Network World

NetworkWorld
Networking Strategies for the Enterprise
Building a better plane
The IEEE has set up a task force to create a standard
for high-speed Ethernet switch backplanes.
Page 3.
®
February 3, 2006 Volume 16, No. 3 $2.50
Eye on the ball
Gearing up for grid
Avaya and its partners are hard at work building
the network to support soccer’s World Cup.
Page 10.
Storage giant EMC recently unveiled a partnership designed
to enhance the firm’s grid computing strategy.
Page 14.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICROSOFT CORP.
Nortel rallies
remote routers
will remain committed to the
enterprise,” he says.
“Bill Owens, Zafirovski’s
Nortel Networks Corp. is hoping
to fill a gap in its enterprise router predecessor, kept saying that
product range with the purchase Nortel would remain committed
of Tasman Networks Inc., as the to the enterprise business. But
there had been some
company tries to nibspeculation about dible away at the massive The Tasman
vestiture in the entermarket share held by deal has
prise division, especialCisco Systems Inc.
confirmed
ly after Mike Zafirovski
Nortel will pay
was named as CEO,
US$99.5 million for new CEO
given his previous backTasman after scouting Zafirovski’s
for a converged net- commitment ground in wireless.”
The acquisition has
work router suitable to enterprise.
ended that speculation
for small- and mediumsized enterprise branch offices and dispelled any rumours of
Toronto-based Nortel disinvestand distributed remote sites.
The acquisition reaffirms ing in its enterprise division, says
Nortel’s commitment to the Gruia. “It shows that the enterenterprise market and gives the prise will remain a division among
PBX leader an answer to Cisco’s the other divisions that are kept
Integrated Services Router (ISR) by Nortel.”
The deal was targeted by Atul
line, says Ronald Gruia, program
leader, emerging communica- Bhatnager, vice-president and
tions, for Toronto-based Frost & general manager for Nortel’s enterprise data network division,
Sullivan Inc.
“Nortel has confirmed that based in Santa Clara, Calif.
new CEO Michael Zafirovski
See Nortel, page 4
BY MARK ELS
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates puts the Xbox through its paces as he spars with CEO Steve Ballmer,
right, at the International Consumer Electronics Show. See story page 6.
RBC embraces IP
BY MARK ELS
RBC Financial Group will begin
switching most of its Toronto telephone lines to a Cisco converged
IP network this month, targeting
nine of its 10 downtown locations
in a multimillion-dollar managed
services deal with Bell Canada,
IBM and Cisco.
Canada’s largest bank is converting 8,400 Centrex lines to
VoIP telephones as part of Bell
PM 40063800
Canada’s strategy to move its
top enterprise customers to Internet Protocol telephony by
the end of 2006. Last year Bell
signed Manulife Financial for
$140 million and the Bank of
Montreal for $84 million. Financial details of the RBC agreement were not disclosed.
RBC excluded one of its
downtown sites because the upgrade to VoIP from a PBX system
did not make business sense, says
Bob Matthews, senior manager
of telecommunications for Royal Bank of Canada.
RBC is moving ahead cautiously in its IP implementation,
upgrading switches and routers
where necessary but replacing
only the telephone handsets in the
initial stages. The bank is buying
into the future of voice and data
convergence, but is adopting a
wait-and-see approach on the application side of the technology.
“It’s for the future we’re doing this,” says Matthews.
“We believe the future applications that we can add to these IP
phones — and they aren’t developed yet — are going to be helping
us to serve our clients better.
“Today we’re saving money,
but tomorrow we believe it’s
going to help us do our business better.”
See RBC, page 3
Top technology trends
to watch for in 2006
IT WORLD CANADA STAFF
As technology professionals, we move in unpredictable
spheres of innovation. But earlier this year, the editors and
staff of IT World Canada gathered around, blew the dust off
the old crystal ball and took a
murky peek inside. Here are
five meaningful insights into
what we believe will matter ITwise in 2006.
Evolution of outsourcing
The practice of handing off IT
infrastructure and processes to
service companies is poised to
move significantly down market
to smaller business customers.
This is the new frontier for outsourced IT services in 2006.
However, that service delivery
will need to come through a range
of new and unique types of service
offerings and approaches.
See Top, page 4
News
Network World Canada February 3, 2006 www.ITworldcanada.com 3
Editor’s Angle Michael Martin
Carriers can’t
ignore Wi-Fi
Most mobile workers can’t live without their cell phones, but
there are times when even the most cell-addicted road warrior is forced to go without. Many remote rural areas still lack
solid cell coverage and even in the core of downtown Toronto, thick concrete walls and floors can cause signal strength
bars to shrink or fade away altogether.
One way to get around cellular black holes is
a combination of voice over IP and Wi-Fi. At the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last
month, UTStarcom unveiled the GF200 — one
of the first dual cell/VoIP phones. The GF200
looks just like like a standard cell phone, but can
connect to both GSM and Wi-Fi networks.
Unfortunately, Howard Frisch, director of
handset product management at UTStarcom, believes it’s
highly unlikely existing North American cell phone companies will be interested in promoting a handset that could significantly cut into their revenues. If users are able to make
VoIP calls on their cell phones while they’re at home or
work, they’ll reduce their number of billable cell minutes.
It would be unfortunate if Canadian enterprises with
mobile workforces were unable to roll out a productivityenhancing technology like dual-mode cell/VoIP phones just
because wireless carriers aren’t willing to part with their precious per-minute cell phone pricing schemes.
Luckily, the situation may not be as bleak as UTStarcom’s
Frisch believes. Mobile VoIP vendor BridgePort Networks
has an alliance called Mobile Integrated Go-to-Market Network IP Telephony Experience, or MobileIGNITE, that aims
to offer mobile carriers end-to-end systems that would allow callers to roam between cellular and VoIP networks. The
group includes heavy hitters such as IBM and VeriSign.
BridgePort has also been trialing its technology with Bell
Canada since last year. When they announced the trial in
late 2004, Bell and BridgePort said their goal was to give
mobile users one handset, one number and one mailbox
that could be used at home or on the road.
Why would Bell want to introduce a technology that
could cut into its cellular revenues? Part of the reason could
be to prevent Bell’s cell customers from moving over to separate VoIP providers and using their traditional Bell cell phone
as little as possible. Another reason could be to make Bell a
more attractive option than competing cellular providers.
So what’s holding up the launch of dual-mode services?
Part of the answer is technology. Making sure the VoIP portion works as it should is tricky, as is handling any hand-offs
that might occur between VoIP and cellular networks.
Another complication may be pricing. Cellular carriers
have invested heavily in 3G wireless equipment and need to
keep driving up revenues to justify those investments. Dualmode cell/VoIP phones will definitely drive down cell minutes, so carriers will have to come up with a way to at least
partially offset the drop in billable cellular minutes.
If cellular providers don’t come up with dual-mode services, it shouldn’t be long before VoIP companies begin offering handsets that can replace cell phones where Wi-Fi is
available. Having two separate wireless companies and numbers obviously isn’t as convenient as one phone, one number
and one mailbox, but if it means saving money and being
able to operate in cellular dead zones, mobile workers will
find the Wi-Fi option hard to resist.
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Thoughts? Opinions?
Send them along to the Network World Canada Mailbag
at [email protected].
Tech Explainer Joel Goergen
Better Ethernet backplane planned
Ever-increasing volumes of traffic strain the capacities of computing and communications gear. Boosting port speeds from 100Mbps Ethernet to 1Gbps
Ethernet — and now to 10Gbps Ethernet — on
servers, storage systems, switches and routers, for
example, means the backplanes on those devices
must be scaled accordingly.
Many network hardware vendors have implemented Ethernet as their backplane technology,
but not in a standardized fashion. Recognizing the
potential cost, time-to-market and management
benefits a standard could provide, the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) has
set up a task force to define a standard for 1Gbps
and 10Gbps Ethernet backplanes. Now in draft
form, the 802.3ap standard is slated for completion in November.
A system’s backplane acts as a highway for communication between the boards and subsystems
that make up a complex device, such as a router or
a server blade. A standard Ethernet backplane will
allow IT workers to mix and match server blades
from various vendors in the same chassis. In addition to providing interoperability, 802.3ap will drive
the development of standardized components that
will enable vendors to bring next-generation products to market quicker and at lower cost.
The IEEE 802.3ap Task Force is working to define
the operation of Ethernet over copper traces embedded in board material that make up today’s back-
planes. Specifically, the task force will define new
physical layers and allow for backplanes up to 3.3
feet. Physical layers of 1Gbps and 10Gbps are being defined, with two variants of the 10Gbps backplane: parallel and serial. The parallel design splits
the 10Gbps signal into four lanes of 3.125Gbps
each. The serial variation defines one lane at a full
10Gbps. Preventing signal degradation at the higher frequency levels in the serial variation requires a
higher-performance backplane that can maintain a
quality signal for a greater frequency range.
Backplanes are complex to design and engineer.
With 802.3ap in place, vendors will have the option
to purchase a standard Ethernet backplane, making
it possible for them to bring higher-performance,
affordable products to market quickly and potentially opening the market to more players.
Enterprises are expected to benefit from a wider
selection of products and the flexibility to mix and
match boards and backplanes from various vendors.
Broad availability of standard components is expected to reduce prices of network devices.
Although a backplane specification may seem
esoteric to some IT managers, 802.3ap offers cost,
flexibility and management benefits that make it
worth tracking.
061984
Goergen is vice-president of technology and chief scientist for Milpitas, Calif.-based Force10 Networks Inc.
He can be reached at [email protected].
RBC,
continued from page 1
At the outset the bank will
only be replacing like for like,
says Matthews, swapping the
Centrex service features with
similar IP telecom services.
IP telephony is a technology
that RBC’s telecom group has
identified to support business
growth, says Kelly Gard, project
manager for voice development.
Gard says the upgraded IP infrastructure will position RBC to
implement new applications in the
future. “When we converge our
voice and data network together, we’re going to end up with a
multi-service network,” she says.
But “we’re going to walk before
we can run.”
Before any migrations begin,
Gard says a large part of her job is
to map-test and certify the products in a lab environment. “When
it is delivered to our internal clients, it goes on the desk clean.”
Gard says RBC’s telecom department is still in the process of
evaluating products and vendors.
“There are a lot of futures we’re
looking at, like unified messaging
or leveraging our Outlook address
book with an application that has
a click-to-dial feature.”
Applications of the future will
be a key to customer relationship
management (CRM), according
to Dave DeAbreu, director of financial services, enterprise group,
for Cisco Systems Canada Co.
in Toronto. “When you have all
your data integrated into your
telephony network, you’re able
to move that customer information around anywhere on the network,” he says.
An example of enhanced customer care would be the ability
to track down an individual anywhere on the network and then
direct a customer query to the
right person the first time, possibly adding a video link.
One of the stronger benefits
of the technology is the reliability
inherent in its architecture, says
Gilles St. Hilaire, vice-president
of national enterprise strategic
accounts for Cisco Canada.
The CallManager switching
software resides in multiple servers in different locations. “This
means you don’t have a single
point of failure,” he says.
For the one RBC location that
functions off a PBX (privately
owned branch exchange), Matthews says at today’s cost it made
no sense to convert to IP telephones. “The business case was
not positive so we excluded anyone who was on PBX,” he says.
The bank has also elected to
maintain its existing Octel voice
mail system, integrating the messaging service with Cisco’s CallManager VoIP software.
As well as replacing all the
telephones with Cisco 7940 IP
handsets, Matthews says the
backbone network needed major
upgrades to accommodate voice
traffic. New hardware modules
include Cisco’s Catalyst 6500
Series routers designed for highgigabit Ethernet connectivity
and multilayer switching, as well
as Catalyst 4506 switches with
six-port chassis and PoE (Power
over Ethernet).
According to Gard, the bank
is aiming to start the implementation in the middle of February
and continue, building by building and floor by floor, up until the
end of November.
As RBC’s single point of contact, Bell Canada says it will be
responsible for systems integration, planning, design and implementation of the infrastructure,
as well as testing, training, auditing and support.
IBM Canada Ltd. is providing
network monitoring and management of the LAN (local area network) infrastructure, according
to Renato Discenza, senior vicepresident of enterprise sales for
Bell Canada Inc.
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