Enterprise Drives 10 Gb Movement

Two months ago we questioned nearly 600 IT professionals and executives about troubleshooting practices and technology adoption. Over the weekend, I had the chance to dig further into respondents’ answers with regard to 10 Gb (10 Gigabit Ethernet) to uncover which organizations are driving adoption.

We’re currently at the beginning of what I think is a steady move to 10 Gb with nearly one-quarter of businesses worldwide implementing by the end of this year. Thirteen percent of global organizations have deployed 10 Gb networks, while another 11 percent expect to roll out 10 Gb in the next 12 months.

Size Matters
In my analysis, enterprise organizations (networks with more than 2500 users) were the clear 10 Gb implementation leaders. One-quarter had already deployed, and an additional 28 percent will deploy by the end of 2008. The second most likely group to implement 10 Gb had between 500–2499 users. 14 percent of these had implemented 10 Gb with an additional 12 percent implementing in 12 months.

We illustrate the trend of larger organizations rolling out 10 Gb below. Implementations are classified by network size.

Location, Location, Location
Location played a role in the likelihood of 10 Gb adoption among respondents. Twenty-seven percent of European organizations will have implemented 10 Gb by the end of 2008 (16% already implemented, 11% implementing within 12 months). This compared to 23 percent of North American organizations, with 12 percent having deployed and 11 percent implementing within 12 months. As far as the statistical significance between locations, it’s hard to identify this as a clear trend given the 4 percent difference is within the margin of error.

To put these statistics into perspective I asked a couple of Network Instruments colleagues about 10 Gb adoption drivers. Charles Thompson, manager of systems engineering, talked about the impact of network size on adoption.

“Among more massive organizations, there’s a real need for the extra bandwidth that’s being fueled by user dependence on network-driven applications, ranging from Unified Communications and VoIP to Web 2.0 applications. With other organizations, two factors seem to be driving adoption. First, network traffic is increasing as they continually add applications and upgrade to eliminate congestion. There has also been significant push among vendors to migrate to 10 Gb, and they may be creating movement through price reductions and marketing pressure.“

Ian Cummins, who heads up our activities in EMEA, thought European adoption was driven by the need to send more data quickly.

“The need is easy to identify. Most organizations want to send higher volumes of data at higher speeds. The price differential between gigabit and 10 Gb has eroded, so when companies are upgrading their infrastructure for a new technology roll-out, they’re opting to install 10 Gb.”

So, what’s driving 10 Gb? It’s hard to say for sure, but it seems that the increased number of network-driven applications and user dependence on the network are really driving the push among larger organizations. If you have any thoughts on deploying 10 Gb or adoption trends, add a comment. It’d be great to hear from you.

IPv6 Attitudes at Interop

The inspiration for this blog came while perusing Google for Interop material when I stumbled upon the following post from Martin Levy, the director of IPv6 strategy for Hurricane Electric, an Internet backbone and colocation provider. In his post he discusses the lack of IPv6 coverage, support, and use by both the Interop show and vendors.

“I returned from Interop 2008 Las Vegas expo, where I attended to gauge how well prepared exhibitors were for IPv6 network deployment. I was very disappointed that out of the approximately 450 exhibitors on the conference floor, there was only one company that even used the term “IPv6″ on the posted exhibitor-list online. When walking around the booths, talking with both hardware and software companies, I was even more amazed at the unknowing responses I received. While I could only sample a percentage of the total exhibitors, a clear trend was coming to light during my discussions.

There are an enormous number of vendors that are either not ready for IPv6, or are simply unwilling to say that supporting IPv6 is the future requirement for enterprise network operators. This future is a lot closer than many expect. Only a handful of the large network hardware vendors at the show were in better shape.”

IPv6 Support Among Network Vendors
In terms of network analysis vendors support for IPv6, Carolyn Duffy Marsan recently looked at where 8 vendors stood in the NetworkWorld article, “Where eight network management vendors stand on IPv6“. When purchasing an analysis solution, be sure that it’s more than just “IPv6 aware”, rather it should support native IPv6, dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 environments, and tunneling. IPv6 support should also be fully integrated into all analysis features like the experts and application analysis functions.

IPv6 Purchasing
On the federal side with a June deadline from the OMB looming, the government sector has been pushing forward with IPv6. According to a recent NetworkWorld article, “all U.S. federal agencies must be capable of passing IPv6 packets on their backbone networks by June 30, 2008.”

Without a similar push on the commercial side, IPv6 support has been more of a future-proof feature that U.S. customers want to have. But, it hasn’t been the key motivator for someone to purchase product. This may change (by the way I should mention that if you interested in IPv6 - Carolyn Duffy Marsan of NetworkWorld is a must read):

For a decade, IPv6 has been the classic chicken-and-egg conundrum: There has been little North American demand for IPv6, so U.S. carriers haven’t introduced IPv6 services; without commercial IPv6 services available from carriers, U.S. government agencies and businesses can’t migrate to the next-generation Internet technology. Now, cracks are starting to appear in the IPv6 egg…

“We’ve seen commitments by the major telecom carriers. They’re going to be IPv6 ready and enabled by 2010,” says Jerry Edgerton, CEO of Command Information, a Herndon, Va., provider of IPv6 services whose carrier customers include Verizon and British Telecom. “These carriers are now global players, and so are their customers. IBM just moved its supply chain management to China last year. This globalization factor is going to drive demand to IPv6. If I’m a global enterprise, I need to be compatible with the rest of the world.”

Further IPv6 Reading
IPv6 exec says sound the alarm - NetworkWorld
U.S. carriers quietly developing IPv6 services - NetworkWorld
IPv4 vs. IPv6 - NetworkWorld
IPv6 Information Page - IPv6.org
IPv6 Explanation - Wikipedia
IPv6 hype suggests real problems - Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Over 80% of Organizations Adopt Virtualization in 2 Years

On the first day of Interop, we joined together with NetQoS to poll 117 Interop attendees and gauge where they stood with emerging technologies. Fifty percent of the respondents were C-level or IT management. The surprise with the polling wasn’t that virtualization is popular, but rather the strong expected rate of adoption.

44% of respondents said that at least 20 percent of their applications run on virtual machines, while a sizable portion (40%) said they don’t have virtual machines. A small portion ran over half their applications on virtual machines.

The expected adoption rate of virtualization was much stronger than I expected. In two years the number of organizations without virtualization is projected to shrink from 40% to around 5%. The second area of growth came with the number of businesses running more than half of their applications on virtual machines. This number is expected to increase from 7% of organizations to nearly 40% by 2010.

Overall, 51% of organizations use virtualization, and this should rise to 83% within two years. I’d be curious to learn of other studies that project the virtualization adoption rate to understand how in line the results were.

Another question asked respondents to identify the emerging technology they think will be the greatest monitoring challenge. 38% of IT executives identified virtualization as the greatest monitoring challenge, followed by unified communications (24%) and MPLS (14%). In this case we didn’t delve into the “why” but it may point to an analysis need. For those involved in virtualization, it’d be great to hear feedback and thoughts on the numbers.

Virtualization Resources
Virtualization Report - InfoWorld’s David Marshall
Virtualization Daily - Virtualization detailed by the CEO of JumpBox
SearchServerVirtualization.com - Tech Target site focused on virtualization in the data center

Network Management Links 2008-05-07

• New Directions: Emerging Computing Models: Somewhere between *NIX-style terminal services (i.e., thin client) and Windows-style PCs (i.e., fat client) is a brave new world of emerging compute models, Jon Stokes of Ars Technica covers the possibilities.
• Jobs Leads Best Beard in the Valley Vote: On a lighter note , Fortune Magazine noticed a trend among Silicon Valley CEOs to grow facial hair, and organized a Beard-Off to choose the best mane among the men. Steve Jobs is among the remaining four.
• Virtualization Brings Multiple Personalities to the Desktop - Michael Vizard of eWeek’s Masked Intentions blog looks at the benefits and convergence of virtualization and multicore processors.
• Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD - In what is an amazing feat of recovery, the post discusses the retrieval of data from a hard drive of the Space Shuttle Columbia that was used to complete a science experiment. Very interesting read.
• Intel Makes Moves in 10 Gb - If you’re looking at whether the stars are aligning for 10 Gb, this might be a sign. Intel announced a stepping-stone server adapter that provides 10Gb throughput over standard copper cables.

Going Retro at Interop

So you may have noticed our absence on the blog. Being busy at Interop leaves little time for other things. I’ll talk about some of our activities and what was HOT at Interop through out this week. If you were at the show, you may have seen us talking about GigaStor and the troubleshooting advantages of Retrospective Network Analysis.

If you weren’t at the show, thanks to LoveMyTool, I can offer you the next best thing. Denny Miu of LoveMyTool interviewed Sam Wang of Network Instruments talking about RNA on the showroom floor. In little over a minute, Wang makes the case.

Expectations for Interop

So in a few more hours, I’m hoping on a plane bound for Interop Vegas. Being my first Interop, it’ll be interesting to see networkers in mass from customers and competitors to reporters and bloggers.

Unlike me, my Network Instruments brethren have been attending Interop for years. If you’re out there check out our booth (#527) and see the latest in troubleshooting technology. We also have chances for you to roll to win an iPod Shuffle, and chat with our engineers about any challenging network situation you might have.

Charles Thompson, our manager of systems engineering, will give hourly presentations on tips and trends in troubleshooting ranging from covering retrospective network analysis to 10 Gb and VoIP.

Beyond our booth there’s a lot going on; Denise Dubie of Network World lays it out in her column today, “Interop highlights for the network manager in you.” Jon Oltsik of ESG and CNet offers a high-level views of technologies and trends that he anticipates dominating the talk at Interop 2008.

Finally Time for 10 Gig

With less than a week before the big show, Jon Oltsik of ESG today offered his thoughts in CNet on the Top 5 Things on Tap at Interop. He discussed obvious trends of IT going green and virtualization, but I found his thoughts on 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gb) most interesting.

10-Gigabit Ethernet. Yes, we’ve been talking about this for years but the discussion will shift this year from the network core to data center switching. Good for vendors like Extreme, Force 10, and Foundry. This also could help Juniper Networks and its new line of Ethernet switches.

From everything I’m hearing either from our engineers or the recent study we did involving nearly 600 network professionals, we’re at the beginning of a very steady move to 10 Gb with nearly one-quarter of businesses worldwide implementing 10 Gb by the end of 2008. 13% of global organizations have deployed 10 Gb networks, while another 11 percent expect to roll out 10 Gb in the next 12 months (Source).

Charles Thompson, our manager of systems engineering, discussed 10 Gb adoption rates last week with Jason Bovberg of Windows IT Pro.

“I was surprised by the relatively high percentage of 10GbE adoption rates. Network engineers are trying to migrate away from two switches designed to communicate over multi-connection 1Gb link (so they would bond together two or three 1Gb pipes into an Etherchannel) and upgrade that connection. So it’s really the connections between switches that 10GbE is being rolled out to. I’m not seeing a lot of 10GbE to the server or desktop. It’s mostly switch-to-switch communication.”

He has also mentioned the decreasing costs of 10 Gb as another reason for its growing adoption:

“Thompson noted that the adoption rate for 10 Gb networks is ’still a strong number, in part because costs are declining.’ He cited the lower costs of interfaces for servers as an example. ‘In fact, many shops are replacing Fibre Channel with NAS using 10 Gb to take advantage of the lower costs,’ he added.”

The Future of IPv6

It’s been a while since I had heard anything about IPv6 in the press, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I found news of IPv6 adoption in Van Dyke Software’s 5th Annual Enterprise Security Study. Denise Dubie of Network World covered the study today detailing the security problems that can keep network managers awake at night.

While the majority of the study was about security, at the very bottom of the press release you’ll find the following paragraph on the move to IPv6.

IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) is the latest level of the Internet Protocol and is now included as part of IP support in many products including the major computer operating systems. About one-fifth (21%) of the survey respondents said that they have moved to IPv6 either in the past 12 months or more than 12 months ago; in 2007 only 10% had reported already moving to IPv6. Also, 26% in 2007 had planned to move to IPV6 in the next 12 months, compared with 36% in 2008.

It’s hard to say whether this is a sign of wider trend of IPv6 adoption in the coming year. I spoke with a few engineers about what they were seeing out in the field. The general consensus was that while it’s something that potential customers ask about, it’s not a sign that they’ll be implementing IPv6 on their network in the next year. IPv6 Adoption will take place, but I would be surprised if nearly half of organizations implemented it by the end of 2008 as the study seems to indicate.

Network Management Links 2008-04-21

• Time-based Troubleshooting - The Network Performance Daily post details time-base factors to monitor that can be for keeping on top of overall network performance
• Radical Network Research - NetworkWorld outlines 25 R&D projects that could change the way we network
• What’s the State of Your Network - Windows IT Pro goes one-on-one with Charles Thompson of Network Instruments discussing troubleshooting and network implementation trends. It’s touches on everything from application troubleshooting to VoIP and 10 Gb adoption.
• Citrix Seeks Virtual Nirvana with XenDeskTop - Apparently as the Register details it Citrix’s push into the virtualized desktop continues with the release of XenDeskTop. It’s an in-depth post on Citrix’s virtualized strategy.

Singing the Blu-Ray Blues

SecurityDude, CISSP-ISSAP is an IT consultant, Security & Privacy Advocate and blogger at large with over 20 years IT experience. SecurityDude shares tips, tricks, and info that the average networking professional will find interesting and indispensable.

As I recently learned, the upgrade path to Blu-Ray is scattered with broken glass. Don’t go barefoot.

Now that Blu-Ray has been crowned “winner” in the HD Video war, I went out and dropped $450.00 on a Sony PS3 and Blu-Ray remote control (NOT included). To enable certain features that require Java to operate (extras on the disc), I had to upgrade the firmware. If you connect the PS3 to the Internet, it grabs updates directly. I opted to download the file onto a thumb drive and plugged it into the front panel USB. No big deal.

But on the PS3, working with things like scene selection and navigating “extras” is frustrating and unintuitive using either the PS3 wireless game controller or the dedicated Blu-Ray remote. Since I had no intention of ever buying games for the PS3, I returned it. Good riddance.

Next, I bought a Sony BD-S300 from Costco ($379). It works pretty much like a regular DVD player. I also had to upgrade firmware on the new player. I downloaded and burned the ISO to a CD-ROM and booted the player with the disk. After 20 minutes, success.

The completely remastered 2001: A Space Odyssey is AWESOME on Blu-Ray. It was truly like watching it for the first time. Blade Runner: The Final Cut was also a real treat for the eyes.

Now the bad news. In addition to the great quality picture, one of the key benefits of Blu-Ray is the promise of lossless audio codecs. With 50 Gb of space to play with on Blu-Ray discs, there is no need to pay the compression penalty of DVD audio. Unfortunately, the BD-S300 is Sony’s entry-level player. It doesn’t support Dolby TrueHD, or DTS-HD Master Audio. TrueHD Bitstream can transport 24 discreet channels. Not all Blu-Ray discs will be recorded with that Codec, but you still want it. Currently, only the wallet-crushing Denon DVD-3800BD ($1700) or Marantz BD8002 ($2100) support all possible Blu-Ray audio codecs. Wait for the Panasonic DMP-BD50 to be released. It supports all of the Codecs, Blu-Ray Profile 2.0 (latest), and HDMI 1.3. The rumor-mill says it will go for less than $600 once it it released. Here is a link to Blu-Ray player feature comparisons.

More bad news. You are going to be shopping for a new A/V Receiver. It needs to have HDMI 1.3 (to support the bandwidth of TrueHD Bitstream) AND support all of the relavent HD Audio Codecs. I am strongly partial to Yamaha receivers. They sound clean and bright at just about any volume. My next receiver will be either a Yamaha RXV-1800 (~$1200 street price) or an RXV-3800 (~$1600). The 3800 has Ethernet and USB ports for firmware updates (and a GUI setup wizard). Both models support HDMI 1.3a and all of the TrueHD Codecs.

Final Bad News: Assuming you already have already dropped a large chunk of cash on a High Definition TV, aGOOD upgrade to Blu-Ray (that gives you the best audio quality) is going to set you back about $1800. I am returning my Blu-Ray player to Costco today. I will take my own advice and wait until the Panasonic player is out.

If this helps even one of you to avoid a bad purchase, then it was worth the time it took to write.