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FierceTelecom.com 3 April 2012 COE Still Looking to Thrive in a Carrier-Grade World BY DAN O’SHEA � Ethernet has been looking to shake the “best-effort” tag for more than a decade. Giving it your best effort is great for little leaguers, but carriers run in more competitive circles. In recent years, Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) specifications, other new standards and new technology models from vendors have made much progress in helping Ethernet acquire a new tag: “Carrier-grade.” However, some in the industry think Ethernet still can do better, particularly in situations where it would be applied in transport networks on a connection-oriented, point-to-point basis, and that’s where Connection-Oriented Ethernet (COE) comes in. COE approaches represent the latest attempt to bring even more deterministic qualities to Ethernet, to make it more closely resemble the legacy technologies it is succeeding, like ATM and Frame Relay. “Carriers want the look and feel of TDM, but the lower cost and greater simplicity of the packet world, while still having all the determinism and low-latency qualities of TDM,” said Andy Walker, director of portfolio solutions at Ciena. Deployment of Ethernet technology in transport networks to support applications like mobile and wireline broadband backhaul have become more frequent, and while some of these deployments do meet the MEF’s carrier-grade benchmarks, some still don’t, Walker said. COE is not a brand new concept for addressing these deployments, as it was first developed more than a decade ago. It has yet to be widely deployed, but could become more central to network strategies as carrier progress on building out packet optical platforms in the core networks. COE comes in different flavors. Provider backbone bridgetraffic engineering (PBB-TE, also previously known as PBT) is the Ethernet-centric standard, while multiprotocol label switchingtransport profile (MPLS-TP) is the MPLS-centric approach. Vendors also may deliver their own variations, such as Fujitsu’s Ethernet Tag Switching, similar to the concept of VLAN tag switching. “COE is a broad term and makes Ethernet in general a more point- to-point friendly technology, but the implementations of it are more specific,” said Ralph Santitoro, director of carrier Ethernet market development at Fujitsu. “If a Tier 1 carrier is expanding right now from their legacy network, it depends on whether the SONET people or the Ethernet people are in charge. The decision could be made on a case-by-case basis or application by application.” Santitoro argued that the Ethernet-centric approach is the more cost-effective one over the long term, and pointed out that Ethernet-centric COE is the model with the fully approved standard behind it, while the MPLS-derived version awaits the completion of operations, administration and maintenance standards. However, some in the market have observed that MPLS-TP also will be supported by many vendors, and Santitoro acknowledged that there will be different implementations. “With any technology, there are different ways of implementing to solve different problems and address different preferences,” he said. “It is good to have both approaches in the quiver,” said John Hawkins, senior advisor for product marketing at Ciena. He added that COE has started to more frequently enter into discussions Ciena is having with carriers, sometimes when the carrier generally talks about the need to bring more determinism to Ethernet, and other times when the carrier wants to satisfy a particular need, such as scaling a customer’s enterprise network by creating tunnels to keep their traffic together, or enabling backhaul for a mobile carrier. Mobile backhaul is probably the COE application that is getting the most attention right now, but Ciena’s Walker said that is likely to change when carriers start deploying COE links in greater numbers to address business broadband. “The carriers are under so much pressure right now to get backhaul right, and make sure the traffic gets from the cell site to the switching center in good shape,” he said. “But, the business market has 10 times the end points of the backhaul market.” How soon COE becomes more broadly adopted remains to be seen. For now, many carriers continue to use Carrier Ethernet. “There is not a lot of demand for COE today,” said Prayson Pate, chief technology officer at Overture Networks. “Some carriers are more focused on Carrier Ethernet, which they believe already has the quality of service attributes they’re looking for,” he said. “Some companies are positioning COE as a way to improve the ability to carry Carrier Ethernet, which makes it an alternative to MPLS, so it depends on whether your organization is focused on pushing MPLS further out.” Pate said Overture is not supporting COE now, but has not closed the book on it. “If our carrier customers want to use COE in the future, then that’s what we’ll build for them,” he said. Though wide-scale COE deployment may not be a reality just yet, it is clear that COE features are going to be important aspects of vendors’ next-generation packet optical platforms. As carriers get further away from their legacy technologies and more toward full packet optical migrations, COE naturally will become more common in networks. “People like Ethernet because it is multi-point, but its multi-point nature also makes it really hard to use in the WAN,” Santitoro said. “COE resolves that issue. The use of ATM and frame relay is declining in networks. If you built a new network today, you would not be using those technologies at all. You would use IP and Ethernet.” l April 2012 4
FierceTelecom.com 5 April 2012 One COE Standard Down, One to Go BY DAN O’SHEA � Whether or not a technology is fully standardized is sometimes almost as much a gating factor for carrier adoption as cost is. As with their adoption of many other technologies, carriers looking at Connection-Oriented Ethernet for solving various problems in their networks will want to know they can rely on standard methods of implementing and managing Connection- Oriented Ethernet (COE). That begs the question: Is there a single COE standard that carriers can fall back on? Like everything with COE, the answer depends on what sort of organization you come from, which technology you are planning on using and how soon. Anyone from an Ethernet-centric organization who is looking for any Ethernet-centric approach to COE to deploy right now does have a fully developed and approved standard to guide them. “There is a common misunderstanding that there is no single standard for COE today, but there is,” said Ralph Santitoro, director of Carrier Ethernet market development at Fujitsu. Provider backbone bridgingtraffic engineering (PBB-TE), which is based on the original concept for provider backbone transport, an Ethernet-centric approach which was developed by BT and Nortel Networks, has been standardized by the IEEE in the form of IEEE 802.1qay. That standard, which was approved by the IEEE back in 2009, is actually an amendment to the 802.1ah Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) standard, with the amended aspects addressing how carriers can control or eliminate various connectionless Ethernet features. The Ethernet-centric approach also relies on the IEEE 802.1ag connectivity fault management standard for some operations, administration and maintenance recommendations, as well as IEEE 802.3ad for link aggregation. It also draws from ITU Operations Administration and Maintenance (OAM) specifications like ITU-T G.8031 and ITU-T Y.1731, which governs performance quality. Meanwhile, the MPLS-TP (multi-protocol label switchingtransport profile) standard remains a work in progress, specifically with unfinished business around the OAM aspects of MPLS-TP. A T-MPLS standard was once being worked on by the ITU-T, and more than two years ago, the ITU-T and the IETF decided to merge their efforts, mainly so that the IETF could be sure that existing IP MPLS configurations in the market were given proper consideration in the new standard. “MPLS still needs OAM standardization to be worked out before it is a complete standard,” continued on page 7 Seeing the Forest through the Trees BY CHriStOpHEr CullAN, prODuCt MArkEtiNg MANAgEr, iNfOViStA The Transparency of Carrier Networks and the Cloud � With service revenues estimated to be $30-$40 billion in 2012, Carrier Ethernet is the fastest-growing carrier network technology domain. The mechanisms used to deliver these services are varied, presenting opportunities and challenges for each carrier in terms of successful delivery. As with most technology debates, there’s an amount of hard evidence indicating what’s better and best, and then there’s another, sometimes more powerful force: the market itself. Adoption is often driven by more than just the consideration of the “best technology” - additional factors include current investments and the time to deliver, among others. Regardless of technology debates, it’s important to take a step back to look at the “big picture” -the technology itself, including its maturity, deployment and management challenges. Today, many professionals in the carrier industry are discussing the impact of mobility on network traffic. However, another equal and possibly greater influencer on carrier networks is emerging: cloud computing. Increasing amounts of data and control traffic are being moved from globally and nationally distributed data centers and enterprise end users to cloud providers. This trend has not gone unnoticed by network or IT standard bodies, but there seems to be an awareness gap between the two. This gap was one of the primary reasons the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) recently published its white paper “Carrier Ethernet for the Delivery of Private Cloud Services.” This paper aims to open a dialogue between networking and IT (more specifically the carrier and cloud communities) to ensure that Connection-Oriented Ethernet continues to evolve to handle the major shift in telecommunications needs driven by the cloud. This first effort demonstrates how the current Carrier Ethernet constructs such as Ethernet Virtual Private Lines (EVPL) can be used to address different network use cases, such as having multiple, private lines to different cloud consumers connecting to a particular cloud providers’ data center multiplexed on one UNI. In essence, more local area network (LAN) traffic will be migrated to the wide area network (WAN) and the differences in cost and scale can drastically impact the quality of service if not properly addressed. The simplicity that cloud computing promises the enterprise causes added complexity for the providers of those services, making management all the more critical. Assuring that the application needs are mapped to the network, Sponsored Content and that the COE performs up to and above the requirements that cloud consumers like the enterprise demand, is necessary for the enterprise to achieve the benefits of cloud computing. Ensuring that enterprise customers are able to visualize the end-to-end usage and the performance of their Ethernet services, in the context of cloud computing, is critical. The ability to provide the verification (i.e. SLA) of application quality across the Ethernet service (with latency and delay measurements of a particular (CoS) and its mapped applications is important for the enterprise. Enhancing that verification with real-time visibility and performance intelligence enables the enterprise to better manage their service usage, requirements and the end user. This enhancement is the next milestone in maximizing the potential benefits that Carrier Ethernet can deliver. InfoVista understands that achieving this quality verification requires a solution that can gather information and provide the visibility of the Ethernet services internal to the communications service provider. A white paper, “Accelerating Revenue through Carrier Ethernet Service Differentiation” is available to learn more. l April 2012 6
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