an xchange eBook
Sponsored By
Sponsored By presents
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
Forecasting Demand Driving Adoption With SLAs Targeting SMBs Giving Customers More Control Finding New Frontiers for Ethernet
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
an xchange eBook group publisher Mike Saxby
[email protected], Ext.1666 associate publisher Betsy Chandler, Ext. 1055
[email protected] account executives Tammy Fellows
[email protected], Ext.1243 Suzy Kelley
[email protected], Ext.1185 marketing and communications manager Kyle Blair
[email protected], Ext. 1066
6
Taking Care of Business Carrier Ethernet has been gathering steam over the past few years, but it now is reaching a critical point where it is becoming many carriers’ fastest-growing enterprise offer. With many advances in its corner, Ethernet finally may have the advantage over traditional technologies like ATM and frame relay in meeting enterprises’ ever-growing demands for bandwidth and support for converged services.
8
Special Delivery In communications networks, customers want guarantees, and being able to satisfy that desire is what’s ultimately going to drive carrier Ethernet services demand. A new MEF certification will help providers prove service quality.
11 Targeting the SMB Set Service providers targeting the SMB market now have an important new tool at their disposal in the form of carrier Ethernet. In addition to being based on Ethernet, carrier Ethernet is ideal for the SMB space because it allows customers to up their bandwidth quickly and incrementally as they require.
12 Customer Network Management Builds Satisfaction, Loyalty Rather than keeping business customers in hands-off mode waiting for their services, imagine if you could outfit them with the tools to order, and receive, services as they need them? That’s just beginning to happen with customer network management tools related to carrier Ethernet services.
14 New Frontiers for Ethernet Competitive carriers in the Wild West of enterprise services are finding that subscribers are continuing to seek higher-speed, IP-based applications. For providers wanting to meet this growing enterprise need, Ethernet represents something of an open range for those that can take advantage of it.
16 Five Questions With Atrica’s Umesh Kukreja Atrica Inc. is a pioneer in the area of carrier Ethernet. The company prides itself on the flexibility and simplicity of its end-to-end carrier Ethernet solution. Umesh Kukreja, director of marketing at Atrica, recently spoke with xchange about trends in carrier Ethernet and what Atrica is doing to help service providers and their customers leverage its benefits.
presents
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business Sponsored By
2
|
November 2006
group editor Khali Henderson
[email protected], Ext.1678 editor in chief Paula Bernier
[email protected], Ext.1669 executive editor Bob Wallace
[email protected], Ext.2006 managing editor Megan McCoy
[email protected], Ext.1044 assistant managing editors Cara Sievers
[email protected], Ext.1609 David Worford
[email protected], Ext.1087 associate editor Tara Seals
[email protected] business and Kelly M. Teal regulatory editor
[email protected], Ext.1020 production director director of art group traffic manager traffic coordinator editorial artist advertising art directors
Chris Vernam Dolly Ahles Danielle Dunlap Mike Palmer Megan McCoy Tamara Elliott Israel Laveaga Karen Williams Angela Wright classified art director Bruce Beck classified traffic coordinator Makeasa Rosemond color technician Bruce Beck reprints manager Jennifer Thompson web designer Eric Sedlmayer web ad coordinator Rob Jackson circulation director Simone Kjolsrud
[email protected] circulation manager Marly White circulation sales Ext. 1285 circulation list rental Ext. 2081
trade show director trade show manager trade show coordinator exhibit sales coordinator production coordinator education coordinator art director
Dana Hicks Sarah Waschler Jerry Murphy Danica Cullins Dawn Carter-Noe Marlo Sneddon Sean Egan
president/ceo Jennifer L. Bolton chief financial officer Teresa Dunaway controller Kelly Ridley director of human resources Linda Maddox Corporate Headquarters 3300 N. Central Ave., Suite 300, Phoenix, AZ 85012 +1 480 990 1101 • Fax: +1 480 990 0819 www.xchangemag.com
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
ADVERTORIAL
Your Customers Are Ready for Carrier Ethernet, Are You?
B
usiness customers are ready to break through the bandwidth and delivery-time barriers of traditional, TDM-based services and realize the joys of flexible, simplified networking. So the time is right for service providers to help customers make that move by delivering affordable, guaranteed-quality Carrier Ethernet. For service providers ready to win the accounts and loyalty of business customers with Carrier Ethernet, Atrica Inc. is ready to help. A pioneer in this space, Atrica offers end-to-end solutions that network operators can employ to create networks capable of delivering highly profitable, differentiated business services. What’s more, this same infrastructure can be leveraged for cost-effective wireless backhaul and flexible triple-play applications. Atrica’s Carrier Ethernet solutions give service providers the ability to bring services to market quickly − so they can start making money and so customer needs can be satisfied in short order. And, because they can carry both newer IP-based services as well as legacy services, they also give service providers a way to collapse their many silo-based networks into an efficient,cost-effective universal transport architecture. For business customers, Carrier Ethernet represents the ability to get affordable, flexible connectivity when they want it and at the data rates they require. The added bonus here, of course, is that customers have a built-in comfort level with Ethernet because of its ubiquity in the LAN.
Atrica's End-to-End Carrier Ethernet Solution
4
1106_Atrica.indd 4
|
November 2006
Atrica’s Carrier Ethernet solutions harness the low cost, scalability and ease of management of plain old Ethernet and pair them with innovations in traffic engineering, services management and optical switching to meet the stringent demands of next-generation transport networks. This integrated portfolio uniquely offers: • High scalability • Guaranteed, end-to-end SLAs with Committed Information Rate (CIR) and Excess Information Rate (EIR) • Sub-50ms network-wide resiliency • Integrated TDM traffic support • Carrier-class point-and-click, centralized service provisioning and management Service providers leveraging Atrica's platforms are consistently recognized as leaders in the Carrier Ethernet space. For example, the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) recently named Orange Business Services the “Carrier Ethernet European Service Provider of the Year − Best in Business.” Earlier this year, the MEF presented Optimum Lightpath with the “Outstanding Innovation” designation based on the strength of its broad spectrum of innovation on the technical, service and business fronts. Optimum Lightpath has leveraged its Carrier Ethernet infrastructure to firmly establish itself as a leader in the delivery of business www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
10/25/06 10:45:43 AM
ADVERTORIAL
services in the Greater New York Metropolitan area. Last year, the MEF named Japan’s KVH the “Asia Pacific Service Provider of the Year.” But those are just three of the 30 network operators Atrica has outfitted with Carrier Ethernet solutions. Others include Cox Communications, DT, France’s Sanef Telecoms, Spain’s Al-Pi, and Energie AG, which is Atrica’s most recently announced customer. Atrica’s Director of Marketing Umesh Kukreja says that Energie AG has been offering Ethernet service for some time, but the company’s existing platform didn’t scale to support mission-critical SLAs. So, Energie AG turned to Atrica for a Carrier Ethernet solution that will meet its needs today and in the future. Energie AG is using the new Atrica-powered Layer 2 network to offer customized, high-speed business communications, wholesale, backhaul, aggregation and triple-play services throughout its service region. Orange Business Services is leveraging the most advanced carrier-class features of Atrica’s Carrier Ethernet technology − such as standard OAM − to deliver ground-breaking and innovative services such as Virtual Private LAN Service with Traffic Engineering (VPLS-TE). VPLS-TE adds carrier-class traffic-engineering attributes to standard VPLS capabilities to deliver carrierclass, traffic-engineered E-LAN services with hard SLAs per application. Sanef Telecoms, a business unit of motorway leader Sanef Group and an innovative regional telecommunications operator, is leveraging Atrica’s Carrier Ethernet Systems to deliver customized, high-speed and very highspeed communications services to local authorities, public institutions and businesses situated near its motorways in France, and to expand its wholesale services business. Cox Business Services deployed Atrica's Carrier Ethernet solution to deliver a converged voice, video and data services network for the New Orleans Public Schools. Designed to link nearly 140 schools and administrative sites, the network delivers high-speed, guaranteed services including Internet access, VoIP, IP/H.323 videoconferencing and distance learning to each location. Atrica-based universal transport networks support a wide breadth of innovative services. Business services include E-LAN, E-Line, Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) and VPLS-TE, Circut Emulation Services (CES), Internet access from multimegabit up to 100mbps and video conferencing. Residential triple-play applications include FTTx backhaul, hundreds of TV channels, video on demand (VOD), personal video recording, interactive video applications such as remote learning and gaming, and voice and video telephony. In addition, with the rapid growth of mobile video and data services, mobile operators need a different type of transport to address new services, functionality and cost models. So, Atrica’s solutions support wireless backhaul functionality. Atrica’s complete product line includes the A-100 and A-210 Ethernet demarcation devices; the A-2000 family of Carrier Ethernet Edge Switches; the A-4000 family of Carrier Ethernet Aggregation Switches; the A-8000 family of Carrier Ethernet Core Switches; and the Atrica Service Platform for Ethernet Networks (ASPEN), an integrated service provisioning and management system.
For more information on Atrica solutions, visit www.atrica.com.
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
The Many Benefits of Atrica’s Flexible and Simple Carrier Ethernet Solution Atrica’s Carrier Ethernet systems give network operators flexibility and simplicity, which allow them to rapidly and easily expand their service offerings as customer demands grow and change, dramatically reduce their capital and operational expenses, and improve their profitability.
»Flexibility
Flexibility of Bandwidth » CIR for applications requiring SDH-like bandwidth guarantees » EIR bandwidth for best-effort applications » Mix of CIR and EIR for bursty applications such as a frame relay upgrade Flexibility of Service Creation » Allows creation of service packages to meet specific market demands and dynamics » For example, a 10mbps bundle for the SMB market could include 3mbps of CIR and 7mbps of EIR Flexibility in Delivering Customized Solutions for the Business Customer Flexible Competitive Engagement » Can respond to competitive offers based on SDH, DWDM and Ethernet services
»Simplicity
Simple, Highly Resilient Services » Rings or meshes in the aggregation/core network » Dual-homed access rings » End-to-end SLAs compared to “sectional” SLAs from competitors Simplicity of Service Creation » Point-and-click service provisioning » Fast time-to-service delivery compared to alternative options from competitors Simplicity of Service Upgrades » Operators can commit to fast service upgrades to match customers’ business requirements » CNM implementation delivers “customer controlled” service upgrades for premium customers Simplicity of Upselling Customer Bandwidth » Sales teams are empowered to upgrade customers’ bandwidth
November 2006
|
5
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
By Khali Henderson
Taking Care of Business Enterprises Demand for Carrier-Class Ethernet Services Grows
Carrier Ethernet
has been gathering American metro Ethernet services market (retail and wholesale) to steam over the past grow from $866.2 million in 2005 to $3.4 billion in 2012. Vertical Systems Group Inc.’s numbers show U.S. retail business few years, but it now is reaching a critical point where it is becoming many carriers’ fastest-growing enterprise offer. It’s no wonder a Ethernet services market will reach $24 billion by 2010. The sub-10mbps combination of technical network standards and service definitions have market will be the fastest-growing segment during the forecast period, conspired to transform Ethernet from a low-cost, best-effort LAN service driven primarily by new copper-based service deployments among into a truly carrier-class contender for WAN applications like Internet smaller businesses and those not served by fiber (see related story, access, private lines and VPNs. With these advances in its corner, “Targeting the SMB Set,” on Page 11). The bulk of the revenue – some $19 Ethernet finally may have the advantage over traditional technologies billion – is for 10mbps speeds and above required by larger enterprises. Indeed, interest in adoption of Ethernet services is growing. A study like ATM and frame relay in meeting enterprises’ ever-growing demands published this summer by Forrester Research Inc. showed 10 percent of for bandwidth and support for converged services. “Enterprise bandwidth requirements are growing – depending on enterprises deployed the technology last year, and 23 percent said they what analyst you listen to – anywhere from 33 percent to 100 percent per are “very interested” in doing so this year. Retail and wholesale trade year,” says Mike Tighe, chairman of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and businesses and public sector organizations expressed the highest levels the director of strategy for Verizon Communications Inc. “And, also they of interest in adopting Ethernet services, Forrester reports. Frost & Sullivan’s top vertical markets vary. Listed in order by are placing converged applications, such as VoIP, video and conferencing, on a network infrastructure. They see Ethernet, with its ability to support Ethernet demand, they include financial, government, education, literally up to a gig and sometimes up to 10gigs worth of traffic, as an ideal health care and legal. Frost & Sullivan’s research mirrors Tighe’s assertions about the drivers way to rapidly scale their networks to support their applications.” Besides being the spokesman for the MEF, Tighe spent three years behind enterprise Ethernet demand. “Increasing numbers of bandwidthintensive applications such as common running Verizon’s nascent Ethernet services gateway interface, medical imaging and business, so he has first-hand experience with North American Metro Ethernet video are placing unprecedented demands enterprises’ ravenous appetites for Ethernet. Service Market Forecast on networks, and Ethernet is considered the From second quarter 2005 to second quarter (in U.S. $ millions) most cost-effective and manageable solution 2006, the ILEC’s Ethernet revenue grew at $3,500 to such data traffic,” the research firm notes. 126 percent, he says. $3,400 As defined by the MEF, there are Tighe’s experiences are shared by $3,000 several basic services that comprise carrier other operators. Kevin Curran, senior Ethernet. These include point-to-point E-Line vice president of marketing for Optimum $2,500 and multipoint-to-multipoint E-LAN, which Lightpath, a subsidiary of Cablevision provide transparent, private line, virtual Systems Corp., says his company has $2,000 private line and LAN services. Typically, recorded “north of 150 percent growth in they have been deployed in support of Ethernet revenue” in the past year. And, $1,500 applications such as Internet access or Craig Dassner, senior engineer with Cox storage area networking. Cox’s Dassner, Omaha, says sales of Ethernet services to $1,000 for example, says the company’s large large businesses have doubled between $866.2 enterprise clients are demanding any-to-any 2005 and 2006. $500 connectivity as well as storage and data Industry growth rates for metro center replication using Ethernet facilities. Ethernet services are more than 20 percent 0 Increasingly, carrier Ethernet services compounded annually, according to Frost & 2005 2012 are being used for video conferencing and Sullivan researchers. In a September 2006 Source: Frost & Sullivan, Sept. 2006 VoIP, which demand lower delay, jitter and report, Frost & Sullivan forecast the North
6
|
November 2006
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
with legacy technology like ATM (see related frame loss than is available with a best-effort story, “Special Delivery,” on Page 8). service. In fact, Optimum Lightpath’s Curran says “It’s a sign of the maturity “They are able to offer better and broader his company’s No. 1 product is a bundle that of Ethernet and that SLAs because of the standards,” notes Maria includes 10mbps of Ethernet connectivity and customers have confidence Zeppetella, senior analyst for Frost & Sullivan. 50,000 voice minutes (over Ethernet) per month However, she says, service providers would for $2,500. The bundle accounts for a third of the to implement Ethernet be well-advised to educate their customers. carrier’s sales, he says. networks to support Not only might it help them earn more of “It’s a sign of the maturity of Ethernet and an enterprise’s business, it can help them to that customers have confidence to implement their mission-critical charge more. While rate decreases of 50 percent Ethernet networks to support their mission-critical applications.” are driving enterprises’ shift to Ethernet, losing applications,” says MEF’s Tighe. higher-priced legacy customers has not been What characterizes this more mature – MEF's Mike Tighe without pain for service providers, she explains. Ethernet? According to the MEF there are five “Price competition is still really tough,” says Zeppetella. “It’s hard key service attributes (see inset article, “Carrier Ethernet Defined,” below), including standardized services, scalability, reliability, service for them to make the margins that they want. There are still too many providers in the market. There are over 100 in North America.” management and QoS. Carrier consolidation is beginning to have a stabilizing impact on The MEF has worked to back up each of the attributes with technical standards, definitions and certifications to provide service Ethernet pricing, she says. Meanwhile, providers have been requiring providers with the tools they need to create and deliver Ethernet with longer terms or keeping customers at their legacy rates while upping the service guarantees enterprises require and have come to expect their bandwidth using Ethernet. With SLAs, the revenue potential for Ethernet grows. Being able to measure quality in and of itself can be monetized, but it also encourages enterprises to entrust more of their Five attributes distinguish carrier Ethernet from familiar converged applications to Ethernet. LAN-based Ethernet: “Apart from educating customers, 1. Standardized Services service providers must gain the trust of • E-Line, E-LAN provide transparent, private line, virtual legacy users by initially providing them private line and LAN services with Ethernet Internet access services,” • A ubiquitous service providing globally and locally via says Zeppetella. “Once customers are standardized equipment comfortable with Ethernet access, they • Requires no changes to customer LAN equipment or are more likely to upgrade to highernetworks and accommodates existing network connectivity priced metro Ethernet point-to-point or such as time-sensitive, TDM traffic and signaling multipoint services.” • Ideally suited to converged voice, video and data networks Giving customers the ability to monitor SLAs directly or even to control • Wide choice and granularity of bandwidth and QoS options their bandwidth through a customer 2. Scalability network management application also • The ability for millions to use a network service that is ideal for the widest variety of business, is expected to enhance Ethernet’s information, communications and entertainment applications with voice, video and data appeal among enterprises and service • Spans access and metro to national and global services over a wide variety of physical providers’ margins (see related story, infrastructures implemented by a wide range of service providers “Customer Network Management Builds • Scalability of bandwidth from 1mbps to 10gbps and beyond in granular increments Satisfaction, Loyalty,” on Page 12). 3. Reliability “From an enterprise perspective, • The ability for the network to detect and recover from incidents without impacting users one of the biggest pain points in the • Meeting the most demanding quality and availability requirements legacy infrastructure as you move • Rapid recovery time when problems do occur, as low as 50ms from T1s to T3s to OC12s was that 4. Quality of Service it took a long time – 60 to 90 days • Wide choice of granularity of bandwidth and QoS options – to upgrade,” says Umesh Kukreja, • SLAs that deliver end-to-end performance matching the requirements for voice over converged director of product marketing for business and residential networks Ethernet gear vendor Atrica Inc., • Provisioning via SLAs that provide end-to-end performance based on commited information rate noting that CNM offers customers the ability to upgrade bandwidth on (CIR), frame loss, delay and variation characteristics demand with a level of granularity 5. Service Management unavailable with other technologies • The ability to monitor, diagnose and centrally manage the network using standards-based and it gives them more control over vendor independent implementations applications they deploy. “It’s on the • Carrier-class OAM road map of almost every service • Rapid service provisioning Source: Metro Ethernet Forum provider worldwide.”
Carrier Ethernet Defined
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
November 2006
|
7
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
Special Delivery Stronger SLAs Drive Ethernet Adoption
By Khali Henderson
In life there are no guarantees, but in communications networks, customers sure want ‘em. Being able to satisfy that desire is what’s ultimately going to drive carrier Ethernet services demand. While early adopters have been contented with best-effort Internet at Ethernet’s low price point, in the end, it’s uptime and QoS that is going to ensure Ethernet’s ubiquity as a converged services platform, experts say. “As we go from the early adopters to the mass market, it’s all about getting frame relay, ATM and private line customers to switch to Ethernet. One thing that is holding them back now is SLAs,” says Fred Ellefson, vice president of Etherjack alliances, with ADVA Optical Networking. “The early adopters were just looking for cheap, dumb pipes and the best cost per bit. Best-effort for them was just fine. The mass market is looking for the same kind of carrier grade and the same kind of quality as traditional services.” Service providers’ experiences corroborate this statement. “From Verizon’s perspective, probably the biggest thing that we did to accelerate the growth of our program was when we implemented stringent SLAs,” says Mike Tighe, director of strategy for Verizon Communications Inc. “That sent a very strong signal and a very strong message to our customers about the type of service that we were offering, that it was a carrier-class service.”
8
|
November 2006
Kevin Curran, senior vice president of marketing for Optimum Lightpath, also says SLAs are important in overcoming the notion that carrier Ethernet is best effort. The service-assurance mandate is getting a major boost this fall as the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) begins the pilot phase of its MEF 14 certification for service providers in late November (see inset article, “MEF to Certify Network Service Quality,” on Page 9). While MEF 14 does not prescribe SLAs, it offers tools with which to build them. There are typical measures that make up SLAs, of course. Optimum Lightpath, for example, looks at four metrics, including availability (99.99 percent), latency (10ms roundtrip), packet delivery (99.5 percent) and jitter (1ms). These can be differentiated based on the type of application and/or the architecture. Cox Business Services, for instance, creates SLAs to match its architecture. So, Ethernet over coaxial cable delivers 99.9 percent availability while single-entrance Ethernet over SONET is 99.99 percent and dual-entrance Ethernet over SONET is 99.999 percent. The service-assurance discipline is being defined largely by several emerging operations, administration and management standards. One of these is Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) OAM, which is included in the IEEE 802.3ah specification. “So, what we have seen over the last two years is ... a very slow move by service providers to adopt EFM OAM standards,” says Bob Mandeville, president of Iometrix, the testing lab that works with the MEF to certify vendors and service providers against MEF standards. “And what we have also seen is, in the last six months, a sudden, very strong movement of adoption of EFM OAM standards both by the vendor community and the service provider community.” EFM OAM is a set of network management functions that provide for network fault and performance monitoring, diagnostics and fault isolation to enable carriers to monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot Ethernet services. It addresses OAM on a link or access basis and commonly is used between the customer premises and the next hop. The goal, however, is to achieve end-to-end OAM. There are standards in the works that address Ethernet OAM on an end-to-end basis, including the IEEE’s 802.1ag Connectivity Fault Management and 802.1aj Two-Port Media Access Control Relay as well as the ITU-T’s Y.1731 ETHOAM. MEF supports the efforts to pick up where 802.3ah leaves off. It is addressing EFM OAM implementation in a pending straw ballot called User Network Interface Type 2 Implementation Agreement, which was expected to be approved at the MEF’s Oct. 31 meeting. IEEE’s 802.1ag specifies capabilities for detecting, verifying and isolating connectivity failures within Ethernet networks that bridge www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
customer and provider domains. The ITU-T’s Y.1731 builds on 802.1ag by adding performance-monitoring features and is being developed in close collaboration with the IEEE’s 802.1 work group to ensure consistency. 802.1aj, which is the least-developed of the recommendations, addresses Ethernet demarcation devices, which help carriers determine where network problems exist and provide separation between the carrier’s WAN and the customer’s LANs. Another one, 802.1ah, addresses scalability, allowing the present limit of 4,095 simultaneous VLANs to go up to 16 million. Already, many vendors are incorporating these standards into their equipment. Cisco Systems Inc., for example, announced in late September improvements to its carrier Ethernet OAM capabilities, including
support for 802.1ag for service verification and 802.3ah for link-layer troubleshooting. The new OAM features are included in the Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Metro Ethernet (ME) 3400 Series Ethernet Access Switches, 3750 Metro Series switches and Integrated Services Router (ISR). “We have talked with customers and analysts and one thing that’s holding [Ethernet] back is a lack of confidence that it can be managed like frame relay and ATM. This [OAM enhancement] really knocks down that obstacle,” says Mike Capuano, senior marketing manager for Cisco. Similarly, this summer at GLOBALCOMM, ADVA Optical Networking announced its Etherjack Service Assurance (ESA) feature, which uses emerging IEEE 802.3ah, 802.1ag and ITU Y.1731
MEF to Certify Network Service Quality By Khali Henderson The service-assurance mandate is getting a major boost this fall capabilities. The certification really says to the market and to as the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) begins the pilot phase of its MEF enterprises that service providers and equipment providers are very confident in their abilities to support applications that have 14 certification for service providers in late November. “That is a huge step forward for the MEF,” says Bob Mandeville, the most stringent requirements, and we’re willing to get certified president of Iometrix, the testing lab that works with the MEF to to show the market that we are confident in Ethernet’s capabilities. certify vendors and service providers against MEF standards. “Now, I think it’s a big step forward.” Tighe says while MEF 14 does not prescribe SLAs to service from a technical point of view, one of the innovations that the MEF is bringing to the marketplace is the definition of metrics that allow providers, it offers them a framework and baseline metrics to the verification of service quality for converged networks and offer an SLA. “It’s kind of a toolkit that allows service providers to implement their own SLAs to differentiate their services but does converged applications.” The number and names of the carriers participating in the allow for consistency in the market, so that when an enterprise user pilot phase were not disclosed, but Mandeville says certified looks at an SLA from one provider to another, they are looking at the providers are expected to be named in first quarter 2007. same types of variables being measured,” he says. The MEF technical committee makes a distinction between Already, MEF has certified system vendors’ equipment against service-level specifications and the standard, but Mandeville says SLAs. Service-level specifications while the criteria are the same, the “One of the innovations that the are technical, and unlike SLAs, instrumentation for measuring it they have no legal implications. has been developed specifically MEF is bringing to the marketplace “From a purely technical point of for service provider networks. is the definition of metrics that view, a service-level specification MEF Chairman Mike Tighe comprises the definition of the says MEF 14 is important to allow the verification of service metrics that the MEF technical enterprise users because part of committee has defined for carrier their motivation to implement quality for converged networks and Ethernet and a way of comparing Ethernet services is to support converged applications.” those metrics to objectives. converged services. “As carrier It’s that, that the certification Ethernet has matured, the ability — Iometrix’s Bob Mandeville program will be using,” explains to support classes of service and Mandeville. ... converged applications has The metrics will be released publicly when the first service become more and more important,” he says. “MEF 14 defines how we will support converged services through class-of-service provider specifications are announced next year, he adds.
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
November 2006
|
9
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
standards to allow service providers to monitor and verify Ethernet SLAs when using ADVA’s FSP 150 product family. In September, ADVA enhanced those capabilities through a global partnership with InfoVista, wherein InfoVista’s performancemanagement solution, VistaInsight for Networks, takes data from the ADVA FSP 150 equipment and provides carriers information on key performance indicators (KPI), such as frame delay, frame delay variation, frame loss and network availability end-to-end across services. KPIs can be provided hierarchically by service type, customer location, device type and interface. The information also can be provided to end-user
QoS dropped fr om the top of the lis t of technical challeng es last year to No. 7 th is year.
— Infonetics Re search
customers through a Web portal (see related story, “Customer Network Management Builds Satisfaction, Loyalty,” on Page 12). “Our partnership with InfoVista is very focused on making Ethernet kind of a business-grade Ethernet and very similar to frame relay, private line and ATM,” says ADVA’s Ellefson. “With the InfoVista/ADVA solution, we are providing a very comparable set of tools to what they have today in the frame relay world.” The ADVA-InfoVista partnership came as the result of a joint customer, Uecomm Ltd., an Australian carrier offering high-speed broadband data solutions over its fiber-optic network. Ellefson said while they like the capability of the Etherjack demarc equipment, they wanted to be able to extract the information and make it reportable to their end customers. Uecomm also was working with InfoVista and introduced the two companies to each other.
10
|
November 2006
“We are continuing to see strong uptake of our Ethernet services, and one of the key reasons is that we have put in place an infrastructure that enables us to offer Ethernet SLAs as stringent as those offered with traditional services,” says Brendan Park, Uecomm’s director of strategy, in a press statement about the implementation. “More and more businesses recognize the unprecedented value of Ethernet-based business services, and the ability to offer and assure Ethernet SLAs enables them to migrate.” Optimum Lightpath takes a similar approach. It uses gear from Atrica Inc., which also sends information to the InfoVista tool, allowing it to create service-level reports on availability, jitter and latency. Atrica’s ASPEN network management system adds another dimension to the provision of SLAs, according to Cox Business Services executives. “ASPEN helps protect us from ourselves,” says Craig Dassner, senior engineer for Cox Omaha. He notes that ASPEN will not allow Cox to change a customer’s bandwidth profile if it adversely affects SLAs or QoS levels. ASPEN, he adds, ensures that SLA commitments built into the Atrica platform are kept. “We are able to leverage the carrier-class products and the MEF definitions and combine the SLA protection and provisioning mechanisms to allow a service provider to come up with a guaranteed Ethernet service offering [and] a best-effort Ethernet service offering,” says Umesh Kukreja, director of product marketing for Atrica. What’s more, he says, is that Atrica allows a service provider to first offer a customer a best-effort service and, later, as its applications change (the addition of VoIP, for example) and require more guarantees, the carrier can provision the more stringent service without changing out the gear. “In an alternate architecture, you would have to provision a new platform – maybe bring in a SONET architecture or overprovision the network and hope that that packet goes through,” he explains. With Atrica’s platform, the service provider can change the mix of excess information rate (EIR) and committed information rate (CIR) traffic on any single circuit without the addition of another box or card. “[ASPEN] allows service providers to provision the service very quickly. Instead of a point-by-point, node-by-node service provisioning, our customers can point and click and basically provision the CIR [and] EIR protection levels and whatever categories they have productized ... in one shot,” he says. Since manufacturers have added many new QoS features based on OAM standards, end-to-end QoS has been improved dramatically, says Michael Howard, principal analyst for Infonetics Research. Inc., citing research published in mid-October. “Now that the No. 1 technical issue that was plaguing service providers rolling out metro Ethernet networks last year – QoS – is being addressed by manufacturers, the Ethernet adoption curve is speeding up,” he says. www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
Targeting the SMB Set
SMB
Carrier Ethernet By Paula Bernier
S
ervice providers targeting the SMB market now have an important new tool at their disposal in the form of carrier Ethernet. In addition to being based on Ethernet, which because of its ubiquity can translate into lower costs for both service provider and business customer, carrier Ethernet is ideal for the SMB space because it allows customers to up their bandwidth quickly and incrementally as they require. Of course, the first iteration of carrier Ethernet was fiber-based only, so it was limited to the about 10 percent of businesses with direct fiber access. It’s notable to mention that many SMBs reside in MTUs alongside large enterprises, but clearly the SMB carrier Ethernet market cannot live on fiber alone, so some service providers with a cable connection are using HFC to reach out to those SMBs that aren’t in high rises in major metro areas. At the same time, Ethernet over copper is now a possibility for some SMBs in areas like suburban office parks and other outlying areas. As you know, today, much of the SMB market uses T1 connections over which to communicate. But such dedicated solutions lock in SMBs that want to scale up their bandwidth, because it rarely makes sense to go from a 1.5mbps T1 connection up to a 45mbps DS3 connection − the next higher option. Ethernet, meanwhile, enables customers to increase their bandwidth incrementally, as their demands dictate. That’s why about 1 million businesses over the next five years are expected to move from T1 legacy services to Ethernet services, which will total more than $8 billion annually in U.S. service revenue, according to Gary Bolton, vice president of marketing and product management at Hatteras Networks. A key part of this opportunity is the “mid-band sweet spot,” for copper-based Ethernet services that can run $500 to $2,000 for 2mbps to 20mbps, he says. Whatever the physical access situation, Umesh Kukreja, director of marketing at vendor Atrica Inc., says carrier Ethernet provides competitive service providers with a unique opportunity to target the SMB group with a variety of voice services and data applications. Because carrier Ethernet has bandwidth guarantees, service providers have the option of taking a business’s existing data and TDM-based voice traffic, which may today run over separate T1s, and combining it on an Ethernet − or migrating that business to VoIP, employing a committed information rate for that delay-sensitive traffic, Kukreja says. “From a service provider perspective, it’s a unique bundling opportunity for developing SMB applications,” he adds. Because with Ethernet, “you can now create a combination of voice applications, data applications and storage applications.” He explains that storage nicely fits into the carrier Ethernet model because − unlike with WDM www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
technology for which the service provider would need to dedicate the entire bandwidth of the link for storage − just a portion of the Ethernet link could be used for that or another application. The SMB space is a target market for Optimum Lightpath, a wholly owned subsidiary of cable TV company Cablevision. The company sells both fiber-based carrier Ethernet services and a service called Remote E-Link, which is terminated over HFC to reach remote offices. Kevin Curran, senior vice president of marketing, says the company has seen more than 150 percent growth in its Ethernet revenue, and that about a third of customers for those services have less than 30 employees. He says most of those SMBs are service-oriented businesses, such as accounting firms, architectural firms, ad agencies and the like. He adds that the company is signing on about 40 new SMBs per month. The company’s No. 1 product is the Internet/Voice Bundle and the most popular version of that offering is the package with 10mbps data and 50,000 minutes of voice, which sells for $2,500 per month, he says. However, customers can elect to have connectivity as high as 300mbps and as many as 1 million minutes per month. The bundles include POTS along with a variety of advanced calling features, numbers and more. Curran adds that Optimum Lightpath also offers circuit emulation as part of its service so SMBs don’t need to buy new gear to migrate to carrier Ethernet. And Optimum Lightpath decided to sell its carrier Ethernet-based services in flat-rate packages to make the monthly spend predictable for SMBs. Cox Business Services also sells to the SMB set. Omaha Public School Systems was the first customer on the company’s carrier Ethernet service. Of the school system’s 96 locations, 65 of them had less than a 6mbps requirement and 18 had a 20mbps-plus requirement, so Cox’s challenge was to deliver one affordable platform to support all the high-and low-speed connections they required, says Craig Dassner, senior engineer with Cox Omaha. Carrier Ethernet allowed it to do that over a combination of fiber and coax infrastructure. Cox Omaha also has various other school systems on its Ethernet services, but to date, this academic vertical is the only one it has attacked in a significant way with carrier Ethernet. Dassner says that’s because SMBs need to be educated on the benefits of Ethernet service. “The medium-sized and small business space at this point is so immature as it is related to Ethernet services, I don’t think they have the awareness that these types of services are available at the cost points they can afford,” he says. But Cox is working to remedy that. “We don’t have a frame relay product, so there’s a lot of greenfield opportunity for us to offer alternate Layer 2 transport and [evangelize the] benefits of carrier Ethernet,” he says. November 2006
|
11
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
Customer Network Management Builds Satisfaction, Loyalty By Paula Bernier
W
e’ve all had the experience of sitting at a restaurant waiting for service that never seems to come. It’s frustrating, to say the least, because you have so little control of the situation and you have to wait, which nobody enjoys. Sometimes you might just leave the restaurant without eating. But a salad bar or a buffet can be much more satisfying because you help yourself to what you want when you want it. Before you make a run for the fridge, let me explain that I’m drawing an analogy here to the telecom market. Wouldn’t it be great if, rather than keeping business customers in hands-off mode waiting for their services you could outfit them with the tools to order, and receive, services as they need them? That way, they have more control, you save money on the order-taking process, and everybody wins. That’s just beginning to happen with customer network management (CNM) tools related to carrier Ethernet services. Being able to scale services as demand requires is one of the key pain points for enterprise customers, says Umesh Kukreja, director of marketing at carrier Ethernet equipment vendor Atrica Inc. But putting control in the customers’ hands so they easily can access flexible, affordable services that meet their needs as those needs arise can help service providers offer tiered services and lower customer churn, because customers tend to be more loyal to providers that offer them more control and more than one service, he says. The Atrica Service Platform for Ethernet Networks, better known as ASPEN, is an integrated service provisioning and management system that offers that kind of control, he says. “We have built up a system where you can have point-and-click at the ends [of the selected circuit], say how much is CIR, how much EIR, how much is protected, and you just built the primary path as well as the protection path, so the provisioning is extremely simple,” Kukreja says. Once the circuit is established, an application called Customer Network Management, which is built on top of ASPEN, allows the enterprise to look at its part of the network via a Web-based interface.
This can allow the business to see how much bandwidth is available on each circuit, and change the bandwidth, if desired. An open API within CNM enables the interface to be customized to the user’s specifications and can be partitioned for different divisions of the enterprise. “CNM is a feature that everybody talks about, but there are no particular standards,” says Kukreja. Some vendors offer CNM solutions that allow customers to view their bills online, but the Atrica solution actually allows customers to order and alter their services, he says. While every service provider that employs Atrica’s carrier Ethernet solution uses ASPEN, the extent to which those providers offer CNM varies, says Kukreja, adding that CNM is on the road map of every service provider delivering carrier Ethernet services today. Cisco Systems Inc. addresses CNM through what it calls its Service Exchange Framework, a collection of products that manage the network intelligently, explains Mike Capuano, senior marketing manager in Cisco’s service provider solutions. The framework consists of a service called the Broadband Policy Manager; and the Service Control Engine, which does applicationlevel inspection and some other functions. Capuano says the solution basically leverages the policy server that includes a Web portal, and that the Web portal often is created by the service provider. The policy server then controls the network equipment. “So the customer could go from 2meg to 10meg each night for data center backup” for example, he says. “The policy server would trigger that via the portal, and send instructions to the network elements.” But Kukreja adds that some solutions from Layer 1 and 2 infrastructure providers require provisioning on a node-by-node basis, requiring a higher level of skill to do the job than the Atrica point-and-click solution requires. Brian Van Steen, Alcatel’s director of Ethernet solutions marketing, adds that products are widely available today to support portals where customers can tune the bandwidth and look at what services they have.
Being able to scale services as demand requires is one of the key pain points for enterprise customers.
12
|
November 2006
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
But offering customers control of their services is more complex than just buying these tools, he says, because service providers need to tie such systems into their OSS/BSS systems and processes. “The billing system must be upgraded to see a customer’s upgraded bandwidth,” he says. “Also, if a customer is paying $100 a megabit for service, if they upgrade to 15meg, is it still a $100-a-megabit charge or is it treated as a burstable, short-term increment?” Service providers need to map out these complex business issues before they jump into offering customer control of carrier Ethernet, he says. There’s also a question as to what constitutes “realtime” ordering and provisioning, he says. In any case, however, historically it has taken about three months to get a T1 provisioned, so if the service provider can shorten that, it’s a good thing, he says. While it’s certainly very early days for customercontrolled networking, some service providers are doing it today. “It’s definitely a competitive differentiator,” agrees Van Steen. “It’s a service that enterprises are aware of and would like to utilize.” For example, Masergy Communications has been a pioneer in the area of customer control through what it calls its Service Control Center. Cox Business Services, meanwhile, is in the process of developing a customer control capability, says Craig Dassner, senior engineer with Cox Omaha. “We wanted to get carrier Ethernet out there fast,” he says. “Cox in Omaha was one of the first to deploy the Atrica platform within Cox. One of the commitments we made to one of our large customers − a school system − is to give them that management. But they were willing to deploy carrier Ethernet knowing this would come later. Cox Omaha was going to develop that capability with a homegrown tool, but then our other markets − like Phoenix − are going to Atrica. So now we’re building [the appropriate tie-ins to] that CNM tool so all Cox markets can use it.” Optimum Lightpath, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp. that offers business services, also is planning to offer customer network management in the near future, says Kevin Curran, the company’s senior vice president of marketing. Starting in the first quarter, the company plans to offer its customers the www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
ability to manipulate virtual circuits within their Ethernet connection. In the second quarter, Optimum Lightpath aims also to allow customers to use a Web portal to change the bandwidth of their entire circuit as well as to alter burstable rates based on time or day or week, says Curran, adding that the changes would be made in the network almost immediately after the business customer input the data.
November 2006
|
13
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
New Frontiers for Ethernet
By Tara Seals
Competitive carriers in the Wild West
of enterprise services are finding subscribers are continuing to seek higher-speed, IP-based applications. For providers wanting to meet this growing enterprise need, Ethernet represents something of an open range for those who can take advantage of it. With an improved cost structure and benefits for end users unmatched by legacy technology, Ethernet allows these operators to remain nimble, customizing transport services to specific applications. Incumbent carriers relying on SONET and ATM may have a difficult time installing barbed wire to curb the opportunity. Ethernet also is overcoming a historical challenge: availability. Typically run over metro fiber-optic links, Ethernet’s adoption among enterprises has been constrained by the fact that fiber is available only to 11.7 percent of commercial U.S. buildings with 20 or more employees, according to March 2006 data from Vertical Systems Group Inc. However, Ethernet also can be run over wireless links, cable networks and other nontraditional access methodologies, providing service to a greater coverage area. “Cablecos and wireless players are the perfect candidates to leverage this service,” says Atrica Inc.’s Umesh Kukreja, director of product marketing. “It’s a better way to use their networks to differentiate service and capture the business market away from the LECs.” For such service providers, Ethernet provides a way to deliver service quality, reliability and flexible bandwidth allocation at a lower cost than more traditional transport mechanisms. That makes tapping the market for enhanced business services an attractive one. For starters, service quality is incorporated by the MEF as part of the standards governing the service, verifiable through stringent certification programs (see related story, "Special Delivery," on Page 8). That makes it an appropriate transport mechanism for carriers to provide multiservice networks to enterprises and wholesale customers. Also, Ethernet’s ability to scale incrementally is a differentiator for providers. SONET-based networks allow service providers to deliver bandwidth to customers only in established increments. For instance,
if a company needs more than an OC48 can provide, it must go to an OC192. But Ethernet is not limited to the SONET equivalent, and typically can scale in any increment between 10mbps and 1gbps. That eliminates the costly problem of over-provisioning. “If you have excess capacity you’re not using, that’s a waste of good money,” says Tim Dunne, vice president of business operations at Nextlink Wireless Inc., which offers wireless metro Ethernet services. Meanwhile, enterprises across the spectrum want to connect multiple sites over cost-effective, scalable, point-to-point, pointto-multipoint internal networks, to enable those mission-critical applications. Those include LAN connectivity, PBX interconnection, VoIP, conferencing, disaster recovery, distributed computing and converged applications, e-commerce, help desk support, remote mirroring and failover, wireless backhaul and access as well as applications like ERP, CRM, supply chain management and others. Ethernet services also provide management advantages. In the enterprise, 98 percent of telecom traffic starts and ends with Ethernetbased LANs. By building WAN transport on Ethernet, nodes appear local to the network, so the WAN becomes easier to manage. Because of all these factors, competitive carriers, in particular, are well-positioned to meet the pent-up service demand by creating differentiated Ethernet-based services to compete effectively with the established players in the marketplace that have legacy platforms and legacy service provisioning methodologies. The best part of the proposition is the cost, says Atrica’s Kukreja. “If I build an OC48 ring in the metro and go to four locations delivering four or five megs to each, 75 percent of my capacity is gone and I have to upgrade to an OC192 to avoid a bottleneck,” he notes. “With Ethernet, I can build a four- or five-node core network with 150 gigabytes of capacity. That’s enough to build up 140 sites, gain ROI over two years, and if you have a four-year contract you’re looking at a 40 or 50 percent margin. If you want to add on, it’s a matter of investing per site to connect it to the network. So, the economics of delivering service are much better.”
For providers wanting to meet this growing enterprise need, Ethernet represents something of an open range for those who can take advantage of it.
14
|
November 2006
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
t
BEFORE Typical Backhaul, Challenged to Scale Economically to Address 3G/4G Growth
The challenge: A mostly TDM-based backhaul today that was designed for low-bandwidth mobile voice • Not easily scalable to address 3G and 4G IP/data/video growth • High cost (opex leased lines)
AFTER Nortel MEN Carrier Ethernet Backhaul Solutions Address the Challenge
• Consolidate both voice and data services over a common backhaul, reducing costs in the short and long term • Provides highly scalable, Ethernet-based access that can accommodate both current and future traffic demands such as 4G • Deliver predictable service quality and assurance for emerging mobile IMS and multimedia applications Source: Nortel Networks
www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
B ac k h a u l Bargains
The backhaul market is another emerging opportunity for Ethernet and its ability to differentiate different levels of traffic. For instance, “a cable operator needs to aggregate backhaul from the headends, to hand off to the PSTN,” says Atrica Inc.’s Umesh Kukreja, director of product marketing. “Video traffic is all Ethernet. They use gigE inside the network, which requires extremely low latency and jitter. You also need some guarantee for voice. Internet access at the aggregation level needs some guarantees, and some best-effort. It’s shared amongst the packets. So, you have a single network used to backhaul different traffic with different SLAs.” In the wireless backhaul arena, advanced services like video, pictures and other traffic is driving ever more bandwidth. “A lot of wireless infrastructure is designed around low-bandwidth voice,” says Errol Binda, product marketing manager at Nortel Networks Ltd. “The problem as they move to 3G and beyond is that more bandwidth will be required to support these new applications.” Right now, he says, most cellcos lease T1s from the LECs for backhaul, which costs around $400 per month per T1. “So doubling or tripling capacity with T1s is not economical, and this is forcing them globally to look at alternatives to do the megabytes needed to move to a high-capacity infrastructure, and that’s where Ethernet in the metro environment becomes handy.” Kukreja says base stations increasingly are being equipped with T1s, E1s and Ethernet ports together. “As traffic migrates to IP, bandwidth requirements increase, and operators can upgrade the bandwidth available and CRI available as needed,” he says. “So, instead of having a T1-based network, if you have fiber, you can deliver 100 megabytes to a port, or transport T1s via circuit emulation.”
November 2006
|
15
Carrier Ethernet: Taking Care of Business
Five Questions With Atrica’s Umesh Kukreja Atrica Inc. is a pioneer in the area of carrier Ethernet. The company prides itself on the flexibility and simplicity of its end-to-end carrier Ethernet solution. Umesh Kukreja, director of marketing at Atrica, recently spoke with xchange about trends in carrier Ethernet and what Atrica is doing to help service providers and their customers leverage its benefits.
XC: Who is Atrica? UK: Atrica was the first company to define the vision for carrier Ethernet, and the first company to deliver carrier Ethernet solutions to the market. We started with a vision of leveraging the cost points and economics of Ethernet technology and bringing its power and advantages to the service provider environment. To Ethernet we added traffic engineering and service management capabilities, such as the ability to support service level agreements (SLAs) in a highly resilient carrier environment. We have also made sure carriers can integrate the solutions with their existing SDH, WDM and core routing infrastructures. Today, Ethernet interfaces have become ubiquitous. We believe that the Atrica vision has, in fact, become reality.
XC: What is carrier Ethernet? UK: Carrier Ethernet incorporates five key elements. The first one is scalability. Carrier Ethernet overcomes the VLAN limitations of enterprise Ethernet platforms and scales Ethernet beyond the scope of how it had been deployed in enterprise environments. Layer 2 Ethernet, coupled with MPLS, is the basis for going beyond the enterprise scalability issues. The second key element is protection and resiliency. Carrier Ethernet leverages MPLS to deliver the 50msec protection required for the delivery of mission-critical services. The third element is the ability to support service level agreements. To deliver mission-critical enterprise services, service providers must be able to commit to and adhere to service level agreements. When you are able to combine committed information rate (CIR) and excess information rate (EIR), you get into some really interesting applications. The fourth element is TDM integration. For a long time, carriers were transporting Ethernet over a WDM or a TDM infrastructure. Today, because Ethernet can support SLAs and timing integrity across the data network, TDM is transported over Ethernet using circuit emulation services. The fifth element is service management. Carrier-class service management is a critical piece for service providers, as it not only allows them to do rapid service provisioning, it also reduces their ongoing operating expenses for things such as fault management, provisioning and moves/adds/changes. And, it allows them to conduct seamless service upgrades.
XC: What is really happening with the enterprise? Why do they want to move to Ethernet? UK: In many enterprises, the IT team is no longer just a peripheral department. Today, IT departments have become mission-critical elements to their enterprise’s success. They are at the core of enterprise, managing Oracle servers, e-mail servers and other application servers. However, the number of people working in IT organizations has decreased. So, IT groups are increasingly outsourcing the WAN service
16
|
November 2006
and other non-mission-critical activities, and they’re setting very strict SLAs in terms of how the services are going to be managed. In addition, dispersed servers are being centralized into key locations. This is driving the demand for more bandwidth and applications between multiple locations such as voice over IP, LAN traffic and storage services. Given all these factors, for service providers, it’s a great opportunity to become more of a partner to their customers by offering managed and resilient carrier Ethernet services.
XC: Who are the major end-user adopters of carrier Ethernet today, and for what applications? UK: There are a number of major vertical markets that are driving the growth of carrier Ethernet. One of the leading adopters of Ethernet services is the education field. Both primary and higher education institutions are clamoring for high-speed Ethernet services. With the launch of government initiatives to close the “digital divide” and ensure students have adequate access to online content, there have been increasing deployments of carrier Ethernet infrastructures. These are being used for applications such as high-speed Internet, voice over IP, and tele-education. In higher education, many universities are leveraging their state-of-the-art communications infrastructures to compete for student enrollment, to enable applications such as remote learning and tele-education, and to attract research expertise and advanced research programs. Two other interesting verticals are the financial and medical sectors. Companies in each of these verticals have a lot of digital information that must be shared among numerous facilities − and that must be protected. Mission-critical, bandwidth-hungry storage area networks are key to these two verticals. In the medical vertical, hospitals are now creating a lot of digital content in the form of X-rays and MRIs. They’re also encouraging their doctors’ offices to be connected electronically for the rapid sharing of medical records. Some innovative medical institutions are even building networks that allow them to keep in touch with their patients. This approach optimizes the use of hospital beds and reduces hospital stays.
XC: What differentiates Atrica in the carrier Ethernet marketplace? UK: Our platform was specifically designed for the service
provider environment, to enable the delivery of very flexible and scalable Ethernet services in a very simple fashion. Our comprehensive Layer 2/MPLS product suite encompasses devices for the metro core, metro aggregation, and metro edge, as well as the demarcation point. Another differentiator for us is ASPEN, our state-of-the-art network management system. ASPEN enables rapid service provisioning, comprehensive network, performance and fault management, and seamless integration with existing applications. www.xchangemag.com/ebooks
