BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

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I P v 6

As the Internet Grows, IPv6 Helps Avert Routing Fiasco

I N F O G R A P H I C S

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Designing a WLAN for the Internet of Things

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Getting Bullish on Bare-Metal Switching

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Can WebRTC Solve Video’s Usability Problem?

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VIDEO OVERLOADWebRTC is making video conferencing a lot easier. It’s great news for collaboration, but what does it mean for the network?

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EDITOR’S DESK | JESSICA SCARPATI

Can WebRTC Solve Video’s Usability Problem?

Earlier this year, I got a text message from a close friend who lives several states away. It contained just two words: “Skype date?”

Give me a minute, I responded, explain-ing I had recently gotten a new phone and hadn’t downloaded the Skype mobile app yet.

“Do you have FaceTime?” she wrote back as I searched the app store. No, I have an Android phone, but I could do a video chat via Google Hangouts, I replied. She didn’t have the Hangouts app on her iPhone but offered to try it through Gmail on her laptop.

The video call request popped up on my smartphone—success! Shortly after accept-ing the call, it became clear the audio wasn’t working. At this point, we’d ordinarily get too frustrated and jump on the phone, but she was a new mom, and we both wanted to have her 1-year-old son on camera.

I’ve downloaded Skype, I texted her, but now I had to remember my username and password. So after negotiating which of three apps to use, one technical misfire, several failed logins and one password re-set, we connected. Finally.

But video conferencing isn’t supposed to be this hard … right?

I want to use video conferenc-ing. Really, I do. Just don’t make me reset my password.

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Of course, we were using consumer tech-nology for personal use. But in the enter-prise world, users face similar hurdles to initiating video conferencing sessions. Even if their platforms are interoperable, the pro-cess to start a session often gets gummed up by the need to remember meeting ID num-bers or download various plug-ins.

I had a pretty good motivation to stick with my attempt at video—a cute, chubby-cheeked baby was waiting on the other end.

That said, I wouldn’t have wasted a financial invest-ment if I’d abandoned the effort. The same can’t be said for the enterprise. If a meeting with cowork-ers or clients gets delayed because users are strug-gling to set up the video

portion, there’s a good chance that inter-action will simply be demoted to a phone call. When that happens, an expensive, en-terprise-grade video conferencing system is going to collect dust because users won’t bother trying it again.

WebRTC, an emerging standard, aims to solve some of these usability problems by providing a framework for embedding real-time voice and video communications into a Web browser without making users in-stall plug-ins or clients. Click on a link and you’re in.

In other words, WebRTC is supposed to make video conferencing easy. But what does that mean for the network? Do band-width demands go through the roof when video gets too easy? TechTarget news writer Gina Narcisi gets the answers to those questions from industry experts and

If a meeting is delayed because users struggle to set up video, there’s

a good chance it will be demoted to a phone call.

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enterprise IT pros using WebRTC video today in our cover story for this issue of Network Evolution, “Will WebRTC-based Video Blow Up Your Network?”

Also in this issue, Shamus McGillicuddy, director of news and features in TechTar-get’s Networking Media Group, examines what it will take for enterprises to embrace bare-metal switching (“Getting Bullish on Bare-Metal Switching”). We also look at how route aggregation gets easier with IPv6, which is a much-needed benefit as

IPv4 routing tables continue to bloat (“As the Internet Grows, IPv6 Helps Avert Rout-ing Fiasco”). And finally, in “The Subnet,” we catch up with a network engineer who discusses what it means to build a wireless LAN in factories where torque wrenches communicate via the network (“Designing a WLAN for the Internet of Things”). n

Jessica Scarpati

Networking Media Group Features and E-zine Editor

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Ω Initiating a video conferenceshould be as easy as making a phone call, and WebRTC isgetting us closer to that. Butcould the network become avictim of its success?

Video calls are no longer just a popular choice for connecting with out-of-town rel-atives and friends. Applications like Skype and FaceTime have shown users how easy—and enjoyable—launching a video call can be, and businesses want the same option for their employees when a simple voice call or audio-only conference just won’t cut it. Not only can traditional video conferencing be expensive and clunky, but it can also eat up

WebRTC

Will WebRTC-Based Video Blow Up Your Network?

BY GINA NARCISI

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WebRTC

precious meeting minutes with the time it takes to log in and launch a session.

This is where Web real-time communi-cations (WebRTC) steps in. The emerging open source initiative enables Web brows-ers to turn into real-time audio and video

clients through JavaScript APIs that don’t require the use of any extra plug-ins, and these capabilities can be embedded into any website or application. Ul-timately, WebRTC prom-ises to deliver easy video calling to anyone with a webcam and browser—though currently just for Chrome, Firefox and Opera users—and the only technical know-how

necessary to join a session is the ability to click on a link.

But while WebRTC makes video confer-encing a lot easier to use and more appeal-ing to businesses, could there be a dark side to making video so effortless and free flow-ing? Copious amounts of video traffic could strain unprepared enterprise networks, and WebRTC has a different set of band-width requirements compared to conven-tional video conferencing systems. Early adopters of WebRTC-based video say, how-ever, that they have yet to see any dooms-day scenarios on the network and that the ease-of-use benefits in WebRTC can’t be beat.

For Charles River Laboratories, a clini-cal laboratory services provider for the pharmaceutical, medical device and bio-technology industries, video is no longer a

Early days for WebRTC in UC Do you plan to incorporate WebRTC into your unified communications strategy?

Source: “2014-2015 Enterprise Technology Benchmark,” Nemertes Research, June 2014, based on direct interviews with IT pros at approximately 200 organizations

69+7+24+s

24%Still

evaluating 7%Yes, in the next two years

69%No

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luxury—it’s a necessity, says Ray Beaulieu, senior director of network operations and infrastructure at the company. Charles River Laboratories, based in Wilmington, Mass., deployed video technology provider Acano’s coSpaces virtual meeting room product to connect its 22 existing room-based systems to desktop video for its em-ployees. WebRTC support ended up being a bonus feature, Beaulieu says. But because the standard has made video easier, the company has already expanded its use of video conferencing to meetings with cli-ents, without any assistance from IT. Ap-proximately 300 employees—ranging from executives and scientists, to IT and HR—currently use video conferencing.

“Most of our employees that have used video in meetings don’t want to use au-dio calls anymore—they really enjoy that

face-to-face interaction,” Beaulieu says. “And any way we can get it, even if it’s not 100% in quality, we’ll tolerate it to get that experience.”

While some businesses are already video conferencing enthusiasts, others are just starting to get their feet wet with free video services to see how visual communications could work within their companies and how readily users will adopt it.

WebRTC Differs in Network RequirementsTraditional video conferencing platforms used to require a lot of bandwidth to pre-vent jitter and packet loss. This consid-eration often made video an expensive endeavor for many businesses, especially small and medium-sized companies. But

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conventional video conferencing products have gotten better in recent years, and many vendors and providers are now of-fering video with an eye toward conserving network resources.

Like its predecessors, WebRTC-based video requires more bandwidth than IP telephony or real-time collaboration. But this type of video requires Internet band-width, as opposed to LAN or private WAN bandwidth, says Andrew Davis, senior part-ner and industry analyst at Boston-based Wainhouse Research. A reliable Internet connection is a must for WebRTC, and or-ganizations must also ensure they have enough bandwidth to support the number of video calls expected to run over the net-work, he says.

While Internet bandwidth can some-times be expensive, Davis says, WebRTC

still doesn’t require as many network re-sources as traditional video offerings. Educational Service Unit 10 (ESU 10)—an agency that provides educational services to more than 40 K-12 school districts in the Lincoln, Neb., area—has been beta testing LifeSize Cloud, a new WebRTC and cloud-based video service from video conferenc-ing vendor LifeSize. ESU 10 has used video conferencing for trainings and meetings between teachers since the early 1990s, but because WebRTC relies on the Internet as the transport medium, its IT team can now roll out video to more schools, says John Stritt, distance learning director for ESU 10.

“We are very fortunate that we have good connectivity to the Internet in all our school districts. Because of that, it’s not going to be a problem for us [to support]

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any of these types of services from a band-width perspective,” Stritt says. The schools each have at least a 100 Mbps connection to Network Nebraska, a statewide network service from the Nebraska Information Technology Commission that provides a 2 Gbps, five-segment backbone that is burstable to 5 Gbps.

ESU 10 is planning to use the LifeSize Cloud service for distance learning and course sharing between schools that might

not have a teacher on site for a particular subject or class.

“We’re trying to get away from all the obstacles with [video] hardware, and we’ve had instances where an indi-vidual is in their car and has been able to participate in a meeting and get both live

video and audio as long as they’re Wi-Fi connected,” Stritt says. “The flexibility for where you can connect and how you con-nect using whatever device you have is an extremely positive thing for all parties involved.”

In addition to its efficient use of band-width, WebRTC-based video also doesn’t require as much processing power as con-ventional desktop video, says Charles River Laboratories’ Beaulieu. The call quality for WebRTC is lower grade than high-defini-tion video, with the latter providing 1080p or 720p resolution. WebRTC-based video offers 480p. With conventional desktop video conferencing, launching or joining a session on an older endpoint meant that users ran the risk of encountering choppy video quality because their machines couldn’t keep up.

WebRTC

14%of companies are evaluating

WebRTC for contact center interaction.

Source: “2014-2015 Enterprise Technology Benchmark,” Nemertes Research, June 2014, based on direct interviews

with IT pros at approximately 200 organizations

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“With WebRTC, that’s obviously less of an issue because it’s not consuming as much [processing power],” Beaulieu says.

WebRTC is also tolerant of changing net-work conditions, Beaulieu says. “Calls don’t often drop. It might stutter once in a while, based on the network conditions, but the call stays up. If conditions really degrade, the technology throws the video frames away and uses audio to do the best it can,” he says.

As WebRTC makes it easier for users to join video conferencing sessions via mobile device browsers, the wireless LAN—which rarely played a role with traditional enter-prise video conferencing—must now also be considered.

“I think the only thing we are really going to have to focus on is our Wi-Fi network, because we never really intended that

network to be a high-priority network for a real-time platform,” Beaulieu says. “But that’s definitely something we’re looking at for next year.”

Early Adopters Find WebRTC Expands Video Use WebRTC isn’t a ratified standard yet. The initiative’s API is still under development, and WebRTC won’t be standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the IETF until the final version of API is ac-cepted. But this isn’t stopping some IT pros from adopting WebRTC-based video offer-ings and products.

JurisLink, a company in Raleigh, N.C., that provides secure video conferencing services to defense attorneys connect-ing with clients in prison and detention

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facilities, built its core offering around Mi-crosoft Lync. But now it’s in the process of rolling out a new WebRTC-based confer-encing application. The new service, based on technology from WebRTC startup CaféX Communications, is not only easier

for both lawyers and in-mates to use, but the new application also will be able to scale to meet the needs of JurisLink’s cus-tomers, says JurisLink CEO Slade Culli Trabucco. While the legacy Lync cli-ent limits a video call to two people, the WebRTC-based client will enable up to four video participants to conference securely.

JurisLink sets up the

Internet connections to the prisons and correctional facilities. Even at some of the more remote locations it serves, such as a facility in Pamlico County in North Caro-lina that uses a DSL connection, there have been no performance issues so far during testing, Trabucco says. The technology is also compatible with legacy video equip-ment that JurisLink provides to its custom-ers, he says.

“Although we’re still testing, I don’t see any limitations or any differences in the quality, in terms of WebRTC-based video versus WebEx, Lync or any other product,” he says.

Perhaps most importantly, the WebRTC-based application is simple to use. Unlike with the Lync-based services, users don’t have to set up the camera or the micro-phone, Trabucco says.

WebRTC

WebRTC: What’s the holdup? Why aren’t you planning to adopt WebRTC?

Source: “2014-2015 Enterprise Technology Benchmark,” Nemertes Research, June 2014, based on direct interviews with IT pros at approximately 200 organizations

62+15+8+15+s

15%Other 8%

Waiting for standards to mature

62%Haven’t evaluated or am unfamiliar with it

15%Don’t see a business case

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“The prison just sends the inmate into the room with the video kiosk at their appointed time, and the meeting occurs,” he says. “It auto-initiates on the prison’s end, and then the attorney just pops in and they have their meeting. [Inmates] just have to pick up the handset, which allows them to talk privately, and they can have a secure conversation with their attorney.”

Charles River Laboratories has also found WebRTC-based video to be simpler for users. The company recently acquired an agency on the Galápagos Islands, and

before the two entities integrated their IT infrastructure and video systems, us-ers were able to conduct their first meet-ing easily with the WebRTC-based virtual meeting rooms.

“Blending the cultures is a lot easier over video. There’s much more joking, [and] misunderstandings are harder to have when you can see somebody’s reactions,” Beaulieu says. “Because we’ve got that mixed model, we give folks choices. So the next phase for us is really going to be what we can do with our clients to make interac-tions with our scientists better.” n

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

k Live long and proxyHas your network infrastructure passed its expiration date? Here’s what Gartner estimates as the useful lifespan for network devices.

k Most important access point features

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k Security Readers’ Choice Awards 2013:

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Source: “Know When It’s Time to Replace Enterprise Network Equipment,” Gartner, August 2012

Source: Wireless networking survey, TechTarget, July 2014, N=278. Respondents could select all that apply.Source: “1Q14 Enterprise Telepresence and Video Conferencing Equipment Report,” Infonetics Research, June 2014; art: wissanu99

k What’s hot, what’s not: Video conferencing editionChange in the number of units shipped globally in Q1 2014, compared to Q1 2013.

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-37% Desktop Video

-17% Telepresence

+14% Multipurpose

room systems

+52% Videophones

+53% Software-based video

LAN switches (access layer)

Core switches and routers

Wireless access points and controllers

Data center network devices

WAN routers

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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66% Security

41% Intelligent traffic prioritization and QoS54% Dual-band, multi-radio

APs with MIMO antennas

49% Guest access

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BARE-METAL

Ω Bare-metal switches aren’t mainstream yet, but they’re getting closer. And while you might worry they require a Ph.D. to set up, it turns out they’re not that scary to use.

The typical network engineer may consider bare-metal switches a niche tech-nology, but these commodity devices—which run third-party network operating systems—are precipitating a seismic shift in the networking industry. Many data cen-ter operators, especially in the cloud ser-vices, Web content and financial services markets, are eager to try bare-metal switch-ing, which has the potential to transform

Bare-Metal

Getting Bullish on Bare-Metal Switching

BY SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDY

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the economics of the networking industry and also give network engineers unprec-edented flexibility and agility.

Unlike traditional, vertically integrated switches from leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Cisco, bare-metal switches—also referred to as white-box switches—separate network hardware and software, which lowers prices and pro-vides more flexibility in operations and network functions.

“Cost is the first thing that gets your at-tention [with bare-metal switches], but it’s not what keeps us there,” says Mike Daw-son, co-founder and director of cloud archi-tecture at Cloudapt, a public cloud provider in Indianapolis. “We’re completely tied to white-box switching from here on out. We’ll never do anything again that ties us to Cisco, Juniper or even Arista, which is the

most open of the bunch.”Bare-metal switching is still an immature

market, however. Most of the software ven-dors in the space are newer startups, and the hardware vendors are original design manufacturers (ODMs) whose distribu-tion channels and enterprise support orga-nizations in North America are limited or nonexistent.

Dell Networking changed that dynamic recently when it cracked open its data cen-ter switches and agreed to support third-party network operating systems from startups Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks. Dell is not a market leader in switching by anyone’s reckoning, but it does have an enterprise-class supply chain and support organization that makes a bare-metal switch much more appetizing to companies that want disaggregated switch

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hardware and software. Ever since Dell made its bare-metal decision, the industry has been asking one question: Who’s next?

“Without saying anything I can’t tell you, I wouldn’t be surprised [if other OEMs fol-lowed Dell’s lead],” says Alex Benik, prin-cipal at Battery Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital fund that made an early investment in Cumulus Networks. “What is exciting about Dell is that it invented the modern server supply chain. I think they’re the ideal partner to help reinvent and cre-ate the modern networking supply chain.”

Bare-Metal Switch Has Appeal, as Well as ChallengesCloudapt launched about 18 months ago with a single pod of server racks and a net-work of five 48-port, bare-metal switches

sourced through Pica8, a software-defined networking (SDN) software startup that helps customers buy bare-metal hardware from Asian ODMs.

“We’re open source guys on everything we do—on storage, operating systems and applications. We’re used to having direct access to engineers when there are prob-lems,” Dawson says. “Working with Pica8 allowed us [to apply] that same model on the network. It was the first time we had that ability. You can’t get a Cisco engineer on the phone without selling your firstborn child. Working with smaller company that has roots and ties to the open source com-munity is completely refreshing.”

The pace of innovation in bare-metal switching is also faster, Dawson says, and new features don’t always require new hardware.

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“When we started working with Pica8, there was zero support for BGP, for in-stance. It’s fully implemented now, and we’ve had a few [revisions] of code fixes on top of that. But I’m running the same ASIC and switch hardware,” he says. “It’s just purely a software change for Pica8, and it came much quicker than a new version of Nexus fully baked and melded together.”

Still, bare-metal switching is unexplored territory for most network engineers, who

are often extremely risk-averse. They have built networks with vertically integrated switches for decades.

Disaggregating hard-ware and software pres-ents new risks. Will everything work? Can you

get enterprise-grade technical support? Can you get a replacement switch quickly? Will the startup you are working with be around in three years?

“Most network guys are rewarded based on availability, not necessarily on innova-tion,” says Andrew Lerner, research direc-tor at Gartner. “People lose jobs when the network goes down. If you are a network guy and you take the network down, that is 10 [times worse than] if you are a server guy and just knock a server down.”

Andrew Gallo, senior information sys-tems engineer at George Washington Uni-versity in Washington, D.C., agrees that bare-metal switching, as the market for it stands now, is unlikely to get much traction where he works.

“I would definitely consider [bare-metal switches], but … my organization is

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17%of data center Ethernet switch ports are

reported to be on bare-metal switches.Source: “2014 SDN Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey,”

Infonetics Research, July 2014, N=101

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extremely risk-averse, so I doubt we would do it,” he says.

“There is value in maintaining a relation-ship with a name brand. The CIO is looking and saying, ‘Am I going to deploy a critical resource on a non-name-brand service?’ It seems pretty obvious that is a really tough case to win.”

But risk-averse engineers will warm up to bare-metal switching if more OEMs

follow Dell’s lead. “From a market perspective and a

revenue perspective, the overall per-centage of [vendors] who do [bare-metal switching] is very small, about 3%,” Lerner says. “If all of a sudden you saw Extreme get involved in this, HP get involved, even Cisco … it becomes a much more mainstream, accepted technology.”

What Goes Into Running a Bare-Metal Network?Google is well known for adopting a bare-metal approach to networking in its data centers. ODMs build switches to Google’s specifications, and Google runs custom software on them tailored to its infrastruc-ture needs. Facebook is pushing for the same thing through its Open Compute net-working project, an effort to develop open specifications for bare-metal switches and software. It is testing Wedge, its own design for a top-of-rack switch, which it will sub-mit to Open Compute shortly.

Facebook and Google have been able to pioneer bare-metal switching in part be-cause they have the in-house engineering talent to build and operate such networks. Many enterprise engineers doubt they have the skills and manpower to put together

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Are you ready to bare it all?

Would you use bare-metal switches

in your data center?

Take our poll

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bare-metal switches. They would rather stick to what they know.

“There is a big chasm between the enter-prise guys who always want to have some-one’s neck to choke and people who are trying to build Web-scale infrastructure, who tend to be more open source and who have the attitude of doing it themselves,” says Cloudapt’s Dawson.

But bare-metal switching proponents say that gap is closing. “I think there’s a percep-tion out there that is false—that white-box switching means you do everything your-self,” says Battery Ventures’ Benik. “Ob-viously, Google and Facebook do a lot of things themselves because they have the resources to do so. The next 12 months are going to be the year of increasing market adoption, now that there are great relation-ships like Dell in place, which take care of

a lot of the supply chain issues. The Open Compute movement for networking is defi-nitely going to have a positive impact on adoption. It will pave the way for people to develop more commercially packaged so-lutions that come with enterprise support and an enterprise feature set that a more traditional networking user would be look-ing for.”

Bare-metal switches offer new ways to do automation. Big Switch Networks and Pica8 sell licenses for switch software that works with their SDN controllers. And most network operating systems for bare-metal switches are open platforms based on Linux, which means data center opera-tors can use Linux management tools and DevOps tools like Chef and Puppet to au-tomate their networks and align network operations more closely with server and

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virtualization teams. “When I do troubleshooting on my Pica8

switch, sometimes I drop into Linux, a lower level than the switch operating sys-tem,” Dawson says. “Pica8 allows me to do that, and I’m more comfortable in Linux than I am in a Cisco switch or firewall oper-ating system. And there are a lot more tools available to me. I can install my own soft-ware on a Cumulus or Pica8 switch and run automatic things that I never had the keys

do to on a Cisco operating system.”

Bare-metal switching’s openness with Linux and DevOps tools make net-work automation much more doable, and it comes at a time when network engineers are struggling to

keep up with more automated silos in data centers.

“You have all these processes spinning up new virtual machines and creating all the stuff needed to support it in an automated fashion. Then it hits networking for VLAN or firewall rules changes and it takes days because you are interfacing it with a human process that is frankly broken,” says George Washington’s Gallo. “Data center network-ing needs to be run through DevOps, or at least in a DevOps fashion. I find it harder and harder to [hire] traditional network engineers, so having some way to manage the network in an automated, multivendor fashion is critical for us.”

Dawson has not found the bare-metal switches used at Cloudapt to be any more difficult to work with than traditional switches from mainstream vendors like

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“I’m more comfortable in Linux than I am in a

Cisco switch or firewall op erating system.”

—Mike Dawson, Cloudapt

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Cisco. If a data center operator properly architects a network based on bare-metal switching, there should be no operational problems, he says. He has been able to set and forget his bare-metal network, thanks to a software overlay network based on OpenStack Neutron and Generic Routing

Encapsulation.“All the difficult networking things like

customer isolation and customer-edge con-nectivity is all orchestrated on my servers in software,” he says. “It doesn’t even touch my white-box switches, which simply pass tunneled traffic around.” n

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Pulse Checkk How many users does your network support?

k What do you have planned for your data center network this year?Respondents could select all that apply.

k We asked … you answered.What programming languages do you know? Respondents could select all that apply.

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Source: Network management survey, TechTarget, July 2014, N=1,276; art: Ponkrit/ThinkstockSource: Network Evolution reader poll, “Parlez-vous Python?”, August 2014

Source: Data center networking survey, TechTarget, July 2014, N=404

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25%100-999

29%Fewer than 99

18%1,000-4,999

8%5,000-9,999

10%10,000-49,999

10%50,000+

Minor upgrade

Expand current network

Complete upgrade

Upgrade to a new technology (e.g., SDN or IPv6)

None of these

16%

20%

14%

41%

26%

52%Python

30%C, C++,

JavaScript, Java

27%Perl, PHP

21%Power-shell

14%Ruby

9%None

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IPv6

Ω The Internet is getting bigger and IPv4 addresses are getting scarcer. Experts say IPv6 is the solution, but its addresses are four times largerthan those based on IPv4. Can routers keep up?

It was the mid-1990s. Netscape ruled the fledgling world of Internet browsers, Titanic became the highest-grossing film to date, peace in the Middle East briefly seemed possible, and Dolly the sheep be-came the world’s most adorable cloned mammal.

Amid all this, the Internet was just start-ing to wake up. The number of routes to

IPv6

As the Internet Grows, IPv6 Helps Avert Routing Fiasco

BY JESSICA SCARPATI

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IPv4 addresses on the Internet didn’t even crack 50,000 until about 1998. So the idea that the pool of unallocated IP addresses could run out, or at least not be bandaged up one day with some form of network ad-dress translation, seemed laughable to many people, despite repeated warnings from industry groups. But just as so many assumptions from the 90s have since gone by the wayside—Netscape who?—so too has the notion that IPv4 could accommodate

the rapid expansion of the In-ternet. IPv4 routes surpassed 500,000 earlier this year, ac-cording to the CIDR Report, which analyzes the BGP rout-ing table. The available pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses has run out in Asia, Europe and most of Latin America,

with North America’s pool expected to be exhausted by early next year.

IPv6, which expands the size of IP ad-dresses from 32 bits to 128 bits, solves this shortage in large part by offering such an exponentially larger number of addresses that experts say it would be nearly impossi-ble to run out again. But skeptics have wor-ried that bigger addresses—and so many more of them—would overwhelm routing tables and consequently cause routers to choke on the memory, forwarding and pro-cessing demands.

As more enterprises and service provid-ers transition to IPv6, however, it appears this is a moment in networking when one plus one doesn’t necessarily equal two. Although IPv6 addresses are bigger and the number of them is only going up, en-gineers who have run networks with the

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14%Percentage of Alexa Top 1000 websites currently reachable over IPv6, as of Aug. 13, 2014.

Source: World IPv6 Launch

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next-generation protocol say IPv6 is un-likely to overwhelm routing tables any time soon.

“The expectation was that it would be a major impact, when in reality we will not see that,” says Ciprian Popoviciu, president and CEO of nephos6, a cloud- and IPv6- focused consultancy in Raleigh, N.C.

In fact, IPv4 may ultimately drag down routing performance, not IPv6. Most mod-ern routers have enough ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM), a specialized type of memory in line cards that is respon-

sible for forwarding pack-ets at line rate, to support between 500,000 and 1 million IPv4 routes, says Owen DeLong, IPv6 evan-gelist at Hurricane Elec-tric, an Internet backbone

and colocation provider based in Fremont, Calif. IPv4 has now passed that lower threshold and continues to grow at a rate of several hundred to a couple thousand routes per month.

But many older routers, including Cisco’s Catalyst 7600 Series, only have enough TCAM to support 512,000 routes. The global BGP tables hit that ceiling on Aug. 12, causing a number of websites across the Internet—including Amazon, eBay and LinkedIn—to suffer from significant out-ages or performance degradation. Simply adding more TCAM isn’t always a practi-cal solution due to how expensive it is, how much space it requires in routers and how much power it consumes, DeLong explains.

“What’s really going to blow out the routing table is not IPv6. It’s actually IPv4 run-out,” he says. “As that happens, IPv4

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IPv4 may ultimately drag down routing

performance, not IPv6.

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is going to get more and more fragmented as smaller and smaller chunks of address space get transferred around to try to plug holes in the dike … [and] IPv4 is going to get much harder to maintain.”

IPv6 Efficiency Lies in AggregationThe ability to better aggregate routes is what many IPv6 proponents pinpoint as one of the main sources of the protocol’s efficiency. Because unlike IPv4, which al-lows variable lengths for host and network identifiers, IPv6 was purposely designed to reserve a standard amount of space, 64 bits, for each portion of the IP address—the net-work identifier and the interface identifier, which is the equivalent of a host identifier in the IPv6 world.

“This means we have consistency. All

links, all networks everywhere, they’re go-ing to be 64 bits long,” Popoviciu says. “And because you do this, as you move up in the hierarchy of networks from the access to-ward the core, you’re able to now aggregate those /64s into tighter routes—a /56, a /48, a /32 and so on.”

Popoviciu, whose team has implemented and tested IPv6 for several large enter-prises and service providers, found that as long as an organization has a well-managed environment, the routing table used for IPv6 on their networks was just 1.2 or 1.3 times the size of its routing table for IPv4.

“People were expecting it to be eight times, 10 times, 20 times—orders of magni-tude—higher,” he says. “The reason for this smaller number is that if you have a good IPv6 addressing plan, then you take advan-tage of high levels of aggregation in v6.”

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IPv6 around the world Countries with the most IPv6 allocations and assignments.

Source: Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), ipv6actnow.org, as of Aug. 13, 2014

3,617

United States

465

Sweden

2,018

Brazil

888

Russia

467

Japan

698

Australia

1,030

Great Britain

686

Netherlands

1,071

Germany

582

France

n 1. United States

n 2. Brazil

n 3. Germany

n 4. Great Britain

n 5. Russia

n 6. Australia

n 7. Netherlands

n 8. France

n 9. Japan

n 10. Sweden

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On the global Internet routing table, DeLong has also seen few signs that IPv6 addresses, despite being four times big-ger than IPv4 addresses, are causing any problems.

“It’s absolutely the opposite,” he says. “Because IPv6 has a bigger address space, it allows us to issue larger blocks of addresses upfront. So there’s less fragmentation in the address space, which allows us to ag-gregate more prefixes in the routing table. If you look at the number of autonomous systems advertising IPv4 routes out there, the average is north of 10 routes per auton-omous system, and in IPv6, that’s closer to two. You actually get a dramatically smaller routing table.”

Martin Levy, head of network strategy at CloudFlare, a website security and ac-celeration company based in San Francisco

that also provides an IPv6 gateway ser-vice, points out that Internet routers run-ning IPv4 and IPv6 will need to store two separate address tables. But thanks to the ability to better aggregate IPv6 routes, the newer protocol is highly unlikely to become a memory hog.

“At the moment, we don’t need as much v6 memory because the global v6 rout-ing table is tiny by comparison to v4,” he says. “It’s tiny not only because of some ef-ficiency done in the routing world but also because every IP address that you have routed in the v6 world can represent an enormous number of machines. There-fore, you can get away with a lot less routed entries.”

In comparison, the variable lengths of host and network identifiers in IPv4 en-abled organizations to chop up various

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blocks of addresses as needed. It’s a mecha-nism that became handy as the pool of un-allocated IPv4 addresses dried up, but it also made route aggregation difficult.

“You end up with this large, wide spec-trum of routes of all sizes that you have to store in your routing table,” Popoviciu says. “Everybody is trying to tweak and twist and use small chunks of address space here and there—whatever is left over, however they can organize it. In order to ensure reach-ability to all these islands, they have to ad-vertise what are sometimes very, very long networks. This overpopulates the Internet [routing] tables.”

It’s like comparing older cities built on farmland to those designed on modern grid systems, he adds. In the former, you’d have to know the exact name and location of each street you want to find, whereas

the patterns in a grid system enable you to make certain assumptions, such as know-ing that 5th Street is unlikely to be in the same neighborhood as 125th Street.

“If you’re a cop trying to find the right way around the city, now you don’t have to store all the names in your head. You kind of have an idea that if it’s a three-letter street with this number, and it’s southwest, then it’s in this quarter. If it’s five letters, it’s in this quarter, and so forth,” Popoviciu says. “That’s the kind of aggregation you can do [with IPv6].”

IPv6 Performs Equal to (or Better Than) IPv4On discussion boards and mailing lists across the Internet, some disagree that IPv6 is critical to survival, let alone

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harmless. They point out that regional In-ternet registries have actually reclaimed some IPv4 address blocks and that enter-prises still rely on NAT for security-related purposes. But proponents say any con-cerns about router performance are mostly unfounded.

“Yes, there’s a cost,” counters Cloud-Flare’s Levy. “But in theory—and there are purists that would argue against this, and I’m going to turn around and say they’re being pedantic—you can move a v6 packet

through network infra-structure at about the same speed and with the same level of resources that you can move a v4 packet.”

“The ‘pedantic’ part is that the v6 packet is big-ger,” Levy continues.

“Why? Because the address is bigger. You need to interpret more bits before deciding where to send it; therefore, the pedantic an-swer is, ‘No, v6 is actually going to take more effort than v4.’ And pedantic people are correct. But at some point in time, you’ve got to just go ‘Come on, guys. This is a little too much.’ Because at the highest level, they’re the same. That was the design.”

While the memory demands, forward-ing speeds and CPU utilization in IPv6 are generally equal to that in IPv4 in most of the enterprises routers, Popoviciu says, he also notes it’s important to press vendors on those specifics because some merely aim for IPv6 readiness—not performance and scale parity.

Due to the way IPv6 has been designed, John Jason Brzozowski, fellow and chief IPv6 architect at Comcast, says he’s

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Memory demands, forward- ing speeds and CPU utilization

in IPv6 are generally equal to that in IPv4 in most routers.

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observed IPv6 traffic sometimes outper-form IPv4 on Comcast’s network. Comcast, which recently announced it has enabled its entire broadband network to support dual-stack connectivity, runs the world’s largest native IPv6 deployment.

“We’re not prepared to quantify that [observation of IPv6 performance] at the moment, but … the logical thinking there is [that] as the routing tables continue to grow and v4 continues to be exposed to the possibility of transition technologies like carrier-grade NAT, those two lines are

growing further and further apart,” Brzo-zowski says.

Over time, that means IPv6 performance will continue to outpace IPv4, he explains.

“Even if v6 stands still, it will still look better,” Brzozowski says. “I think there will be an opportunity to optimize it. But at a bare minimum, it’ll still be better.”

However, that’s all contingent on having a carefully planned addressing architecture.

“Start working on your IPv6 address plan early,” Popoviciu says. “You need time to get it right for your organization.” n

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THE SUBNET | Q&A | JESSICA SCARPATI

Designing a WLAN for the Internet of Things

In this edition of The Subnet, we chat with Jonathan Davis, a senior network planning analyst at a global automotive and commercial manufacturing company, about everything from the challenges of optimizing Wi-Fi for the Internet of Things to his life as a beekeeper.

What are you working on lately?I work in two major areas: wireless and data center. On the wireless side, we’re going through all of the North American manu-facturing facilities and upgrading the wire-less networks. There’s a large number of very different applications in each location,

so we’re trying to provide a standard level of service.

On the data center side, I am replacing the MPLS WAN core for North America, and directly following that, the data center networks. We’re migrating to Cisco’s Nexus [series] like everybody else.

What’s driving the wireless upgrade?There’s a buzzword Cisco uses, the Internet of Things. We’re really starting to see that in the factories in things like building man-agement or lighting control, and there are a lot of line-management-type applications that require wireless connectivity. Even

n Jonathan Davisn Senior Networking

Planning Analyst

n Automotive and Manufacturing Industry

n Greensboro, N.C.

n Twitter: @subnetwork

IPv6

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the tools, torque wrenches and things like that, now have wireless connectivity so you can verify every screw is bolted to the cor-rect torque and how often [the wrench] has been used to see if it needs to be calibrated. So there’s a huge demand now for wire-less capacity and excellent wireless cover-age, and the problem there is the wireless supplicants themselves are so different. [You have to know] whether they support 5 GHz or not—most devices in the enter-prise space don’t yet—or whether they have a single antenna or not. Most devices are still 802.11g with a single antenna, gener-ally a 0 dB or possibly a 2 dB antenna, but very rarely with multiple antennas. So that leaves us in a spot where you’re building a wireless network for the lowest common denominator, and that lowest common de-nominator’s pretty low in most cases. It’s

not always an easy task.

What is the strangest thing you’ve had to do in the line of duty?We manufacture trucks, and the trucks go through cold- and hot-weather testing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where there is a cold-weather testing facility. They can take it from ambient temperature out-side to—I think they’re capable of reaching negative 60° [Fahrenheit], but this particu-lar test was for negative 40°. The vehicles are loaded with sensors. A lot of the sensors are in the onboard computer, but there are also a few hundred added to test tempera-ture, exhaust, various gases and anything that can be measured.

Last year, I engineered a point-to-point wireless solution using Cisco 1552s [access points] that allowed the person looking at

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the numbers to be quite a distance away from the truck. So last week, we had to mount these very large APs back into the trucks, make some configuration changes to align with the frequency the Air Force would allow us to use, prepare the trucks to go down to negative 40° and pull all this data while these trucks were being driven around. From a purely technical perspec-tive, [the network] is pretty simple, but the complexity comes in the fact that you’ve got moving vehicles involved.

If you had an unlimited network budget, how would you spend it?I don’t think any organization that has as many sites as we do is ever really happy with their WAN. If I had the ability to spend as much money as I wanted, I’d definitely be looking toward the WAN.

A large portion of the frustration is the fact that right now, for us to get a new, large WAN pipe, we’re looking at months [to provision it]. So when we identify a prob-lem or maybe a new use case that’s going to dramatically change our WAN utilization, it may be six months before we can actu-ally have that WAN link delivered. I would be throwing as much money as I could at divorcing ourselves from relying so heavily on the major WAN providers and looking at things not only like Riverbed [for WAN optimization] but also at some of the WAN overlays like Cisco’s IWAN [Intelligent WAN] to see how can we improve some of the response times, not just by spin-ning up cheap links but also by offloading lower-priority traffic onto cheaper links. [This is] so that, long term, I’m not spend-ing a ridiculous amount of money on large

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MPLS WAN pipes when 60% of that traffic is headed directly to the Internet.

What were your early career goals, and what led you to networking?I was planning on joining the military. I was all set to leave and tore my ankle up four weeks away from my leave date. I had to figure something out rather quickly, so that was what led me into IT. I did every other aspect of IT before coming to networking, from systems to the Web to .NET develop-ment to DBA [database administration]. I was honestly fed up with IT in a lot of ways, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do when I left IT—and then discov-ered networking.

I had an opportunity in one of my posi-tions to take a lead role on the network side. I thought, ‘It’s one area of IT I haven’t

touched in any way. At least if I leave IT after this, I’ll know I tried it all.’ And I fell in love. It just fits my way of thinking. Net-working in a lot of ways is that 20,000-foot view. If I’m getting a packet between point A and point B the way I want it to go, then my job’s done.

Your Twitter bio says you’re a beekeeper. How did you get into that?Every kid is afraid of bees, right? You step on one and learn quickly that bees equal pain. When I was 7 or 8, I got stung a few times, and at the second or third time, I thought, ‘Well, that wasn’t as bad as I re-membered it.’ After the initial shock, it wasn’t as horrible. I began asking adults about it and learned the bee dies too. I thought, ‘Shoot, well I don’t want to step on a bee and kill the bee.’

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So it kind of started in childhood. [Bee-keeping] was something I’d always wanted to try, and I was given the opportunity from an acquaintance to go into his beehives, and it just further developed the interest. When I go into my beehives, everything gets really quiet. It’s not technical in any way. I spend a lot of time in the technical world, but what I’m doing with the bees is completely non-technical. It’s kind of a back-to-nature thing for me; it’s very peaceful and calming.

That’s amazing—because that sounds exactly like my worst nightmare.Actually, I go into my beehives without gloves. And that’s where most people go,

‘Wow, that’s crazy! You must get stung a lot.’ But I’ve been stung one time this year and have probably been in my beehives 30 times. For a bee to sting you, it’s going to give its life up, so that means the bee doesn’t really want to sting. To protect the hive, it will, but it’s not like a wasp or a yel-low jacket, which don’t lose their stingers.

I began to realize when I was wearing gloves, I could bump the bees—just slightly tap them—and they would move out of my way. They weren’t reacting aggressively; I would just tap them and they would move. That’s when the light bulb went off and I thought, ‘Yeah, I could totally do this with-out gloves.’ They’re actually quite gentle. n

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CONTRIBUTORS

GINA NARCISI is the news writer for TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. She writes for SearchUnified-Communications and SearchNetworking. Before joining TechTarget in 2011, she covered healthcare technology, radiology and cardiology news for Trimed Media Group. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Rhode Island.

SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDY is the director of news and features for TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. He writes about networking, security, data centers, network management and other topics for Search-Networking and SearchSDN. He also manages over-all news coverage for TechTarget’s other networking sites, including SearchUnifiedCommunications and SearchEnterpriseWAN.

JESSICA SCARPATI is features and e-zine editor of Network Evolution in TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. Scarpati was previously the site editor for SearchCloudProvider and the senior news writer for the Networking Media Group. Prior to joining TechTar-get, she worked as a reporter for several newspapers in the Boston Metro area. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University.

COVER ART: AMANA IMAGES/THINKSTOCK

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Rivka Gewirtz Little, Executive Editor

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