BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

MAY 2015 \ VOL. 6 \ N0. 4

E D I T O R S D E S K

Networkings Latest
Humblebrag: 802.11ac
Wave 2

L AY E R 4 -7

Data Mine

Need for Network

Orchestration
Builds, but Tools
Come Up Short

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Youve waited for them. Theyre here.
The first 802.11ac Wave 2 access points
have hit the market, maxing out 11acs
potential with multi-gigabit speeds.

T H E S U B N ET

Getting Hands On
with VMware NSX

INFOGRAPHICS

N ET W O R K M A N A G E M E N T

Single Pane of Glass

or Single Glass of
Pain?

INFOGRAPHICS

Pulse Check

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EDITORS DESK | JESSICA SCARPATI

Networkings Latest Humblebrag: 802.11ac Wave 2

Whenever a new
standard bumps
up bandwidth, we
wonder how well
ever fill up that
pipeand its not
long before we
eat our words.
Here we go again.

Are you familiar with humblebrag?

Its a term that signifies false modestya
boast poorly masquerading as self-deprecationwhich enjoyed its moment in the sun
a few years ago when a TV writer coined
the term and later compiled Twitters best
humblebrags in a book. The act of humblebragging isnt a new social phenomenon,
but the level of obnoxiousness it evokes has
been amplified by social media.
Youve surely rolled your eyes at comments or tweets like these before: Im
always getting stopped for speeding just
because I drive an expensive sports car. So
unfair! Ugh, I didnt even brush my hair

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today and I still got hit on at the bus stop.

I can eat a whole pizza every day and not
gain any weight. How weird is that?!
But long before we were subjected to
Ashley Judd lamenting about how tortuous it is to be nominated for an Emmy, networking had its own humblebrag moment.
In fact, I would argue, networking has a
humblebrag moment every few years.
Stop me if youve heard this one before:
What would we even do with so much
bandwidth?!
Its a refrain we often hear right before a
new standard comes out that will double,
triple or otherwise multiply the capacity

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on wired or wireless networks. And like

clockwork, IT pros eat those words a few
years later when the latest killer app comes
along that consumes most of their available
bandwidth. Even the data center engineers
at Google underestimated how quickly
video traffic would saturate their network.
And here we are again as the first 802.11ac
Wave 2 access points hit the market. This
second and final phase of the latest Wi-Fi
standard claims it can hit a theoretical
maximum of nearly 7 Gbps. While its a
speed we can expect to see only in tightly
controlled lab environments, no doubt
Wave 2 will make multi-gigabit speeds a reality in enterprise wireless LANs.
Its an intriguing notion for most network
engineers, but without the benefit of hindsight, its difficult for them to imagine how
they could possibly take full advantage of

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such throughput.
For most enterprises, Wave 2 sounds like
overkill today. And for many that have already overhauled their networks to support
Wave 1, spending thousands more on Wave
2 is out of the question. But it wont be long
before the next big bandwidth-hogging application comes along, and it will catapult
the need for Wave 2s capacity gains to the
forefront.
As we explore in our cover story in this issue of Network Evolution (Making Waves:
Preparing for the Next Phase of 11ac), enterprises preparing to take the plunge will
need to think about how Wave 2 affects
their architecture beyond access points and
switches.
Also in this issue, we look at whether the
single pane of glass approach to network
management is still the preferred model

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with increasingly abstracted IT environments that use cloud and virtualization

technologies (Single Pane of Glass or Single Glass of Pain?). We also dive into how
the emerging world of Layer 4-7 orchestration aims to simplify and automate the lessthan-glamorous tasks of network service
provisioning and lifecycle management
(Need for Network Orchestration Builds,
But Tools Come Up Short).

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Finally, in this edition of The Subnet,

one network engineer in the middle
of testing VMwares NSX platform shares
his experiences with network virtualization (Getting Hands On with VMware
NSX). n
Jessica Scarpati
Networking Media Group
Features and E-zine Editor

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At long last, 802.11ac Wave 2

802.11ac

Making Waves:
Preparing for
the Next Phase
of 11ac
BY ANTONE GONSALVES

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access points are here,

ushering in the age of multigigabit Wi-Fi. What does it mean
for network architectures?
And will Wave 1 adopters be
left in the dust?
As an increasing number of enterprises
upgrade their overtaxed Wi-Fi networks
with 802.11ac technology, they are discovering wireless speeds that are capable of
meeting their demand for several years.
Its a welcome realization for many networking professionals who were unsure
whether to hold off on deploying the first
generation of 802.11ac, known as Wave 1, or

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wait for the widespread commercial release

of the second generation of 802.11ac products. Wave 2 access points, which have just
started to trickle into the market, will offer
up to five times more bandwidth than Wave
1 and be able to support up to four times as
many simultaneous connections on a given
access point (AP).
But with great bandwidth comes great
responsibility.
Nearly all 802.11ac implementations today are based on the Wave 1
specification, which doesnt
typically require widespread
network infrastructure
changes. However, the secof controller-based access
ond phase of the technology,
points shipped in Q4
called Wave 2, may require
2014 support 802.11ac.
Source: Worldwide Quarterly WLAN Tracker, IDC, March 2015
enterprises to rethink their
network architecture.

30%

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At the forefront will be the need for

greater capacity in the access layer to avoid
bottlenecks between an AP and the first
switch to which it connects. Its not just
about bigger pipes, however. Wave 2 will
make 802.11ac the first wireless standard to
use multi-user MIMO, which adds support
for more mobile devices on a wireless LAN
(WLAN), augmented by wider channels
and standardized beamforming techniques
to improve speed.
But introducing those features to a network may require IT pros to adjust their
network design. Additionally, many Wave
2-based networks will require a cabling upgrade and need to accommodate new power
over Ethernet requirements.
Fortunately for most enterprises, the
Gigabit Wi-Fi capability of Wave 1 will satisfy their needsand prevent any dramatic

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changes to their networksfor a few

years.
Were really not seeing anything approaching that gig bandwidth, even with
802.11ac access points, says Joseph Rogers, associate director of network engineering at the University of South Florida
(USF) in Tampa, which began deploying
Wave 1 APs last year.

802.11ac Takes the Lead

Upgrades from the previous 802.11n standard started earnestly last year after the
IEEE ratified the latest technology. The
biggest draw for enterprises has been faster
wireless speeds and the ability to support
eight spatial streams per AP, an important
feature as more laptop-toting users add
smartphones and tablets to the arsenal of

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devices they use on enterprise WLANs.

This year, the number of shipments of
802.11ac APs will surpass those of 802.11n,
according to market researcher IDC. Thats
a huge turnaround from 2014, when shipments of the older technology were more
than five times greater.
In 2015, we do believe that 11ac will
far out-ship 11n, says IDC analyst Rohit
Mehra. Thats the ramp-up that we are
seeing for 11ac.
Last month, Ruckus Wireless was the
first vendor to announce an AP that natively supports Wave 2, and more vendors
are expected to follow in the months ahead.
The second iteration of the standard has a
theoretical maximum throughput of almost
7 Gbps in the 160 MHz channel, up from a
theoretical maximum of 1.3 Gbps in the 80
MHz channel in Wave 1.

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While the promise of higher speeds and

support for more users is attractive, it will
come at a cost. Enterprises that adopt Wave
2 devices will need to consider the implications across the whole network. For example, Wave 2 access points will need 30 watts
of power over Ethernet versus the 15 watts
many enterprises currently have in their
access layer.
In addition, the Cat5e and Cat6 cabling
used in most enterprises today may have
to be upgraded to Cat6a to handle faster
speeds. Two vendor alliances and the IEEE,
however, are working on specifications
for supporting 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet
(GbE) over Cat5e and Cat6, which are currently certified to support 1 GbE for up to
100 meters. Cat6a, more commonly found
in data centers, is certified to support 10
GbE for up to 100 meters.

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But with many organizations having recently upgraded to 802.11ac Wave 1, its unlikely those that have made significant investments will jump into Wave 2 soon. IT pros
who have already adopted Wave 1 say that,
fortunately, they expect their current architectures to serve them well for quite a while.

Schools a Hotbed for 11ac

Among those knee deep in upgrading to
802.11ac Wave 1 are colleges and universitieswhere students are slow to praise, but
quick to gripe, when wireless connections
are too sluggish for streaming video, sharing photos on social networks and downloading coursework.
For us, [receiving] no complaints is
a good thing, says Trevor Beach, a network engineer at West Chester University

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(WCU) of Pennsylvania, which recently

rolled out 802.11ac.
Wave 1 of the latest Wi-Fi standard has
a theoretical maximum speed more than
double that of 802.11n. Actual speeds for
the technologies in the real world are considerably less, but the order of magnitude
of throughput between the new and the old
standard is about the same.
Last fall, the University of South Florida,
which serves 31,000 undergraduates, replaced 1,400 legacy access points in student
housing with 802.11ac models from Cisco.
The APs that were tossed were eight years
old.
It was way past due, says USFs Rogers
of the upgrade.
The new APs have a maximum uplink
speed of 1 Gbps, which is 10 times the 100
Mbps speed of the older devices. However,

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Rogers was surprised to discover that areas with the most traffic peaked at only 90
Mbps to 100 Mbps.
Traffic from all 1,400 access points averaged only 2.5 Gbps, which is far below the
capacity of the 10 GbE switches from Cisco
and Brocade that the university installed
along with the access points. He expects the
current technology to meet the universitys
needs for the next three to five years. Thats
because the majority of smartphones
and tablets in use today do not support
802.11ac. Only 15% of the devices online at
USF use the latest Wi-Fi standard.
Organizations using 802.11ac Wave 1 today say the most important advantage of
upgrading is the higher number of mobile
devices that can be handled by each AP. The
standard operates in the less-congested
5 GHz band and supports more 20 MHz

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channels for connecting a greater number

of devices to a network, but the actual volume of devices a given network can handle
depends on an individual design. Each
802.11ac Wave 1 access point at WCU can
handle roughly three times as many devices as 802.11n APs, estimates Beach.
Its definitely faster than the 802.11n access points, but in the end, the bigger benefit is in the ability to handle more clients,
Beach says. The older access points just
couldnt handle the client base that these
new ones can.
Wave 2 introduces multi-user MIMO
and more antennae, which allow an AP
to behave more like a switch by enabling
it to communicate with several radios at
once. The catch, however, is that client devices must also support multi-user MIMO
to take full advantage of it. The previous

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generation of Wi-Fi, 802.11n, introduced

single-user MIMO, in which an AP behaves
more like a hub that can only talk to one
client at a time.

The Cost of Upgrading to 11ac

More than half of networking professionals
say mobile devices have an extremely or
very high impact on network capacity and
performance, according to a May 2014 survey by 451 Research.
Organizations like research labs that
need to send hundreds of megabits per second of data from a single device have the
option of doing that by taking advantage
of 802.11acs ability to use 80 MHz or 160
MHz channels. Such high frequencies support fewer devices, so they are seldom used
in organizations looking to get as many

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Cloud-based WLANs let IT focus on bigger picture

As wireless networks grow more sophisticated, some IT pros find a cloudmanaged model improves their operational efficiency.
Albany State University in Georgia uses 430 of Ciscos cloud-managed Meraki APs; about a quarter support 802.11ac. The controller is in Ciscos cloud.
Pricing for on-premises and cloud-based controllers is similar, says
Noore Ghunaym, infrastructure services manager at Albany State. The
cloud-based one is easier to use, he says, enabling Albany State to cut the
equivalent of a part-time position for WLAN management and maintenance.
Two-thirds of the APs at the Pulaski County Special School District in Arkansas use 802.11ac. But that figure is rising to support an initiative to issue
every student an iPad.
The deployment with Aerohive Networks will cost $6 million to $8 million, which includes the price of 10 GbE switches and cabling, says Will Reid,
Pulaskis chief technology officer.
Reid wanted to avoid needing a management appliance at each
schoolsaving $12,000 to $15,000 apieceand to remove the burden of
maintaining them.
When you work for a school district, youre always being asked to do
more with less, he says. n

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people online as possible.

The Kelsey-Seybold Clinic has 20 facilities in the Houston metropolitan area. It
rolled out about a hundred 802.11ac APs
in clinical areas that never had a wireless
network, says Martin Littmann, the clinics
CTO and CISO. The deployment made it
possible for doctors to more easily upload
medical images to patients electronic records and to use computers on carts during
patient visits or outpatient procedures.
The clinic started to roll out new access points after upgrading its two Aruba
wireless controllers in mid-2014. Such an
upgrade can cost between $30,000 and
$50,000, Littmann says.
The doctor-run healthcare provider
has more than 300 older access points in its
waiting rooms. Because each new AP would
cost about $600, the clinic is unlikely to do

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another upgrade for three or four years.

One of the principles of a physician-owned
business is to use a piece of equipment until
its dead and then make sure its dead before
you throw it away, Littmann says.
On an average day, 20%
of the WLANs bandwidth
is used for clinical purWhats in your WLAN?
poses while the remainder
Which wireless standards have
is split between personal
you deployed?
Respondents could select multiple answers.
devices used by employees
and patients.
802.11a
27
In a lot of wireless en802.11b
27
vironments, you find a
802.11g
whole lot of bandwidth
45
being given out for free
802.11n
57
and a much smaller
802.11ac
26
amount actually being
consumed by the enSource: Wireless LAN buyers survey, TechTarget, March 2015, N=176
terprise for production
%

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work, Littmann says.

In the summer of 2014, Aruba customer
WCU installed a thousand 802.11ac APs,
roughly doubling the number on campus.
The majority was installed in student housing that never had Wi-Fi.
The cost of the 802.11ac implementation,
including routers, switches and cabling,
topped $1 million, says Joseph Sincavage,
WCUs director of networking and telecommunications. About a year before, the
university of almost 14,000 undergraduate
students had upgraded its LAN from 100
Mbps to 10 Gbps.
The school has a 3 gigabit link to the public Internet and is planning to upgrade it
soon to 10 gigabits.
Were almost filling that pipe, Beach
says of the current connection. Were
getting close. n

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Data Mine
k What do you look for in campus LAN switches?
Respondents could select more than one answer.

Application and traffic awareness

51%

Ability to function in a distributed core

48%

Ability to function in a fabric or virtual chassis

36%

IPv6 support

33%

Support for shortest-path routing

23%

SDN support

23%

42

percent
PM

Source: Network infrastructure buyers survey, TechTarget, March 2015, N=128

of enterprise IT pros
expect to see
wearable devices,
such as smart
watches or fitness
trackers, connecting
to their wireless
LANs by 2016.

k Open networking efforts begin to bare fruit

Bare-metal switches are expected to account for 26% of port shipments
by 2019, up from 11% in 2014.

11%

2014

26%

Source: Network infrastructure buyers survey, TechTarget, March 2015, N=128

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2019

Source: 2015 Mobile and IoT

Security Strategies and Vendor
Leadership: North American
Enterprise Survey, Infonetics
Research, March 2015, N=187

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Software-defined data

Layer 4-7

centers and cloud computing

Need for Network

Orchestration
Builds, but Tools
Come Up Short
BY JESSICA SCARPATI

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are driving a need for tools

that can automate provisioning
and lifecycle management for
Layer 4-7 network services.

Networks have developed a middlechild syndrome over the years.

Ever since the first server virtualization
platforms allowed systems administrators
to easily spin up or decommission virtual
machines (VMs) within minutes, the data
center solidified its place as the golden
child, representing agility and efficiency in
infrastructure. It paved the way for cloud
computing, putting more pressure on IT to

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be responsive to dynamic environments.

While virtualization soon seeped into
other parts of IT like storage and desktops,
the network was largely ignored. Although
Layer 4-7 appliance vendors released virtualized versions of their productsvirtual
firewalls, virtual load balancers, virtual
WAN optimization controllers and so
forththeir primary focus was on reducing
expenses, not improving agility. Networking as a whole remained frozen in hardware
governed by static architectures, and most
attempts to innovate focused on moving
bits faster.
Software-defined networking (SDN)
and network virtualization finally caught
up, however, adding more flexibility and
programmability to switching and routing. Now enterprises and service providers steeped in cloud and software-defined

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data centers are eager to see these platforms climb up the stack to tie in Layer 4-7.
Theyre hungry for orchestration tools that
can automate the deployment and management of those services with minimal human intervention.
Its becoming close to table stakes, says
Rick Drescher, managing director of technical services at Savills Studley, a commercial real estate advisory firm in New York
that helps businesses lease data center
space. For companies that are really leveraging a software-defined data center, that
level of orchestration on firewalls, virtual
switches, virtual routers and virtual load
balancers is becoming something that they
absolutely have to have.
Theres just one problem: The commercial products and open-source alternatives
available today just scratch the surface in

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terms of bringing these capabilities to life.

These cloud orchestration platforms
are really good at taking Layer 4-7 services templates and applying them to virtual appliances to spin things up quickly,
says Shamus McGillicuddy, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates
(EMA). But theyre not necessarily doing
everything else you need to do in order to
manage them, troubleshoot them, monitor
them, make sure that each instance of your
Layer 4-7 service is configured properly
and so on.
A recent EMA survey asking IT pros
about their greatest barriers to softwaredefined data centers found that troubleshooting and monitoring across physical
and virtual networking was the third-biggest perceived challenge, while integrating provisioning across physical and virtual

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networking ranked fourth. Those are two

areas where sophisticated orchestration
tools can help out, McGillicuddy says.
Meanwhile, Ciscos recent acquisition of
Embrane, which had been the most visible
independent vendor in this space, signals
that incumbent vendors are recognizing
the importance of these capabilities.
People arent even necessarily aware of
whether or not they need this. Theyre going to need it, but they dont know that yet,
McGillicuddy says.

What Does Layer 4-7

Orchestration Entail?
Like a conductor cueing the violins to come
in a few beats after the trumpets, orchestration platforms automate and coordinate
the steps necessary to provision, configure

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and manage IT services.

Orchestration has traditionally been
associated with cloud servers. But in the
world of Layer 4-7 services, the idea is that
anytime a server admin does anything to
an applicationlaunches it on a new VM,
decommissions that VM, or moves the VM
to a different server rack or another data
center entirelyan orchestration platform would dutifully follow up with all the
necessary configuration changes in virtual
appliances associated with it. Ideally, it
would also integrate all of those appliances
management platforms to perform other
housekeeping tasks like tracking licenses,
monitoring availability and initiating
troubleshooting.
Automated provisioning and lifecycle
management may not sound especially
revolutionaryuntil you consider just how

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dynamic the modern data center is.

In the world of private cloud, where everything is theoretically and serially moving around, you dont have these 4-to-7
appliances sitting in one spot anymore,
says Andre Kindness, a principal analyst at
Forrester Research.
Enterprise environments are getting
more complex as they either become unwieldy or because a company is growing
like crazy with acquisitions, says Savills
Studleys Drescher. He recently worked
with a client that makes one acquisition
per quarter, on average; almost 30% of its
change-control processes are a direct result of those acquisitions. Orchestration
tools would minimize some of the burden
and risks that accompany these otherwise
manual processes in highly virtualized
environments.

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The amount of human error thats going to be introduced into a system like
this continues to grow as the system gets
more complicated, Drescher says. So the more
you can automate things
Top five network
like switching VLANs
virtualization uses
around or updating fireWhich network virtualization capabiliwall changes dynamically,
ties are most important to you?
Respondents could select multiple answers.
the more youre going to
get out of your IT infraMonitoring a virtual environment
55
structure and the less
Layer 2-3 network virtualization
50
prone youre going to be to
Switching within the virtual stack
downtime.
48
And while much of the
Application awareness
in virtual networks
focus on Layer 4-7 orches38
Virtualized Layer 4-7
tration has been around
network services
26
data centers, Kindness
Source: Network infrastructure buyers survey, TechTarget,
says, the wide area netMarch 2015, N=126
work (WAN) may stand
%

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to benefit the most. The move away from

hub-and-spoke designswith fewer branch
offices now reaching out to the data center
for all network serviceshas created a need
for distributed enterprises to simplify the
way Layer 4-7 services are now deployed.
Instead of doing something like you see
with airlineswhere you fly from one city
to a hub and then youre forced to get on
another flightwhat were moving to [on
the WAN] is much more like a freeway system where you get to choose from multiple
paths, Kindness says. But since you dont
have one spot [acting as] your control center, your Layer 4 to Layer 7 services that
were typically in the data center need to be
dispersed everywhere.
Its an exciting prospect for Markus
Voegele, a senior system and design engineer at Lufthansa Systems, a managed

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service provider and wholly owned subsidiary within Lufthansa Group that serves
the German companys flagship airline
along with more than 300 other airline
customers.
Employees at one of Lufthansas larger
offices on Long Island, N.Y., have a video
conference twice a month with their colleagues in Frankfurt. In a traditional
network architecture, any policies and appliances used to optimize that traffic would
have to be staticmeaning,
once a policy is set, its always onor would have to
be manually reconfigured
I do not often say the word
awesome, but if this turns
by Voegele and his team in
out to work as designed by
Kelsterbach, Germany.
Cisco, this will be awesome.
Hoping for a more effiMarkus Voegele, Lufthansa Systems
cient approach, Voegele is
testing Ciscos Application

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Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module (APIC EM), which functions

as a centralized controller for provisioning, configuring, monitoring and managing application-level network policies in
Ciscos Application Centric Infrastructure
(ACI) fabric. In addition to supporting Ciscos built-in Intelligent WAN and network
monitoring applications, the controller
also integrates with Citrixs NetScaler load
balancer.
Voegele would like to use APIC to provide the local IT administrator in the Long
Island office with on-demand, but limited,
control over the network connection during video conferencing sessions to optimize
traffic.
I do not often say the word awesome,
but if this turns out to work as designed by
Cisco, this will be awesome, he says.

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Other Drivers: Clouds and Consumers

The need to orchestrate Layer 4-7 services
is becoming increasingly vital for enterprises that rely heavily on the cloud. Thats
because many are eager to take advantage
of the ongoing price wars among cloud providers and migrate their workloads to the
lowest bidder, Drescher says.
Additionally, factors like the cost of electricity can drive a private cloud migration.
The Pacific Northwest is home to a lot of renewable energy, with rates as low as 3 cents
per kilowatt-hour, Drescher explains. Compare that to New York City, where 17 cents
per kilowatt-hour is considered a good deal,
he says.
If you only need your data center to be
near your users [in New York] during the
peak of the daybecause thats when latency mattersand if you can shift it over

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to someplace cheaper at night, that could

save a customer a few hundred thousand
dollars on electricity bills over the course of
the year, Drescher says. Orchestration is
super important to make sure that works
[because] the complexity of doing it manually is not something that many places have
the appetite for.
The push for more dynamic, automated
networks is also driven by the consumer
market as companies try to react to customer demands in real time, Kindness says.
Global supermarket chain Tesco has hyper-personalized the experience at some
gas stations the company operates. While
customers fill their tanks, a small device
uses facial recognition software to deduce
their age and gender; a nearby monitor
then plays specific advertisements for that
demographic, Kindness says.

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Similarly, a retailer in Asia uses sensors

to identify clothing items customers bring
into a dressing room and then adjusts the
music played while they try on the clothes,
he says. Preppy clothes, for example, may
trigger pop music while hip-hop fashion
may initiate rap music.
These specific companies arent using
SDN or network virtualization, but theyre
looking to do something because the current resources are strapped, Kindness
says.
Businesses are pushing services and
responsibilities closer to the customer.
As such, networkings Layer 4 through 7
services are getting dispersed in either an
appliance, software or service form at the
remote location, he adds. Everything
isnt being done at the same time, so the
business needs SDN to spin up and down

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services and find the best resources based

on whats occurring at the remote site.

Figuring Out the Best Approach

Like much of SDN and network virtualization, vendors approaches to Layer 4-7 orchestration are splintered.
At this point, the predominant model
revolves around Cisco and VMwarewith
their ACI and NSX architectures, respectivelyand the ecosystems they have built
up with various Layer 4-7 vendors.
Last August, VMware announced a partnership with F5 that provides integration
between NSX and F5s BIG-IQ orchestration platform. This followed a partnership
VMware had struck with Palo Alto Networks in late 2013 that enabled NSX users to automatically provision Palo Altos

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virtual firewalls in overlay networks.

Because services are mapped to a VM
an identityand not to a physical location
like an IP address, NSX can be configured
to ensure any VMware-based or supported
third-party services automatically queue

Networking plays biggest role in SDN investments

Which teams in your IT department influence SDN purchasing decisions?
Respondents could select multiple answers.

81%
80

43%

60

40%

40

23%

20

%0

Network
operations

Server
operations

Virtualization
managers

Source: Software-defined networking buyers survey, TechTarget, March 2015, N=371

2 2 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A Y 2 0 1 5

Application
developers

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up, turn off or move around according to

real-time network conditions, says Chris
King, vice president of product marketing
at VMware.
Wherever the infrastructure decides to
put my workload, all the correct Layer 4-7
services follow it, King says.
Prior to Ciscos recent acquisition of Embrane, the two vendors entered a partnership in 2014 when Cisco added Embrane to
its ACI ecosystem. It was a turning point
for Embrane, which pivoted its strategy
from providing a platform that orchestrated its own brand of Layer 4-7 services
to facilitating Layer 4-7 orchestration and
lifecycle management for third-party services like Citrixs NetScaler.
Some Layer 4-7 appliance vendors have
tried to stake their own claim in this market. Last May, load-balancing vendor Kemp

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Technologies enabled administrators to

insert Layer 4-7 services from any vendor
through a single platform on a bare-metal
server. Meanwhile, startups like Avi Networks, which came out of stealth mode
last December, announced a controller
that provisions, orchestrates and manages
Layer 4-7 services.
In the world of open source, OpenStacks networking project Neutron has
been working on APIs for load-balancing-as-a-service and firewall-as-a-service
extensions.
Experts say enterprises will most likely
align their orchestration plans with their
main network virtualization vendor and
their affiliated ecosystems, making it a
Cisco-versus-VMware game. But industry

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watchers are skeptical of how successful

the partnership model will be.
Thats a lot of wrangling that needs to go
on thereits politics and money, Kindness says. Im not a big fan of partnerships
because what happens after a while is that
everybody tries to cater to everybody. It becomes a very complex, one-inch deep and
mile-wide solution that doesnt work very
well.
EMAs McGillicuddy also sees room for
improvement. The current integrations
focus on turning Layer 4-7 services on and
off, but they glaze over everything in between, he says.
That is just a service insertion point
that is not a lifecycle management solution, McGillicuddy says. n

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Pulse Check
k Out with the old, in with the cloud

k Whats driving your VoIP investment?

We asked IT pros purchasing voice over IP infrastructure to weigh in.
Respondents could select multiple answers.

By the end of 2018, more than

40%

of Cisco CCIE data center

network certifications issued in
2014 will be replaced by cloud
infrastructure architect
certifications.

Reduce telecom expenses

67%

Improve operational efficiency

47%

Part of SIP trunking project

40%

Development of IP-phone-based applications

32%

Call center improvements

28%

Click-to-call applications

20%

Source: Unified communications and collaboration buyers survey, TechTarget, March 2015, N=182

k IT infrastructure downtime, by the numbers

Source: Predicts 2015: Enterprise Networking and Network Services,

Gartner, December 2014

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Average number of
outages suffered
a month

Average number of
degradations suffered
a month

Average number of
hours an outage or
degradation lasts

Source: The Cost of Server, Application, and Network Downtime, Infonetics Research, January 2015, N=205

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Vendors claim that their

Network Management

Single Pane of
Glass or Single
Glass of Pain?

BY SEAN M. KERNER

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network management and

monitoring tools can do it all,
but with virtualization and
clouds obscuring visibility,
is that still true?

The modern network has become the

backbone for all IT infrastructure. Along
the way, it evolved into a multi-headed
beastone that must be tamed to ensure
the network is capable of supporting nearly
any form of data, including application,
cloud, compute, storage, video and voice
traffic.
But some networking professionals say
the fabled weapon of choiceone network

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management tool to rule them allis still

more myth than reality. And in some sense,
thats OK.
Thats because the need to understand
multiple realms of technology means that
the idea of a single tool for all network
management functions is not something
that entirely works for many organizations.
Some vendors talk about the holy grail of
network management being a single pane
of glass for visibility and control, but its
not an idea that IT pros like Ant Lefebvre
buy into.
Every tool has its purpose, but no tool
can do everything, says Lefebvre, senior
systems engineer at Middlesex Hospital
in Middletown, Conn. The single pane of
glass is really a single glass of pain.
Christian Renaud, a senior analyst at
the 451 Group, agrees with the notion that

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there is no single tool that fits all needs

for network management, and enterprises continue to grapple with the consequences of that. Networking professionals
rated network visibility as their number
one problem and the top issue that keeps
them awake at night in a recent 451 Group
survey.
Networks are considered a missioncritical resource in nearly every industry. In the case of Middlesex Hospital, the
network is truly vital and plays a key role
in how physicians and medical practitioners save lives. Having sufficient visibility
and control over all the moving parts is
essential.
Middlesexs facilities include one major
hospital, two emergency departments and
approximately 30 off-site locations. There
is a data center in the hospital, and there is

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also an off-site facility for disaster recovery

purposes where some applications are also
hosted. Overall, Lefebvre estimates that
he must manage 500 networking devices,
which encompass switches, routers and
other network infrastructure.
Middlesex Hospital also has deployed
Wi-Fi extensively to enable voice over
WLAN (VoWLAN), which doctors and
nurses use to communicate. All told, Lefebvre has approximately 3,000 users that
he has to keep happy.
The thing that makes it tricky is the
amount of downtime were allowed to
have in a hospital environmentwhich is
none, Lefebvre says. In a hospital environment, there is critical stuff that is on
the network [and] that is relying on the
network, and any downtime is perceived
as terrible.

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New Challenges
in Network Management
Some vendor sales representatives might
pitch the idea that there is, in fact, one network management tool to solve all challenges. But thats not quite how network
management works in the real world.
Rick Drescher is often asked about what
tool should be used to manage the network.
In his role as managing director of the critical facilities group at Savills Studley, a commercial real estate advisory firm in New
York City, he helps many enterprises figure out their data center needs. Network
management is a concern for many clients,
and the biggest challenge is that the network isnt a single entity anymore in an IT
environment.
A lot of people use the term network
management software as the umbrella for

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Management intelligence:
Finding order in chaos
What are your top challenges when
using network log data as a source
of management intelligence?
Respondents could select multiple answers.

Knowing what to look for

Cost of tools

51%
38%
37%

Correlating log data to performance metrics

36%

Writing new filters to find what is important

Keeping up with storage needs

36%

Source: Log Analytics for Network Operations Management,

Enterprise Management Associates, December 2014, N=192

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seeing and viewing everything in an organizations

IT deployment, Drescher
explains. The traditional
network management platform is not going to give you
that visibility.
A number of trendsincluding virtualization and
the convergence of storage,
networking and compute
has shifted enterprises
network management requirements. But while most
network managers have a
good handle on the basics
like Ciscos NetFlow protocol, Drescher notes, they
often struggle to fully understand how other factors

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like virtual machines and storage volume

will affect network management.
With the added complexity of softwaredefined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, the challenge of network visibility
is further compounded. Simply having visibility into routers and switches doesnt
provide a full picture of what is going on in
a network.
There is no vendor that can say that
they support every single virtualization
startup or SDN overlay vendor and can see
into all those pieces, says 451 Groups
Renaud. Network performance is the
aggregate of many pieces and not just any
one subset.
Software alone isnt enough to manage
a network faced with these demands, Drescher says. Outsourcing network monitoring to a cloud provider works best for

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businesses with smaller networks that

dont have much data to export, he says.
Enterprises with a large number of ports
and devices need to have a device physically
attached to the network to be able to grab
all of the data.
It was a lesson Drescher learned after
a project intended to outsource network
monitoring to the cloud failed because
he didnt have full visibility into the environment. There were recurring, giant
greyed-out areas in the bandwidth reports,
indicating data from the
network wasnt making it
to the data collector at the
We have a menagerie of
cloud providers location.
tools. Some of them we spin
We did not have an onup and leave alone, then
premises piece of hardothers we actively manage.
ware on site to collect the
Ant Lefebvre, Middlesex Hospital
data, Drescher says.

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Choosing the Right Set of Tools

If there isnt a single platform, then what
tools are in play for this era of network
management? The quick answer: There is
no shortage of options.At Middlesex Hospital, Lefebvre uses a lot of different monitoring tools that trigger alerts if a service is
interrupted and theres an issue that needs
to be addressed.
We have a menagerie of tools. Some of
them we spin up and leave alone, then others we actively manage, he says.
Although Lefebvre doesnt have one centralized dashboard for all of his network
management tasks, he does use Splunk
to provide a centralized view for troubleshooting network management issues.
Splunk functions as a central correlation
engine for his log data, which can then be
searched.

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So if something happens that isnt part

of normal day-to-day operations, we can
search in Splunk to see where the issue is,
Lefebvre says. Its a Swiss Army knife tool
for me to [use to] investigate when someone says, Hey, go look at this.

THE SUBNET

Lefebvre also uses ExtraHops wire-data

analytics hardware for getting the necessary information from the network. It
comes in handy, he says, because when IT
disruptions or outages pop up, the first
thing application vendors do during the

Whats inside your tool box?

How many tools do you use for network monitoring and troubleshooting?
40

n Small businesses (250-999 employees)

34%
30%

n Medium-sized businesses (1,000-4,999 employees)

30%

28%

30

20

18%

28%

n Large enterprises (5,000+)

21%
16%

16%

14%
10%

10

9%

8%

15%

11%
4%

2%

6%

%0

1 to 3 tools

4 to 5 tools

6 to 10 tools

11 to 15 tools

Source: Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends 2014, Enterprise Management Associates, April 2014, N=246

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16 to 20 tools

more than 20 tools

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troubleshooting process is point a finger at

the network. With the ExtraHop tool, Lefebvre says he is able to obtain visibility into
the network to understand the issue, refute
those vendors and help keep the network
running smoothly.
Additionally, he uses WhatsUp Gold as
a ping monitoring tool that lets Middlesex Hospital know when devices go down,
along with a platform from PathSolutions
to monitor bandwidth use.
And despite so many new challenges in
network management, some old-school
methods are still best. The most fundamental part of network management has always
been knowing exactly what networking
equipment is in place. And for as long as
there have been networks, one of the most
common ways to track network devices has
been the use of a spreadsheet. Thats still

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true today.
In his work with enterprises, Drescher
says he still sees many hands-on networking professionals track network assets in a
spreadsheet.
Lefebvre acknowledges that even amid
all his collection of specialized network
management tools, he too uses a spreadsheetin his case, Google Docs in the
cloudbut he also has a few other tools
to help keep track of the locations of his
physical networking gear. He has all of
his switches listed in SecureCRT, an SSH
client.

At the Core: Solving Business Problems

Given that the single-pane-of-glass tool approach isnt likely the best approach, what
should network managers actually do?

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Drescher suggests that networking professionals first need to take a step back to understand what it is they are actually trying
to manage.
The reason why network management
fails is that people dont have a good grasp
of their entire environment before they go
out to deploy, he says.
According to 451 Groups Renaud, it is
important that both enterprises and the
vendors that support them understand that
modern network management is about
more than just protocols, speeds and feeds.
Rather, it needs to be treated for what it
isa discipline built on solving business
problems.
From a features perspective, Renaud emphasizes that network management tools
must have visibility into virtualized environments and the cloud.

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If the network operations person is

measured by network uptime, its critical to
make sure the visibility and management
tools can see the virtualized and cloud trafficor else youre being given all the responsibility and none of the authority,
Renaud says.
For Lefebvre at Middlesex Hospital,
keeping the network always up is about using whatever tools make sense for the specific problem hes trying to solve.
Even more important, the network is
designed in such a way that even without
a single pane of glass for network management, service disruptions are minimized
when there is a problem.
We have tried to develop a redundant
network, Lefebvre says, so if there is a
failure, something else picks it up and the
network doesnt go down. n

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THE SUBNET | Q&A | JESSICA SCARPATI

Getting Hands On with VMware NSX

n
n

Jason Rieger
P
 rincipal Network
and Security
Architect

F
 ireHost Inc.

Richardson, Texas

Eager to build networks that were

more agile and programmable, cloud
providers were among the first to adopt
software-defined networking (SDN) and
network virtualization. In this edition of
The Subnet, we dive into the experiences
of one of them. Jason Rieger, principal network and security architect at Texas-based
cloud provider FireHost Inc., has been testing VMwares NSX platform with the hope
of putting it into production environments
later this year.

What are you working on lately?

Whats been on my plate for upwards of the

3 3 N E T W O R K E V O L U T I O N, M A Y 2 0 1 5

past year or so pretty hardcore has been

software-defined networking and network
virtualization. I spent the greater part of
the last two years researching every vendor
under the sun. Theyre a new take on an old
paradigm. They offer a lot of the benefits
that networking professionals have, for
many years, been asking for. And, hey, now
is the time.
Specifically, in regards to network virtualization, it is a re-architecture of our
secure cloud hosting environment. FireHost is a secure cloud hosting provider, so
we offer a purpose-built and highly secure
infrastructure as a service offering to our

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customers, and that requires a very scalable, secure and high-performing environment for those tenant workloads to run on.
Ive been working over the past year with
another of our architectsfrom the compute and storage side, and me from the networking and security sideand weve been
engineering and developing this new generation for cloud architecture where network virtualization is a key player.
Why did you go with NSX? VMwares
heritage is not networking, so what made
you confident it was the right fit?
I get asked that all the time: Why NSX
over ACI? Why over Nuage Networks or
Junipers Contrail acquisition? Well, [the
vetting process] was difficult. It was farreaching. It required a lot of due diligence
and getting to know the producttrials,

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tribulations and what have you. So it required a lot of research with the vendor
itself, getting to [talk to people at] product
manager levels and having a clear understanding of where their short-term roadmap as well as their long-term roadmap
was concerned.
We chose NSX for a few major reasons.
We are a VMware vSphere hypervisor shop.
We are not a multi-hypervisor shop currently. Whether thatll change in the future,
whos to say? But we are a vSphere environment today, so we knew that we would
get a lot of economies of scale, as well as
better integration because we use their hypervisor. Thats not to say other vendors
dont support VMware vSphere; they do.
But what we [liked about VMware] was the
concept of in-kernel firewalling and security services. And thats one of the things,

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since were in that business, that attracted

usme in particularto the VMware NSX
platform.
It is a network security platform on
which we can build and where third parties
can write code and interact with the APIs
that VMware provides on that platform to
enhance [its] security servicesand thats
what were looking to do. We provide a very
highly secure cloud environment today, but
this will allow us to enhance those security
offerings even further, as well as deliver
them more quickly than ever.
The last thing I would cite as a reason
for committing to NSX over some other
technologies is that its the most robust
solution available today. A lot of the other
vendors are just starting or are certainly
behind in the game, and were ready to
go now.

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What can you achieve with network

virtualization that you cant with
legacy network architectures?
There are several pain points associated
with our existing architecture when it
comes to the networking side of things,
such as the way we configure tenant isolation. Network virtualization will allow us to
do that in a different way that is more scalable as the company grows.
It will use the current capabilities of the
underlying physical network hardware
coupled with capabilities that are available
in software from a firewalling standpoint.
Its a hybrid approach, utilizing VLANs that
are configured in the underlying physical
network. In conjunction with that, we leverage software-based firewalling in the hypervisor to achieve isolation at a software
level, so we have you covered both ways. If

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theres a failure in the software, youve got

the underlying VLAN configuration in the
hardware delivering the isolation.
Operationally speaking, its also easier
to manage when its all in software, hence
this attraction to software-defined networking and network virtualization. Thats
because one of the key things SDN does is
decouple the hardware from software and
takes things like firewall policies out from
your underlying routers
and switches. It puts that
into software applications
One of the key things SDN
and usually a centraldoes is decouple the hardized controller to deliver
ware from software and
those policies to the places
takes things like firewall
where the customers data
policies out from your underlying routers and switches.
actually travels. Youre
Jason Rieger, FireHost Inc.
running a network environment thats built and

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operated and exists inside of software, and

the underlying hardware environment
the routers and switchesthey dont really
know whats going on in the software environment. Theyre just there to forward
packets. So it creates a very, very good separation of church and state, and it allows for
faster development cycles.
How did you develop the job skills
needed to implement this?
My first exposure to virtualizationand it
was server virtualization, obviouslywas
back in the early 2000s, around 2001 or
2002. VMware wasnt a big name back
then, and they had among the first hypervisors out there. It was VMware ESX and
GSX back then, and then there was Citrixs
XenServer. I started to dabble in server
consolidation, which was a big thing in that

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timeframe, in which enterprises were looking to get more out of less hardware. They
were consolidating physical hardware systems, doing physical to virtual migrations.
They were taking, say, 10 physical servers
and turning them into 10 VMs on one physical server. So server consolidation was a
big part of what brought me into server virtualization back then.
Then after server virtualization came
the foundation of what would eventually
become network functions virtualization
on the timeline. It comes before network
virtualization, which is where we are now.
In the mid-2000s, you started to see more
virtual network appliances and functions.
All this means is you take a physical switch
or a physical router, and you port the code
into a virtual machine so that its no longer
a physical device; its a virtual appliance

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that does the same thing it was doing when

it was a piece of hardwarethings like routers, switches and firewalls. So I started doing that and I said, Hey, I dont need all
these physical switches or, This router
here is a good candidate for virtualization,
so I converted it into a virtualized router.
How did you get into IT and,
specifically, networking?
I didnt study anything technology based in
college. I actually have a bachelors degree
in marketing. I went to work for a mortgage
servicing firm, but I didnt last there very
long at all.
A buddy of mine worked for Perot Systems and said, Hey, come on board, so I
did. And I did the lowliest of the low when
anybody enters the technology realm for
the first time: I loaded backup tapes on a

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graveyard shift. That didnt last too longI

could only physically do that for about six
months. So then I moved into a helpdesk
role for the National Car Rental and Alamo
Car Rental contracts for Perot Systems.
From there, I increased my skill set in everythingin Microsoft and Cisco technologiesbut still didnt know where I wanted
to be. Thats when I first entered the employee development program at Perot Systems, and thats where I got introduced to
networking.
I just found it fascinatinghow these
electrical signals get from PC to PC, how
it actually makes sense after its sent, and
how something could interpret an electrical signal on a piece of copper after it
arrives.

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One more before we finish: If you

lived in the Game of Thrones universe,
which family would you belong to?
You know, my wife watches this intently
and I do catch it, so I know the families. I
think it would be the Lannisters.
Thats a bold choice. Care to explain?
Correct me if I am wrong in my interpretation of this family: ruthless?
Well, yes
Im ruthless in my passion for what I do.
Nobody really gets in my way when I want
to either learn something or if I believe
something should be implemented, deployed or you name it, so Im a Lannister in
that sense of the word. n

CONTRIBUTORS

ANTONE GONSALVES is news director for TechTargets

Networking Media Group. He has deep and wide experience in tech journalism. Since the mid-1990s, he has
worked for UBMs InformationWeek, TechWeb and
Computer Reseller News. He has also written for PC Week,
CSO.com and CruxialCIO, in addition to covering startups for Bloomberg News. He started his journalism career
at United Press International, working as a reporter and
editor in California, Florida, Kansas and Texas.

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director
Jessica Scarpati, Features and E-zine Editor
Kara Gattine, Executive Managing Editor
Chuck Moozakis, Executive Editor
Antone Gonsalves, News Director

SEAN M. KERNER is an IT consultant, technology enthu-

siast and tinkerer, and has been known to spend his

spare time immersed in the study of the Klingon language and satellite pictures of Area 51. He has pulled
Token Ring, configured NetWare and has compiled his
own Linux kernel. He consults to industry and media
organizations on technology issues.
JESSICA SCARPATI is features and e-zine editor of

STAY CONNECTED
Follow
@NetworkingTT today.

Network Evolution in TechTargets Networking Media

Group. Scarpati was previously the site editor for
SearchCloudProvider and the senior news writer for the
Networking Media Group. Prior to joining TechTarget,
she worked as a reporter for several newspapers in the
Boston Metro area.

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