BTI Systems Blog

Building an Ethernet Business Portfolio: 5 Recommendations

Posted May 25, 2010 by Jason Smith

I work with a lot of customers who are evolving their service portfolio offering to include Ethernet services.  In many cases, there’s a lot of questions based on technology, differences in vendor equipment offerings, and the features that provide flexibility to define services.  To build a high value Ethernet business services portfolio I tend to provide 5 considerations when selecting service delivery equipment and developing service definitions.

1. Use Carrier Ethernet - It provides the complete foundation that provides the service-oriented capabilities well beyond enterprise-class solutions.  The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), IEEE, and ITU-T have all contributed to develop a technology that offers standardized services, scalability, reliability, quality of service, and simplistic service management.  The MEF’s certification of networking gear provides assurance that equipment complies with MEF specifications, reduces time on complex interoperability testing and establishes a solid foundation for services.
2. Offer a variety of Service Architectures - Not all applications are created equal, and required different distribution or connectivity requirements.  A portfolio offering transparent, private line, virtual private line and virtual private LAN services ensures broad market applicability and architectures to best fit application technical requirements.  To clarify and standardize services, the MEF has defined private and virtual services architectures – E-line: a service connecting two customer Ethernet ports over a WAN; E-LAN: a multipoint service connecting a set of customer endpoints, giving the appearance to the customer of a bridged Ethernet network connecting the sites; and E-tree: a multipoint service connecting one or more roots and a set of leaves, but preventing inter-leaf communication.
3. Offer Tiered Service offerings - The offering of various service with various performance, availability, and bandwidth opportunities complements service architecture offerings and further broadens market applicability through service capabilitites and cost points that fit operational requirements and IT budgets.  Packet loss, and latency specifications correlate to required application performance; recovery time and availability are considerations when evaluating the mission critical nature of the application; finally, port size and bandwidth increments meet the requirements of cost-optimized services with scalable growth as application demand grows.
4. Provide Protection options – As more mission critical applications transition to ip-based service delivery and leverage Ethernet for connectivity, the requirement for protection becomes more important.  Existing, technologies such as spanning tree take too long to reconverge networks after a failure.  New technologies provide simplified, SONET/SDH-like protection.  Look to leverage technologies like G.8032 Ethernet Ring Protection Switching and G.8031 Ethernet Service Protection Switching to fulfill these requirements
5. Implement Statistical Multiplexing – With virtual service offerings, the oversubscription of bandwidth ensures maximum return on your infrastructure investment.  Transitioning from a completely dedicated bandwidth per service model to that of shared infrastructure does take careful engineering and detailed service definitions including Committed Information Rates (CIR), Excess Information Rates (EIR), Committed Burst Size (CBS), and Excess Burst Size (EBS), but the ability to more effectively share the network means an quicker return on investment and improved revenue.  The science of defining the proper statistical multiplexing is on a network-by-network basis and highly dependent on the service definition, but does provide a huge payback.

The engineering of an Ethernet service delivery network definitely requires thought and analysis but using the right technology, a standardized approach, and offering a comprehensive portfolio of service offerings will provide competitive differentiation and broad market applicability.