technology, Open Networking Foundation.

Entitled SDN – Insider Insights, Bauer’s address explained why software-defined networking (SDN) has become “a phenomenal wave of change”. The growing volumes of data transiting today’s networks are driving a need for smarter networks, as well as the growth in the number of devices with IP addresses, he said.

Another driver is the growth of cloud computing and virtualisation which mean, Bauer said, that the intelligence needs to move to a more abstract layer.

Additionally, the time for the delivery of projects needs to reduce from 6 months to 2-3 months with success or failure determined within weeks.

“Traditional networking can’t keep up,” Bauer said. “It can’t support scale, performance and time to market. IP is promiscuous, designed for a tree hierarchy. It doesn’t work for a microsecond architecture. The tree-like switch and router architecture doesn’t work any more.”

Networks today consist of custom silicon with merged control and data planes, but SDN is a network architecture that decouples services from the underlying hardware. This means that you don’t have to rip out the network to add a feature or innovation but can add bandwidth as you need new services, Bauer said.

How does it work? It uses primitives – forwarding instructions – that enable equipment manufacturers to put those instructions into silicon.

With SDN to change how a large network installation works there’s no need to re-program every switch. So to add new features, you don’t replace a switch, you flash it with those new features, and this makes the network faster and more reliable.

“OpenFlow won’t be the only instance of SDN – and the ONF is not only SDN body – there will be lots of other protocols to take advantage of the promise of SDN”, he said.

Bauer concluded by highlighting some early real-world deployments of SDN, such as that by AT&T and IBM’s secure cloud service.

He was joined on-stage by NetEvents Editorial Director Manek Dubash, who asked him why SDN needed multiple protocols. Questions from the floor followed.

Debate I: The Quest for Rock Solid Datacentre Solutions

Panellists: Ed Chapman, VP Business Development and Alliances, Arista Networks; Mr Yulianus, Division Head, Indosat; Robert Kuse, MEF Board Member & Director; Nitin M. Jadhav, Associate VP, Trimax IT Infrastructure & Services

The first debate was opened by Camille Mendler, Principal Analyst at Informa. She asked whether, following some recent datacentre disasters, the datacentre industry could do better.

“Why do datacentres fail? Acts of god – such as fire, earthquake, or flood – followed human error such as bringing in a can of coke and spilling it so it shorts out the equipment,” she said.

She said that in the datacentre ecosystem, it’s Darwinian, in that success is not about being the biggest or smartest but being the most adaptable to change.

Ed Chapman said that in the enterprise, it’s about ensuring that running services such as ERP locally is as effective as buying it as a service.

Nitin Jadhav said that datacentre management is as important as datacentre building. We are trying to provide services such as disaster recovery, and our datacentres are properly certified, he said.

Robert Kuse said customers are indifferent to in-source or outsource decisions. Service adoption is growing fast, and enterprises are switching providers quickly. But the transport needs to be secure, and uptime and availability are key.

Yulianos Yhoes said that his company offers datacentre services with other services, such as a network connection. Datacentre location is very important, he said, as “in Indonesia we have limited power, so finding locations with dual power sources is difficult.”

Chapman said that the rapid adoption of virtualisation allows better disaster recovery. “In a multi-tenanted environment customers want dedicated resources, five nines,” he said. The challenge is that virtualisation means orchestration but the end user needs to be unaware that this has happened, so VMs need to keep the same IP address.

Kuse said that customers used to ask for point to point connectivity as recently as two or three years ago but now they ask for multi-point services.

Moving to discuss compliance, Jadhav said in India regulations mandate the adoption of disaster recovery but that most mid-tier customers are not taking it seriously, seeing it purely as a compliance issue.

The panellists discussed which certifications were worth looking at. They included ISO 90001, ISO 20000 and ISO 9000. They then discussed datacentre location, and whether it was smart to build datacentres in geologically active areas. There was general agreement that you need to put the data close to users, and add mitigation for factors such as fault lines and volcanoes. All except Nitin Jadhav agreed that the 100% survivable datacentre could not be built, although you could get close.

Debate II: SDN – A fertile ground for a network applications store?

Panellists: Ed Chapman, VP Business Development and Alliances, Arista Networks; Kash Shaikh, Senior Director, Product & Technical Marketing, HP; Rick Bauer, Managing Director, Technology, Open Networking Foundation

Analyst Dustin Kehoe, Associate Research Director – Telecommunications ANZ, IDC opened the debate by pointing out that today’s networks need to get to a point where they employ one admin for 500 servers or more. There are too many manual processes, he said. For him, SDN could help because it allows faster service provision. SDN will be a $2bn market, he said. And will consist of 35% of network switch shipments. Cisco with 58% market share has the most to lose, HP with 14% market share has most to gain.

Ed Chapman said that Rick Bauer’s opening keynote was very good at describing SDN as a virtualised network. The technology enables service definition on the fly.

Kash Shaikh said that his company’s definition of SDN is the same as that of the Open Networking Foundation. There’s confusion in the market, he said, but one benefit of SDN is a single point of control over the network. “Openness is key”, he said, “and SDN is about delivering applications and solving business challenges.” Its key benefits for him are simplicity, scalability and automation.

Rick Bauer said that the challenge for the ONF is to develop recipes and white papers showing use cases.

The panel was asked about the security of a software-defined network.

Bauer said that “any exploit will try to attack the weak spots.” he pointed out that default passwords still left active in many pieces of equipment, and that any centralised infrastructure or storage makes it a bigger target. However, he said that there’s no need to flash 300 routers to fix a vulnerability, instead it can be done from a central point.

Shaikh said that you can provide applications to prevent attacks such as DDOS – he cited his company’s Sentinel application. So SDN allows you to provision applications to protect the network.

Chapman said that customer concerns include programmatic vulnerability to redirect resources or packets if hackers access of the SDN controller.

Bauer responded that, like PKI, you need to protect against man in the middle attacks. “We are working on that in the ONF,” he said.

In terms of competitive developments, Shaikh said that he saw interest across the board, from service providers and enterprises. “People want to see applications that solve problems,” he said, “and we have had more interest than we expected especially for campus deployments.”

The panel was asked about tap aggregation – using existing network infrastructure to redirect particular flows of data to devices that can analyse it, such as Gigamon’s traffic visibility solutions.

Bauer said: “This is about the confluence of big data and analytics – now data can be captured and analysed. Some really interesting things are happening.”

Asked about commoditisation of the network, Chapman and Shaikh took differing attitudes. For Shaikh, intelligence in hardware is as important as software. “In the days of software routing the challenge was performance – we don’t want to go back to that so hardware remains important,” he said.

Chapman said: “We use merchant silicon – software is very important, so our Arista EOS will operate across different hardware.”

Debate III: Bring Your Own Disaster?

Panellists: Adam Kelly, Account Executive, Australia/New Zealand, AirWatch; Neeraj Khandelwal, Product Manager, Barracuda Networks; Dino Soepono, Director of Products, Asia Pacific, Citrix; Michael Kiss, Senior Consultant, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Verizon

Analyst Ajay Sunder, Senior Director – Telecoms, Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan, opened the debate by pointing out that the individual’s role in the enterprise has changed. Devices are mobile, chosen by users, and users have control. The problem is how to secure a dynamic network. People work before going to work, on their way to work, and at home in the evening.

The question, Sunder said, is how to manage this situation? How to manage the data and avoid leakage. Who owns the device? If it’s my device, can the company put Websense on it?

Enterprises need to define the line between personal and corporate applications, how to balance risks versus benefits, and how to ensure visibility, he said.

Adam Kelly said that there were two security perspectives – that of the employee and of the enterprise. With Airwatch’s products, during enrolment, user can authenticate using either a personal or an enterprise device and based on ownership, they get different security policies applied.

Dino Soepono said his company has had BYOD internally since 2008. You need to define security policies that define which applications can access what data. “We can sandbox applications so if a device is lost you can wipe or encrypt it,” he said.

For Neeraj Khandelwal, one of the challenges of BYOD is snooping tools that can access other’s emails, and “use social engineering to get you to a malware site.” His solution has been to move solutions to the cloud so that all activity is redirected there, allowing access to compromised websites to be blocked.

“We work with enterprises who want to set up mobile device management programmes,” he said. “So we integrate application security – doing application analysis – such as checking where the IP address is coming from, is it going through a proxy?” You also need to prevent man in browser attacks, so his company’s solution injects JavaScript to prevent vulnerabilities such as keystroke logging.

For Michael Kiss, BYOD presents challenges. “Most organisations need to use their existing controls, don’t try to manage the devices as that way lies pain,” he said. “The devices change very quickly so it’s a losing battle. Instead, ask what do you want to protect?” This means looking at a sandbox approach, and tying data to the user not the device. You also need to “play nice with personal data” on the devices, he said.

A question from the floor pointed out that BYOD is not new as monks used to smuggle papyrus into monasteries.

Special guest speaker presentation by Kash Shaikh, Senior Director, Product & Technical Marketing, HP

Demystifying SDN – an SDN leader sums it up

Shaikh presented HP’s view of SDN.

We started working on OpenFlow in 2007, demoed an OpenFlow enabled switch in 2008, had 60 customers by 2010, and introduced commercially available OpenFlow in 2011. A complete solution was delivered in 2012, he said.

Research from Gartner shows that by 2020, there will be 50 billion devices on wireless networks, and the SDN market will be worth $2bn by 2016.

He said automation and SDN were key for tomorrow’s networks as the amount of manual admin they will need is not feasible, so there was a need to “eliminate human middleware”.

He said HP was unique in selling a complete SDN solution. “We have customers already using SDN for public cloud provision. CERN is a customer and is developing its own load balancing applications”, he said.

“We have 29 SDN switches but Cisco has zero, Juniper has zero, and Brocade has zero,” he said. “People buy for investment protection – our hardware is SDN / OpenFlow capable. That’s the benefit of a complete solution.”

How to start with SDN? “It’s a journey, and it’s evolution not revolution,” he said. “We will introduce a new enterprise controller in 2H13, and will eventually enable end-to-end SDN.” This will take time he said, but promised the elimination of vendor lock-in and human middleware.

The post NetEvents APAC Summit, Phuket – Day 1 appeared first on NetEvents.

PRESS RELEASE

The Truth about SDN – Dan Pitt to Keynote at NetEvents APAC Summit in Thailand on February 20^th

Executive Director of ONF will provide new insights into SP and customer benefits from software-defined networking

16 January 2013: Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), will for the first time, be addressing the NetEvents APAC summit on February 20, 2013 in Phuket, Thailand. Dan is one of the leading thinkers behind the SDN (Software-Defined Networking) revolution, so his “Insider Insights” on Why Service Providers should embrace SDN and the benefits this will bring to their customers will be among the Summit’s most eagerly anticipated sessions.

Since last April – when NetEvents Hong Kong introduced SDN to leading press, analysts and vendors across the APAC region – interest in SDN and the OpenFlow protocol has exploded, becoming a key theme at Interop Tokyo 2012. According to the latest Forrester report, SDN will be the driving force behind many anticipated changes in the IT industry. SDN, it says: “…will become the defining architectural abstraction…over the next five years, if the supplying vendors fully implement the vision.” According to IDC’s Interop Las Vegas briefing, the SDN market could grow from just under $200 million in 2013 to $2 billion by 2016.

Dan Pitt – with 20 years at the coalface developing networking architecture, technology, standards, and products – was one of the first to recognize the real potential of SDN and was recruited to lead the ONF from its launch in 2011. His experience includes work for IBM Networking Systems in North Carolina, IBM Research Zurich in Switzerland, Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, Bay Networks in Santa Clara, and Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions Technology Center – not to mention contributions to academia, including serving as dean of the school of engineering, and holder of the Sobrato Chair in Engineering, at Santa Clara University from 2002-2007.

Dan will join a number of leading global industry players during this year’s NetEvents APAC Summit. These 2-day events, also held in the USA, EMEA and CALA regions, have become established as the key opportunity for tech industry leaders to spend quality time with a region’s key IT media gatekeepers.

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