Network Evolution December Final

BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

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U C F E D E R AT I O N

Is UC Federation a Lost Cause? Or the Last Hope?

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What Drives Voice Engineers to Drink

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White-Box Switches: Three Paths to Programmable Networks

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One Less Box

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CUTTING THE CORD ON WIRELESS LAN MANAGEMENTHighly distributed wireless networks don’t scale easily for everyone. And who wants to babysit yet another management appliance? Hello, stressed-out network engineer. Meet cloud- managed wireless.

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EDITOR’S DESK | JESSICA SCARPATI

One Less Box

We always hear from networking pros that they’re being asked to do more with less. And while it can be difficult to objec-tively quantify the more, the less is readily apparent.

Three out of four networking profession-als say their IT departments have main-tained or reduced their staffing levels this year, according to TechTarget’s 2014 Annual Salary and Careers Survey. Of the 173 networking pros TechTarget surveyed, 20% are in IT departments under a hiring freeze, and 11% have shrunken their staff by attrition. Only 17% are looking to make new hires.

The other side of the story is repeated so often that it’s practically a cliché, which doesn’t make it any less true: Networks continue to get bigger, faster and more so-phisticated. Moreover, the number and complexity of devices and applications they now support keeps multiplying.

Will Reid, chief technology officer at the Pulaski County Special School District, which comprises 38 schools in and around Little Rock, Ark., is one of those IT pros being asked to do more—a lot more—with roughly the same resources. The district is planning to put an iPad in the hands of every student and teacher, totaling 15,000

While IT staffing remains flat, the demands placedon network engineers continue to grow.Cloud-managed wireless shows that less can be more when IT is asked to do morewith less.

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iPads over the next two years. “We’ve got a whole lot more technology

in the classroom today than we ever did, but it’s not as if you can hire a whole new set of team members,” Reid told me.

As we explore in our cover story for this issue of Network Evolution, that coun-terbalance between ambitious techno- logy initiatives and flat staffing levels is why Reid and his team, like so many other networking pros, are retiring their on-

premises wireless network management platform and migrating to a cloud-based version of it. Jimmy Hogg, the dis-trict’s director of techni-cal operations, will retain full control over his wire-less access points and all

traffic, but he will have one less server to maintain, upgrade, back up and secure by opting to subscribe to AeroHive’s software-as-a-service version of HiveManager—freeing him up to focus on optimizing the network to support the oncoming influx of iPads.

And while wireless network manage-ment is probably the most accepted form of cloud-based networking today, it’s not for everyone. Find out whether cloud-man-aged wireless is the right approach for you in “Cloud Makes WLAN Management a Breeze.”

Also in this issue, we take a look at three ways white-box switching is bringing the concept of network programmability to life (“White-Box Switches: Three Paths to Programmable Networks”). We also ask why unified communications (UC)

Wireless network manage - ment is probably the most

accepted form of cloud-based

networking today, but it’s not for everyone.

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federation—a catch-all term for tools and services that integrate otherwise disparate UC applications—has failed to take off, de-spite strong demand (“Is UC Federation a Lost Cause? Or the Last Hope?”).

And, as always, don’t miss this edition of “The Subnet,” in which one network

engineer shares all the horrible ways your voice upgrade could go wrong (“What Drives Voice Engineers to Drink”). n

Jessica Scarpati

Networking Media Group Features and E-zine Editor

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Ω Cloud-managed wireless is growing three times faster thanthe wireless LAN market as a whole. Here’s why.

There are so many things for Lee Bad-man to do in Florence, Italy.

There’s the iconic Duomo, with its fa-mous octagonal dome made of burnt orange bricks overlooking the city that gave birth to the Renaissance. Michelangelo’s statue of David holds court in the nearby Uffizi Gallery. Tucked away on cobblestone side streets, a dizzying number of family-run trattorie entice diners with Tuscan cuisine and wine.

Luckily for Badman, a network architect at a large private university in upstate New

Cloud Wi-Fi

Cloud Makes WLAN Management a Breeze

BY JESSICA SCARPATI

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York, manually setting up a wireless net-work at the university’s satellite campus in the historic Italian city isn’t on his list of things to do when visiting Florence.

That’s because Badman used a cloud-based wireless network management platform to design, build and configure an entire network for the Florence cam-pus—including wired assets—from his of-fice in Syracuse. After he entered his sales order number into the vendor’s dashboard, the system autopopulated a list of every-thing Badman ordered and made it avail-able for configuration before the products even shipped. Everything, from site-to-site virtual private network (VPN) tunnels to local switching to wireless access point (AP) policies, was ready to go when the in-frastructure arrived from Meraki, a cloud networking vendor Badman tapped before

Cisco acquired it in 2012. “It was just waiting to be brought to life,

and I could do that at a time of my choosing and at a pace that allowed me to not rush after it was all delivered,” Badman says. “We had it delivered directly to the site and had a non-network guy who was capable of just following directions: ‘Plug this into here, plug that into there, meet with the ISP, and make sure that when they connect, this is the thing they connect to.’”

It’s an approach that appeals to more and more networking professionals—thanks to maturing feature sets and a growing ac-ceptance of cloud-based technologies—making cloud-managed Wi-Fi one of the fastest-growing segments of the wireless LAN (WLAN) market. IDC expects the cloud-managed WLAN infrastructure mar-ket to achieve a 38.8% compounded annual

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growth rate (CAGR) be-tween 2013 and 2018. In comparison, the CAGR forecast for the overall WLAN infrastructure market over that period is 11%.

Although cloud-man-aged Wi-Fi got its foot-ing several years ago among small businesses like neighborhood cof-fee shops and single-of-fice companies with few IT personnel, the model has since caught on with larger organizations that are highly distributed—including retailers, ho-tel chains, large school

districts and franchises. These enterprises are looking for a more efficient alterna-tive to buying, maintaining and upgrading hardware appliances at dozens or hundreds of locations that have little or no on-site IT presence.

Sold as a subscription-based service, cloud-managed wireless isn’t the right model for every enterprise. But for those that fit the profile, it can help bring large-scale, enterprise-grade wireless to loca-tions networking pros otherwise couldn’t serve.

“If you have franchises or small environ-ments distributed all over the place, I can’t imagine not using a cloud model at this point,” Badman says. “Where you have no IT people or very few IT people at another site or where the site is going to be, cloud makes perfect sense.”

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Cloud-based WLAN: What’s the draw?We asked 89 IT pros investing in a cloud-managed wireless LAN (WLAN) this year to weigh in.Respondents could select all that apply.

Source: TechTarget

Ability to remotely manage WLAN

Improves scalability for more devices

Activates new management features quickly

Helps with mobile device management

Eliminates WLAN controllers

Shifts from capital to operational expenses

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The market growth comes as cloud-man-aged WLAN vendors offer more robust features and add support for cloud-based management of some wired network as-sets—getting those tools closer to being on par with traditional on-premises net-

work management platforms.

“When we first started, the cloud-based [management tool] wouldn’t do some of the things that we needed, but now all of the fea-ture sets that you get on-premises you have in the cloud,” says Jimmy Hogg, director of technical

operations at Pulaski County Special School District in Little Rock, Ark. Hogg and his team plan to migrate from Aerohive Networks’ on-premises WLAN manage-ment platform, HiveManager, to the cloud-based version. “We really didn’t want to continue to support those servers and the backups and maintenance, so we’re moving it over to the cloud so that, basically, Aero-hive can take care of all of that instead of us,” he adds.

What Is Cloud-Managed Wireless?There are two prevailing models of cloud-managed wireless: One embeds both the wireless controller and network manage-ment software in the cloud, and the other puts only the management functions there. Typically, neither passes user traffic

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Do cloud-managed networks perform better?In an October 2013 survey, researchers asked network administrators who use cloud-based network management tools—and those who don’t—to rate their network performance.

Source: Network Management Takes to the Cloud, Aberdeen Group, January 2014, N=149

n Optimal n Adequate n Inadequate n Don’t know

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through the cloud, so if the connection to the cloud service is lost, the WLAN remains available, although access to some adminis-trator functions is disrupted.

“I’m the first to admit that I’m not prone to go cloud management or service-man-aged at all. I’m one of those guys that love control,” says Aaron Paxson, global net-work manager at SVP Worldwide, a sewing machine manufacturer based in LaVergne, Tenn. “I love doing things myself, and I don’t like having somebody else do it for me, so it takes a reasonable amount of ef-fort to convince me to move anything out-side of my control.”

Paxson uses Aruba Networks’ cloud-based management platform, Aruba Cen-tral, to run his wireless network. “That was one of the reasons why I’m more apt to do [cloud-managed wireless]: My wireless is

not through the cloud,” he adds. “All of my wireless is local to my network, so I can still maintain and have control of that data.”

Administrators access the vendor’s dash-board through a Web-based GUI that can be configured to allow access from any-where with an Internet connection.

“With your legacy servers and control-lers, out of necessity and good practices, the only way you reach them is via the VPN in your home environment, and then you’ll grab a remote desktop,” says Badman, who also authors the blog wirednot. “So it’s just kind of liberating to be able to go out to the Internet, or depending on whose hardware you use—Meraki has a really nice [mobile] app, for example—and just pull up all of your cloud-managed spaces on an app and see what’s going on with them.”

Cloud-based WLAN management is sold

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as a subscription-based service, which offloads the capital and operational ex-penses of deploying, securing, updating, backing up, powering and cooling appli-ances that would otherwise be the en-terprise’s responsibility in a traditional on-premises model. Compatible APs and other network devices are purchased sepa-rately, and deployed and maintained on site by the enterprise IT department.

Although the market was once fairly small, Cisco’s grab for Meraki in 2012 prompted more WLAN vendors to get in the cloud-managed game, according to Nolan Greene, research analyst at IDC. Following Aruba’s and Xirrus’ march into cloud Wi-Fi last year, other notable names in wireless including HP, Motorola Solu-tions and Ruckus Wireless all entered the market this year. They joined specialized

vendors that deal only in cloud-managed wireless, such as AirTight Networks, which jumped into cloud Wi-Fi in 2011, and startup Relay2, which launched its cloud Wi-Fi platform earlier this year.

“In the last year, the number of vendors who are offering something has blown up,” Greene says. “Before, if you knew you wanted cloud, it was Aerohive or Meraki —and there was a fairly distinct differen-tiation [between them]. Now there is a wider range of vendors, and the differences between each of them are a little more nuanced.”

Cloud Wi-Fi Relieves Maintenance Burden Although it’s true that no two cloud Wi-Fi deployments are the same, one thing they

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all have in common is network engineers who are thrilled to have an empty rack in their data centers where a management server or controller would otherwise be.

“It’s one less thing that I have to worry about—one less software appliance that’s installed and configured,” Paxson says. “I don’t have to worry about bug fixes any-more. I don’t have to worry about updating my firmware anymore. Now, that is done in Aruba Central, so I’ve always got the lat-

est and greatest out of the cloud management [plat-form] instead of having to always upgrade.”

At the Pulaski County school district, IT pros are preparing for an iPad ini-tiative that will put Apple tablets in the hands of

every student and teacher—about 15,000 iPads over the next three years. Hogg, the district’s director of technical services, and his boss, CTO Will Reid, expect to have their hands full managing endpoints and the wireless networks at 36 schools. Their decision to offload the maintenance of Aerohive’s HiveManager platform to the cloud couldn’t come at a better time, they say.

“We’re being asked to do more with less all the time,” Reid says. “We’ve got a whole lot more technology in the classroom today than we ever did, but it’s not as if you can hire a whole new set of team members.”

“And we still have to work real hard to support the wireless [network] itself,” Hogg adds. “It’s just that the [WLAN manage-ment] server piece of that—the hosting piece of that—we don’t have to deal with.”

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“It’s one less thing that I have to worry about—one less

software appliance that’s installed and configured.”

—Aaron Paxson, SVP Worldwide

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Some networking pros have also found cloud-based management platforms to be more user-friendly.

Thao Xiong, network manager at the Milpitas Unified School District, which comprises 13 schools in Milpitas, Calif., says Meraki’s Web-based GUI makes it easy to replicate configuration changes throughout the network, as opposed to the more manual process for configuring RADIUS authentication and assigning access policies on several premises-based Cisco controllers.

“In the cloud-based [platform], you can do one configuration and copy it straight through. It’s sort of the same, but it’s much quicker, and you don’t really need to know any of the commands,” Xiong says. “You have to have someone who really knows the ins and outs of Cisco IOS to configure a lot

of the options in a traditional [controller].”Getting wireless deployed faster through-

out the district’s 13 sites wasn’t just a mat-ter of convenience when the network was installed in 2012. Due to the way the city handles its budget, the IT team didn’t get funding until mid-July of that year, even though the network needed to be ready be-fore students returned in late August.

“If we were to do the traditional control-ler install and configure each of the con-trollers, it would’ve taken us a much longer time,” says Chin Song, the district’s director of technology. “And now, if we need to add access points in classrooms or other spaces, all we have to do is run an Ethernet cable, plug it in and go.”

For networking pros using a cloud-based controller, that ability to scale without additional hardware is often a big draw

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for organizations that are unsure of their needs, says Matthias Machowinski, a di-recting analyst at Infonetics Research.

“You have a controller, and it’s some kind of limitation. Maybe it can only handle 50 to 100 access points, but if your infrastruc-ture’s growing to 101 access points, you need another controller,” he says. “With a services-based approach, it doesn’t matter; the infrastructure grows right along with it.”

And for many enterprises, the beauty of cloud-managed WLANs is their ability to set up enterprise-grade wireless with mini-mal resources.

“We have a lot of sites that are not di-rectly connected to our private network, so if we bring up wireless there, we’re going to have to configure that wireless stand-alone because there’s no way for it to get

its configuration [from a centralized plat-form],” says SVP Worldwide’s Paxson. “But 99% of all sites have a connection to the Internet, so … the configurations are auto-matically downloaded and brought online, and it does not require me to send out a technician or have any kind of technical ex-pertise at those remote areas.”

Enterprises Not ‘Going to Go Cloud-Managed Overnight’Cloud-managed Wi-Fi isn’t the best fit for everyone, however. Network engineers who use the approach agree that they would be more hesitant to adopt it if they had more stringent security requirements or had more complex needs. Moreover, large en-terprises already have sunk a lot into legacy investments.

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“Big enterprise customers have been do-ing wireless for so long that their networks are established,” Badman says. “Nobody’s about to just throw in the towel because migrating huge environments takes so much money, and if you haven’t completely had it with your vendor, it’s really hard to just jump ship as a big customer.”

In a 2013 survey of 162 IT pros, Infonetics Research found that nearly half of respon-dents (48%) expected to use a cloud-based service for AP management by 2015—up from 35% the previous year. And while cloud-managed Wi-Fi is expected to take off in certain markets, such buyer projec-tions can often be overly optimistic, cau-tions Machowinski.

“The world isn’t going to go cloud-man-aged overnight, but we are definitely seeing big growth here,” he says.

It’s expected to only represent 20% of the total WLAN infrastructure market by 2018, at which point growth will likely taper off, says IDC’s Greene. That’s because it isn’t de-signed to usurp an existing premises-based WLAN deployment. Instead, cloud-man-aged Wi-Fi targets a select market that sees a growing need for wireless but lacks the re-sources to do a traditional implementation everywhere, Greene adds.

“[These customers] need enterprise-grade Wi-Fi for the security that is embed-ded in enterprise solutions, as opposed to a consumer-grade solution that you’d pick up at Office Depot,” he says. “This re-ally brings enterprise-grade Wi-Fi to the last places where it hasn’t penetrated and where the needs are much more complex than what can be offered in a consumer-grade solution.” n

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

Data Mine Their top three drivers:

Security is the most important feature in APs.

72% The need to expand coverage

54% Upgrade to newer Wi-Fi standards

of those deploying WLAN management tools say security

management is the top feature they

look for.

37% Increase speed and capacity

14%More than half of networking pros operate wireless LANs (WLANs) in at least five locations.

have WLANs in 25 to 50 locations.

2/3

30%of networking pros are aligning their WLAN investments next year with security projects.

WI-FI GROWTH SIGNALS FOCUS ON SECURITY

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65%

of businesses investing in them this year think so.

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Three out of four networking pros are buying access points (APs) this year.

How many APs do they plan to purchase?

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

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32%of survey respondents plan to invest in wireless LAN security products this year.

The top two devices that were attacked last year?

Servers

End-user devices

Wireless security ignored: A timeline

Stolen credentials were the No. 1 mechanism for data breaches.

1997 The IEEE introduces the first wireless encryp-tion standard, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).

2003 The IEEE releases Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) as a stopgap, as the group works on WPA2.

2005 Attackers breach TJX Companies via its wireless network, which uses WEP.

2001 Researchers identify major secu-rity flaws in WEP.

2004 WPA2 is ratified by the IEEE. All enterprises are advised to adopt it immediately.

2007 Investigators discover cybercriminals stole 45 million of TJX customers’ credit card numbers.

Wireless LAN security is ranked as the

security challenge, beating insider threats,

advanced persistent threats and phishing

scams.

Source: TechTarget survey, 2,134 security professionals

No. 8

CLEARING THE AIR ON WIRELESS LAN SECURITY

• That’s how cybercriminals attacked Target in 2013, affecting up to 110 million customers.

• But poor network segmentation likely enabled thieves to access Target’s stockpile of credit card data.

But don’t panic; network devices were the least-common device attacked in 2013.

Source: 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon

“ Malicious traffic definitely passes through those, but they’re not typically com-promised during a breach.”

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Ω Everyone wants to reduce their network budget, and that’s one of the most popular ways white-box switches are being pitched by vendors today.But that doesn’t even scratch the surface on how they can radically improve network operations.

There are two magic words that can grab the attention of even the most skepti-cal IT professional: cost savings. And when the market was introduced to white-box switching—commodity switch hardware that comes preloaded with a third-party

SDN

White-Box Switches: Three Paths to Programmable Networks

BY DAVID GEER

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network operating system—the potential cost savings were often the first thing net-work engineers heard or read about this new approach.

But as interest in the concept of network programmability grows, it’s become clear that cost savings are one of the less inter-esting aspects of white-box switches. In addition to saving money, they make the network more automated, programmable and flexible, which turns out to be where

their real value lies. The white-box switch-

ing market, which in-cludes the software and the hardware it runs on, is expected to grow to ap-proximately $500 million by 2018, according to Lee Doyle, principal analyst

of Doyle Research in Boston. But it’s still early days for this corner of software-de-fined networking (SDN), as the white-box switching and network operating system (OS) market is currently quite small. As a point of comparison, white-box switching vendors like Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks “have, maybe, $2 million in revenue” between them today, Doyle says.

There are primarily three types of com-panies, he adds, gravitating toward white-box switches: Web-scale companies that have the resources to deploy and maintain them, data center operators apt to take on more risks in greenfield deployments, and some companies that are cloud-based though not Web-scale.

Most enterprises and service providers, however, will not be happy with just any

3.8%of data center switch ports that

were shipped in 2013 belonged to white-box switches.

Source: Market Share: Data Center Ethernet Switches, Worldwide 2013, Gartner, August 2014

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network OS. For most, their choice of OSes will ultimately be determined by the pro-fessional and technical backgrounds of the people who make the purchasing decisions.

“Server guys will pick Cumulus Net-works or Pica8, while the networking guys will look at Big Switch or Pica8,” says Joe Skorupa, a distinguished analyst at Gart-ner. “Cumulus Networks runs on white-box switches for use in data centers. People of-ten use it to support SDN overlay networks, though it is not SDN itself.”

In this feature, we explore three use cases for network programmability using white-box switches.

Managing Switches Like ServersDreamHost LLC, a Los Angeles-based Web hosting company and cloud provider,

uses Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network OS on white-box switches to ef-ficiently scale and manage its open source, multi-tenant public cloud services: DreamCompute.

“Running Cumulus Linux, we treat our switches as just another type of Linux server,” says Jonathan LaCour, vice presi-dent of cloud at DreamHost. “We use the same team, tools and processes to manage Cumulus Linux that we use for our Linux servers.”

This was a significant departure from DreamHost’s legacy switches, which ran on pre-installed proprietary software and tools that looked nothing like the Linux tools the IT team used to manage and mon-itor its compute and storage gear.

“Cumulus Linux helped us turn the network, which was a special case, into

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something that was not a special case,” LaCour says.

Cumulus’ white-box switches achieve this by replacing proprietary switch in-terfaces from large, legacy switch ven-dors with common Linux interfaces that all Linux server administrators can understand.

Running Cumulus Linux on white-box switches gives DreamHost increased per-formance and network visibility in a Linux platform, while enabling its engineers to use their existing Linux server adminis-tration tools for network automation. In the same way that Linux servers automati-cally configure upon installation, requir-ing no further attention except for small updates and changes, the Cumulus Linux controller automatically configures its white-box switches upon installation to

serve the DreamHost network. The net-work comprises customer pods—self-con-tained units of hardware that represent a single availability zone for DreamHost’s cloud—and command-and-control pods for management, running Cumulus Linux in a leaf-spine architecture over 40 Gigabit Ethernet.

“While network engineers program many switches today via automation, CLI [com-mand-line interface] and APIs, Cumulus Linux is unique in that the CLI and API turn out to be the same Linux tools that ev-ery systems and cloud engineer has been using for decades, such as the route com-mand and ipconfig,” LaCour says. “There is nothing new to learn, and everything is hardware-accelerated.”

There aren’t many differences be-tween a Linux server and a switch running

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Cumulus Linux—the main discrepancy being the number of ports on each one. A Linux server has two to four Ethernet ports for Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectiv-ity, whereas Cumulus’ white-box switches come with 48 10-Gigabit ports.

DreamHost uses DevOps tool Opscode Chef for server and net-work orchestration. And the fact that each switch runs versions 2 and 3 of the Open Shortest Path First protocol makes net-work operations, from configuration to trouble-shooting, easy. Dream-Host engineers program Cumulus Linux switches using Chef cookbooks and recipes—sets of reusable

configuration instructions—for inven-tory management and configuration. Its IT team uses the Python-based tool Graphite for monitoring.

Switches will fail, and when they do, Cu-mulus Linux enables DreamHost’s network to keep routing data and running smoothly until the switch is replaced, which is done by removing the failed switch from the network and automatically reforming the network using the remaining switches. The controller then configures the new switch and adds it to the network automatically. This reduces mean time to recovery from hours to minutes.

But like any network platform, Cumulus Linux is not perfect.

“Network OSes are still playing catch up with traditional switching infrastructure when it comes to esoteric features,” says

How important are open network APIs? We asked 76 networking pros investing in SDN this year to weigh in.

Source: TechTarget

43+37+11+9+s

9%Not

important11%Important

43%Very Important

37%Somewhat important

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LaCour. “This isn’t relevant in our case be-cause we prefer our underlying network to remain simple while we push any addi-tional features [the white-box switches are missing] into the SDN overlay.”

White-Box Switching Simplifies Network Taps To monitor traffic or troubleshoot network issues, enterprise network engineers often rely on network taps, such as sniffers or packet brokers. Service providers also use network taps to ensure service delivery and quality of service, using such tools to confirm the quality and delivery of traffic, or to proactively measure actual network performance against their service-level agreements.

Additionally, network engineers can use

taps to pinpoint the origins of network congestion.

“If people are streaming YouTube and choking the core network, that could de-grade the performance of SaaS applications or VoIP systems,” says Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing at white-box switch vendor Pica8 Inc. Network engineers need to diagnose the cause before they can insti-tute a cure, such as policy enforcement.

But the traditional approach to network taps can be problematic, especially in large-scale environments, where full visibility requires physical taps to be inserted in any device the traffic in question traverses.

The programmability in white-box switching offers an alternative. Pica8’s software, for example, enables network engineers to program the kind of tap they want to use into the OS via an API and

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controller—whether the tap is for mirror-ing traffic from a port, subnet or VLAN, or for aggregating all HTTP traffic passing through a switch to a single collector port.

The benefit of this approach is that engi-neers no longer need physical taps on every switch. They can tap from one switch and then think where and what in the logical network they should probe.

“The ability to have a dynamic and pro-grammable tap enables you to centrally manage network monitoring. You can at-tach the test tool to one port, and using pro-grammability, you can sense any virtual or physical port throughout the network. You can move to different ports and look at dif-ferent traffic flows from any given port,” Garrison says.

“You could also filter out certain traffic and see what is left as a means to help isolate

a root cause of a flooding event,” he adds.

Building the Network You WantThe University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) is home to the Open Compute Project (OCP) Certification and Solution Laboratory, a cloud and big data research laboratory, which is the first of its kind in North America. The lab certifies Open Compute technologies and key workloads for large enterprises while educating its students about open source technology. Its network operates on Cumulus Linux on top of the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE), which is currently the best boot loader for open networking on white-box switches, says Carlos Cardenas, associate director of applied research in cloud com-puting at UTSA.

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To support the lab’s ongoing research and work on open source technologies, its data center must be able to expand and adapt rapidly. The lab chose to run Cumulus Linux on white-box switches to automate various parts of the network using a stan-dard Linux OS and Linux tools.

Most of the network infrastructure in the UTSA lab is based on OCP-certified net-working technology, with switches from Edge-Core Networks and Quanta Com-

puter running Cumulus Linux. Its goal is to expand this architecture to the rest of the network, building it out with the same OCP-certified networking tech-nology and switches that run Cumulus Linux. This kind of network will adapt

to the increasing number of new, open source research projects.

With Cumulus Linux as the network OS, the lab’s network supports a broad vari-ety of easily accessible, open source server packages. This means the same software that is normally installed on Linux serv-ers—such as OpenSSH, OpenNTPD, isc-dhcp-server, DNSMasq and Quagga—is natively available on Cumulus Linux. These are not variants of these software packages, as is typically found on traditional network devices, but the exact ones found in Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. Switch interfaces appear to the engineers as if they were Linux servers—only with 48 ports.

“We use the same configuration manage-ment interface on the switches that we use on all our servers,” Cardenas says. “The

UTSA uses the same config- uration manage ment interface on its switches and servers, so the admins only need to know

Linux to program the switch.

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administrator only needs to understand Linux to program the switch.”

The mechanisms the lab uses for large-scale software updates and reconfigurations in network infrastructure are identical to the ones it uses for Linux servers. Cumulus Linux enables engineers working at scale to work with familiar scripts and APIs to pro-gram the network. Because the network OS is Linux-based, network engineers use their favorite automation tool—Ansible—to man-age network configurations for their white-box switches. And with ONIE, the lab loads

the network OS it wants on the hardware it wants.

“ONIE discovers the OS and installs it on the hardware,” Cardenas says.

White-box switching not only gives the lab its choice of hardware and network OS, but it also allows the lab’s IT team to choose from among the many Linux and Linux-compatible software applications to run on a programmable network. It’s an approach that exposes an automated network to much less risk and human error than tradi-tional switch architectures. n

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Pulse Checkk What’s your plan for UC as a Service (UCaaS)?

k Networking for desktop virtualization: What keeps you up at night?Respondents could select all that apply.

Source: UCC Spring 2014 Purchasing Intentions Survey, TechTarget, July 2014, N=662Source: Desktop virtualization survey, TechTarget, September 2014, N=1,130

We are taking a wait-and-see approach

Not sure

We are planning a major UCaaS migration

We are testing it

We are using it for most workers

We are using it to augment a legacy UC platform

Cloud UC is not viable for us

12%

17%

11%

9%

9%

9%

33%

86.5% of IT pros say their wide area network negatively affects their business-critical applications occasionally or frequently.Source: 2014 Wide Area Networking State-of-the-Market Report, Ashton Metzler & Associates, April 2014

37%Nervous about performance over the WAN

30%Traffic from printing, file

transfers and USB devices

28%Not having

enough network bandwidth

21%Applications

exceed network or protocol capabilities

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Ω It seems like a given that unified communications shouldbe, well, unified. But having a multi-vendor UC environment is still a struggle for many enterprises. UC federation products claim to fill the gap, so why haven’t they taken off?

The IT team at American Public Media, the second-largest producer and broad-caster of public radio programs in the United States, didn’t have anything as lofty as a “unified communications strategy” on its mind when it deployed its Avaya telephony system 14 years ago. It simply needed the phones to work.

UC Federation

Is UC Federation a Lost Cause? Or the Last Hope?

BY GINA NARCISI

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Over time, however, more types of enter-prise communication tools emerged and matured, and the broadcaster’s IT team realized its users needed more than just a phone line to get their work done. Ameri-can Public Media has since subscribed to Cisco’s WebEx Connect service for instant

messaging, WebEx for Web conferencing, and Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 suite to manage some of its communica-tions in the cloud, includ-ing email.

“We are a classic ex-ample of a mishmash of a whole bunch of different things without any real integration,” says Jess Probasco, senior network

engineer at American Public Media, based in St. Paul, Minn. The broadcaster’s unified communications (UC) tools “are all dispa-rate platforms,” he notes.

It’s a dilemma facing many enterprises with multi-vendor UC strategies that have grown organically over time. Employees started asking IT for tools and services like IM and video conferencing, or sometimes just downloading them on their own, to get their work done. Meanwhile, vendors be-gan building up their UC portfolios simi-larly—gradually adding new tools through acquisitions or having disjointed product teams develop them à la carte—without much thought to a wholly integrated, in-teroperable platform that offered every-thing in one package.

As a result, many businesses today are us-ing at least two different vendors to fulfill

One in three have a mixed UC environment How many unified communications (UC) platforms do you have in production?

Source: 2014 IT Decision Maker UC Survey Report, Wainhouse Research, April 2014, N=153

64+21+9+4+2+s

4%Four

2%Five

9%Three

64%One

21%Two

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their communications needs—often a legacy voice system from one vendor, and some newer collaboration features or ser-vices from another, says Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director at Nemertes Research. But due to the way many UC ven-dors have developed their products, these enterprises are stuck with proprietary sys-tems that are unable to talk to, also referred to as federate with, other vendors’ UC tools and services.

Enterprises seeking a tightly integrated UC experience have two choices: rip and replace until all but one vendor remains and use only features and tools from that vendor’s portfolio, or turn to UC federation products and services from a third-party provider. Moving away from a multi-vendor approach isn’t a viable option for every en-terprise, especially if its current UC tools

haven’t reached the point of depreciation. But many companies would still appreci-ate integration between their disparate UC systems and even to be able to use their enterprise UC tools to connect with third parties—like partners, clients and suppli-ers—by federating with external communi-cation systems.

Despite the real-world applicability, how-ever, UC federation just hasn’t taken off. And despite its insistence on sticking to the phrase unified communications, the indus-try seems to have stacked the deck against providing a truly unified UC experience.

The Case for UC Federation for External Communications UC vendors have tried addressing the prob-lems associated with businesses using a

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mix of communication products by adding more features to their own platforms, or by creating entirely new product suites or ser-vices to encourage customers to stick with a single-vendor model for their UC needs. But neither of these strategies has yet to address the issues that businesses have while trying to communicate—either inter-nally or externally—using disparate tools from different vendors.

UC federation services have emerged in recent years from specialized providers like Esna Technol-ogies, IntelePeer and Next-Plane. These providers offer various integration services for multi-vendor UC envi-ronments, and mostly fo-cus on providing federation between different IM and

presence platforms—the two communica-tion features that have the most pressing need for interoperability.

Bellevue College in suburban Seattle has a UC environment consisting of two different vendors’ tools: Microsoft Lync for collaboration and Mitel for voice. The college sees a value in interoperabil-ity between its communication tools, and currently has some federation in place that allows calls placed through Lync to run on its Mitel voice system, says Russ Beard, Bellevue’s vice president of information resources.

Rather than turn to a standalone, third-party federation provider, Beard and his team are working with F5’s virtual IP tech-nology and will standardize on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) stan-dard for exchanging authentication and

–15%The rate of decline in UC

federation deployments between 2012 and 2013 among enterprises

with at least 500 employees.Source: 2014 IT Decision Maker UC Survey Report, Wainhouse

Research, April 2014, N=153

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authorization between UC tools. Currently, Bellevue College is able to communicate with several of its partners and suppliers through federation with Lync.

“I can IM Aruba and Dell employees, [and] we’re in the process of federating with a couple of other companies, like Mi-crosoft,” Beard says.

Being able to maintain a dialogue in real-time with employees and partners is critical, and being able to communicate re-gardless of platform or employer via IM is

becoming just as impor-tant as voice communica-tion, Beard adds.

“I think the industry is moving that way,” he says. “And quite frankly, I can’t think of any [vendor] out there that will cover all

your needs. You have to be able to put mul-tiple solutions together.”

What Will It Take for UC Federation to Blossom? Businesses may be able to get by without a federated approach to UC if there isn’t a compelling use case, Lazar says.

“For businesses that have a use case for regular, real-time interactions with cli-ents, partners or suppliers outside of the company, UC federation could be an easy sell,” he says. These use cases can include complex manufacturing scenarios. “Where [there are] supply teams that are tightly in-tegrated, like manufacturing of airplanes, and automobiles—that’s one of the areas where there is an argument made for fed-eration because [these businesses] have to

Businesses may be able to get by without a federated

approach to UC if there isn’t a compelling use case.

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stay in close contact with their suppliers,” Lazar adds.

The demand for UC federation is also growing within the financial services in-dustry, especially for institutional organi-zations like mutual fund companies when mutual fund managers want the ability to interact with agents, Lazar explains.

Ultimately, however, no matter what the name implies, UC federation is another in-vestment that not every business is going to be able to justify.

“I think it’s very useful. I think it’s very cool, especially when you have all the mobile integration that can be done, and the [single] phone number calling,” says American Public Media’s Probasco. “I have ideas for what I’d do here when I can. But while I say all that, I go back to the incentive to spend half a million [dollars], or really a million, over a one-, two- or three-year period. It’s hard to get a com-pany to want it bad enough to spend that money.” n

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THE SUBNET | Q&A | JESSICA SCARPATI

What Drives Voice Engineers to Drink

In this edition of The Subnet, we chat with Amy Arnold, a senior network engi-neer who works in the public sector, about all the things that can go wrong during a voice upgrade, what her dream network looks like and the challenge of getting deeper into information security.

What are you working on now?I have a lot of projects on my plate, but probably one of the two biggest ones is planning a voice upgrade. We’re getting ev-erything sorted out to take [our Cisco Uni-fied Communications Manager platform] to the next major version. It never sounds

like much, but there are all these details be-cause of all the applications that [integrate] with it. And I’m also replacing my firewalls with newer, bigger firewalls, so that’s an-other big project that we’ve got in the next few weeks.

Tell me more about the voice upgrade.Our phone system, our voicemail system, our contact center solution—those are all getting upgraded. Currently, we’re on [version] 8.6 and we’re going to 9.1. It’s not the latest version, but it’s the latest stable version—which is always important when you’re dealing with voice.

n Amy Arnoldn Senior Network

Engineern Public Sectorn Dallas, Texasn Twitter:

@amyengineer

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It’s a lot of intricate detail, and I think that’s what people forget. I have done this on the consulting side as well, and when I would go in to do voice upgrades, clients would forget third-party applications that depend on your voice system and [are af-fected by] what version you’re on. Call re-cording is a good [example of ] one, as well as faxing—which, unfortunately, is still out there—and paging systems and all of these different applications. [People] are think-ing, ‘Oh, we’re just upgrading our voice sys-tem,’ but if you’re not careful, you’ll break a lot of stuff when you do it.

It’s a lot of back-end research where you find out what [systems are] compatible, what versions are compatible and what has to be upgraded first. And can your phones support the latest firmware, or do you have to do step upgrades? It’s the reason voice

engineers drink. It’s so detail intensive, and it’s not the hardest work you can do—it’s not rocket science, per se—but, definitely, if you’re not careful, you could miss some-thing, and that always makes for a very long cutover.

Is a voice upgrade gone awry difficult to troubleshoot? It depends on how badly you broke it. I did know another voice engineer’s customer who took it upon themselves to upgrade their contact center without upgrading all of their other stuff, and it was very difficult to get back to where they needed to be be-cause they didn’t do what they needed to do. Usually, though, if you’re doing things in a certain order … you can revert back to the inactive partition.

I know Cisco voice, so I’m not sure if

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Avaya voice and Mitel voice can do the same thing, but typically you can go back-wards. It’s just a matter of how painful it’s going to be to go back. It depends on how far you went down that road. It’s never good to, before an upgrade, not check to make sure they have a valid backup. Those are rookie mistakes. Try not to make those.

If you could build a network from scratch, and money was no object, what technologies or architectures would you look to first?That’s a hard question because it’s hard to imagine a world with no budget! I’ve seen, on both the consulting side and in the public sector, that there are places where you cut back on redundancy. You know you could do it better, but because of constraints, you take that hit. So I would

love a network that was really redundant. I know that sounds cheesy, but that’s where I would go. I would spend my money on getting that extra supervisor card for ev-ery switch that can hold it, getting dual switches everywhere and really focusing on a truly redundant design—not having to cut any corners.

I don’t think about particular brands or any one technology, but I would just like a network design that was truly redundant and truly resilient, which is the holy grail of networks. I’m not even sure that exists, but it would be cool.

What is your biggest technical challenge these days?I’m dealing a lot more with security, which I haven’t been as focused on. I’ve been able to [configure] a few firewalls and things

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like that, and now my department actually [oversees] security, so it’s a new skill set. I’m trying to think policy-wise and also just from a configuration standpoint to learn those skills.

I focused on voice for a long time when consulting, and I’ve done route/switch net-work engineering for a long time, but when you really start digging into specialties like security, it’s a lot to learn.

It seems like a lot of people get into IT somewhat by accident. What was your career path, and how did you wind up in networking?I thought I was going to be an attorney. I even went as far as to get a full scholarship to law school—and I dropped out in a week. I loved the theory of law, but with the actual practice of law, I wasn’t feeling that this

was what I wanted to do with my life. I took several classes after that. I had

an undergrad degree, so I thought about, ‘What did I really want to do?’ I took a pro-gramming class and I took a networking class, and I loved the networking class. I was hooked, and the class was from the Cisco Networking Academy, so I did all of [the classes they offered]. I did them all quickly, and I loved it.

Did you consider yourself a technical person before that?My dad is a programmer, so we grew up going up to the data center with him and spending time in his office. I could fix my own computer, and if I deleted something, I could recover it—things like that, you know, that average users couldn’t necessarily do. But I didn’t have a huge passion for it and,

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honestly, I still don’t have a huge passion for endpoints. Desktop support does not thrill me, and I do not want to be a full-time server admin. But I love networking, and I love building networks. I just think it’s fun.

Here’s a different personal question: What’s the best place you’ve ever traveled to?I was very fortunate when I was young, about 18, to go to Nairobi in Kenya. I had

never been outside the U.S. at that point, and it was incredible to see how other people lived. It gave me a real appreciation for what I had, for one, and an appreciation for another culture. I had never experi-enced that—seeing how other people lived. And the people in Kenya were incredibly gracious and kind to people they didn’t even know. You don’t see that a lot over here. [Their culture has] just an incredible amount of compassion and generosity. n

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CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID GEER is a freelance technology journalist. His work has appeared in Scientific American, The Economist, the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer magazine, GSN: Government Security News and many more industry publications. Prior to his work as a journalist, Geer was a technician at CoreComm in Cleveland, Ohio.

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

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

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Rivka Gewirtz Little, Executive Editor

Shamus McGillicuddy, Director of News and Features

Jessica Scarpati, Features and E-zine Editor

Kara Gattine, Executive Managing Editor

Brenda L. Horrigan, Associate Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis, Site Editor

Gina Narcisi, News Writer

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Neva Maniscalco, Graphic Designer

FOR SALES INQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT:

Doug Olender, Senior Vice President/Group Publisher [email protected]

TechTarget, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466

©2014 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTar-get reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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