Home North AmericaNorth America I 2014 Innovation for a new era of information technology

Innovation for a new era of information technology

by Administrator
Ariel EfratiIssue:North America I 2014
Article no.:7
Topic:Innovation for a new era of information technology
Author:Ariel Efrati
Title:CEO
Organisation:Telco Systems
PDF size:198KB

About author

Ariel Efrati is the Chief Operating Officer of BATM Advanced Communications (LSE: BVC; TASE: BATM), where he oversees BATM’s global business operations and telecommunications practices, and acts as Chief Executive Officer for Telco Systems, a BATM wholly owned subsidiary.

Previously, Ariel held several senior positions in the telecom industry. As Senior Vice President, Ariel led Amdocs (NYSE:DOX) Venture Investments, Open Innovation and Product M&A unit. He headed Amdocs corporate competitive strategy unit, and served as the General Manager of the Service Fulfillment Product Business Division. Ariel also led Amdocs strategic and substantial entry to the OSS markets through organic growth and M&A activities.

His past senior positions include leading an advanced technological unit in the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. He was also the CEO of CallmyName, a startup in the Mobile sphere. He is a member of several successful startups’ BoDs, and is highly experienced in technological and market innovations.

Ariel is a software engineer and an EMBA graduate of the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).

Article abstract

As the demand for communicating more data grows, the technologies that support such growth are evolving. In particular, SDN and NFV are complementary technologies that optimize inter-connectivity and service delivery by decoupling software and data from their platforms. However, in hosting more data on the Cloud and in utilizing hosted network facilities to access it, more control traffic is generated, and even more data traverses the network. The new era of zettabyte affects all corners of the industry, from access and transport capacity, to enhanced network management and SLA monitoring

Full Article

Information technology is well embedded into our daily lives – we are constantly sharing data across networks via a range of devices – yet IT, networking and data exchange is still a rapidly evolving concept guided by a number of innovation-driven industries. Technology and innovation are two areas well known to go hand-in-hand. As the information we share across networks, as well as the complexity of the networks themselves, continue to evolve and expand, the software and processes used to control the networks need to keep pace with this evolution.

People expect more from their networks – we want our information fast, accurate, anytime, anywhere. We’re also putting a record-high amount of content out into the world, and seeking to distribute it more often, and in wider circles. This, in turn, has generated a data and traffic explosion, causing network limitations to wear thin. It forces seeking new concepts and innovations to remedy the congestion… leading us to the Zettabyte Era of information technology.

Some internet traffic researchers believe that global internet traffic will amount to 1.4 zettabytes (ZBs) in 2017 – larger than the total traffic in the whole history of the internet from 1984 to 2012 (1.2ZB). The drivers behind this notion are attributed to more users coming online, users connecting to more devices, growing network and broadband speeds and more media rich content being shared.

A good example of network capacities needing to accommodate the impending Zettabyte Era is the past year’s enhancements in medical science for genome mapping, or, the creation of a genetic map assigning DNA fragments to chromosomes. Today, this information has become much more accessible due to the reducing network cost. With the increase in production, comes an increase in sharing. One human genome map requires around 200GB of data. Doctors and scientists would like to get these files in real time, and in some cases, share it with their colleagues. This immense size of data sharing will have a dramatic impact on current networks, which are presently not designed to support such high volumes of traffic. Today’s traffic is estimated to be roughly over 1,000 petabytes of information per day – and rising – thus, the next generation of telecom networks will have to support zettabyte traffic – that’s 1 billion terabytes!!

Moreover, the telecommunications industry has recently experienced fantastic growth in mobile internet traffic, which is expected to reach 11.2EByte (exbibyte=260) by 2017. New services and applications, such as ‘catch-up TV’ and social video sites like YouTube , raise demand for mobile video and high-definition (HD) content, which further increases bandwidth requirements. Improvements in smartphones that drive the desire for HD content are expected to be some of the main contributors towards the necessity of zettabyte networking capacities.

The explosion of data traffic has forced network architects to form new networking concepts and designs, in anticipation of the Zettabyte Era. Virtualization and cloud technologies are becoming an integrated part of IT, meaning more and more information will be stored and processed outside the core devices. The externalization of currently internal enterprise IT functions onto the cloud and into datacenters has been dictated by the need for performance assurance. SDN and NFV are two good examples of this evolution.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have been hot topics of late in the telecommunications and IT industries. They are complementary approaches, offering new ways to design, deploy and manage networks and services. Simply put, SDN focuses on virtualize inter-connection with other networks and NFV focuses on the virtualized services – both working to ensure optimal quality of service and experience for the user. Therefore, the future success of NFV and SDN within the service provider’s environment has to be tightly coupled with the underlying transport technologies. It’s thanks to these technologies that software can finally be decoupled from the hardware, removing the constraints imposed by the actual networking device that delivers the service. In other words, network administrators are able to manage network services separately from the device that implements them, and can deployr multi-vendor solutions across a network. With NFV, the network hardware infrastructure allows for the option to scale the network elements. Similar to adding more capacity to a datacenter through the use of an additional blade – operators can add more standard open hardware to a network, as traffic grows.

There are certain requirements imposed on transport networks for running networked functions remotely. The first is higher capacity. With the adoption of SDN & NFV, many functions will relocate from customer premises to datacenters. The result will be that more traffic will have to traverse the network, either as control traffic between the end device and the virtual service, or as data payload traffic, where it was previously handled by dedicated customer platforms and is now handled deeper in the network (depending on where the NFV service allocates to it).

Another requirement is an increase in demand for service-level agreement assurance and measurements. When extracting an inline function from the enterprise and pushing it into the service provider network, the delay and packet loss of the network has to be monitored in real time, as major changes in these parameters may drastically impact the networking functions’ processes. Monitoring loss and delay will help assure the application’s health and identify degradation of these service parameters. While more and more services are moving out from the enterprise, the availability and QoE (Quality of Experience) still has to remain the same – otherwise customers will reject this new technology.

There is a general consensus in the industry that network virtualization through SDN & NFV will be implemented by mobile operators and vendors within the next few years, and this is already happening in North America. Tier 1 wireless operators appear to be leading the way for virtualization in the U.S. In the fall of 2013, AT&T announced plans to virtualize their networks by implementing SDN & NFV. This reconfigured network architecture is expected to accelerate time to market for new products and services, while simplifying the network and improving functionality.

This trend appears to be catching on, as the U.S. Government also has plans to move to cloud computing – an infrastructure complementary to SDN & NFV implementation. In 2013, the U.S. Government adopted the ‘Cloud First’ policy, driving wider adoption of cloud computing in the public sector.

SDN and NFV mark a new era in the number and type of services the carriers and service providers will be able to provide and the time to market for which these services will be launched, mainly because of the shift from hardware-based services to software-based services. These services will pose new quality requirements for the networks, some of them more complex, forcing the network to provide highly granular hierarchical quality of service (HQoS).

While these innovative technologies have brought new spirit to the telecom market, and carriers are starting to explore how they can take advantage of them, we’re still some years away from major commercial deployments. So the short term concern is how to make current network investments future proof, while preparing for the Zettabyte Era.

The Zettabyte Era will have great effects on networking and information technology in many ways: networks will need to become much faster, while allowing for a higher level of decision making, policing and optimization; network processes will become more automated, as an increasing amount of information will go online and more content will be stored off-site in big datacenter locations; and most crucially, networks will evolve to be more resilient, measurable, self-aware, self-healing, and cyber-aware, capable of detecting and isolating networking attacks.

It is clear that a lot of thought and innovation will have to go into the preparation for the Zettabyte Era. It affects everyone and everything, from the architects that design the networks, to the enterprises and people sharing information and services over the networks. SDN & NFV are just the beginning of a data exchange revolution, as the world prepares to innovate for a new era of information technology.

 

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