Q&A: Addressing the MPLS challenge

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
09/07/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Q&A with Nexagent CEO Charlie Muirhead
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Network World Executive Guide: Application Drivers: Pedal to the
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This Network World Executive Guide examines the move toward
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Today's focus: Q&A: Addressing the MPLS challenge

By Jim Duffy

Maintaining MPLS VPN service consistency has emerged as a major
issue for companies employing multiple carriers for global
reach. Nexagent is a 5-year-old company based in the U.K. that
develops hardware and software designed to link carrier
networks. CEO and founder Charlie Muirhead recently spoke with
Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

NW: Is MPLS VPN service consistency a big concern among
corporations?

Muirhead: The challenge is connecting networks in a scalable and
reliable way while ensuring that you can extend the rich service
model from one network to another rather than diluting it down
to the lowest common denominator services. How do you solve this
from an operational and process standpoint? There's a whole
bunch of choices available to them.

Historically, enterprises pretty much built the solutions
themselves. They would buy bandwidth from many carriers. That
was a big task. Along comes the world of VPNs and the large
international carriers would turn around and say, 'If you want
consistency and [service-level agreements], you have to give it
all to me, on-net.' That jarred some customers who played their
bandwidth suppliers off of each other to keep them keen on price
and quality. So these global enterprises find themselves in an
interesting position: Do they go to a single global carrier
knowing that that carrier doesn't have the network in all the
countries, and somewhere under the hood there's an activity
going on which is really network integration? The default is to
continue doing it yourself. That means buying MPLS services from
different carriers around the world and integrating those. The
third option is to go straight to a systems integrator who
historically would essentially take over running your in-house
[do-it-yourself] architecture with great scale of economy. Then
you have the virtual network operators that are just beginning
to emerge.

NW: Sounds like a daunting problem for a company.

Muirhead: It is. The global enterprises have a lot of choices.
There's pros and cons to each. They're always quite suspicious
about the motivations of the global carriers because they're
always trying to get your traffic onto their facilities so they
get their margins. And they're always a bit suspicious about
what's actually going on under the hood and where do they have
network and where don't they. Most of the time you'll hear about
carriers responding to bids with pricing for geographies they
say they're going to have when it's not quite in place yet.

NW: How do interconnected carriers hash out the billing and
settlement issues between them?

Muirhead: Let's say a global carrier wants to have partners in
five off-net regions. Their requirements will be to link up
carriers to their own core network in a secure and reliable way,
where they can put multiple customer connections to the same
physical interconnect. So they need to have a method of
physically connecting those and controlling which VPNs extend
across which partnerships. That requires quite a bit of network
architecture to be done. Then you need a way to run services
that go across [those interconnect points]. [Carriers] need to
do a pre-sales process of examining which partners they're going
to have to use in which countries and they have to come up with
some way of modeling that. Those pre-sales processes have got to
be pretty thorough because you've got to come up with a price
for the solution that you can bid to the customers to make you
money, but still keen enough to win the business. You've got to
have the tools to calculate what needs to be done on your
partners' networks. The instruction you send to your partner is
typically a work order, which says 'I want this service from you
in these countries, on these parts of your networks, with these
SLAs for these sites and these three addresses, and this kind of
monitoring frequency and so forth, and here's the money we're
going to pay you . . .' That's the kind of level of detail that
would go to each of your carrier partners and then that would
all need to go into a project plan. And you need to track the
progress of each of your carrier partners around the world to
make sure they deliver what they're supposed to deliver on time.
So there's a whole assurance process that goes on which feeds up
into the macro-assurance process that the global carrier will
already have in place.

NW: You recently announced that you joined the MFA Forum, which
is also working on an MPLS Interconnect specification. Why?

Muirhead: Four years ago, we delivered Version 1 of our
interconnect architecture. Over the course of those years, it's
evolved. Now that the industry is waking up to the challenge, we
wanted to get the appropriate forums thinking about the problem
and agreeing how that should look in the future. We absolutely
support an open interconnect architecture and our software over
time has evolved to support whatever comes through those
standards processes. We are participating and contributing as
much as we can of what we've learned into that process so that
we get the best brains in the world thinking about what this
should look like so we can come up with something for the
industry. That, of course, will be an interconnect point that
enables the carriers that have agreed on standardized service
definitions to work very easily together. We're also jointly
proposing a new working group in the IETF with a handful of
vendors and a handful of the carriers . . . on this area of VPN
service interconnection.

NW: You're also a member of the IPsphere Forum, which is also
addressing the interconnect issue. Are these activities
redundant?

Muirhead: They're all doing different things. The IETF is
working at a protocol level. The MFA is about implementation,
best practices at the network layer - what they call in the
IPsphere the ICI, Inter-Carrier Interconnect. The IPsphere is
working at the services architecture level saying, 'What
services do customers want to buy? What will those look like?'
and how do the different partners signal to each other what they
want. So they all have different functions and this is such a
huge space that there's no one organization that could tackle
all of that.

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_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Jim Duffy

Jim Duffy is managing editor of Network World's service provider
equipment coverage
<http://www.networkworld.com/topics/service-providers.html>. He
has 18 years of high-tech reporting experience, including over
12 years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at
Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at
Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at
<mailto:jduffy@nww.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Ciena
Network World Executive Guide: Application Drivers: Pedal to the
Metal

This Network World Executive Guide examines the move toward
tighter security, optimized performance and ubiquitous Web
services. Learn about new approaches to securing today's
applications. See what users are doing in their quest for top
performance. And, take a detailed look at present and future
implications of Web services and service-oriented architectures.

http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=112800
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

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