Unified Communications - New era

I haven't shared my thoughts with people via this blog for quite a while. In the past six months, I attended three different conferences about Unified Communications (UC). Probably, this is a very hot topic nowadys. Many IT and Telecommunications companies are very excited about UC. Why? Because of new technologies or new business opportunities.

Software Enterprises - Microsoft and IBM

Networking and Telecommunications technology company - Avaya, Cisco and Nortel

Telecommunications Operators - British Telecommunications

Conference Technology companies - Polycom

Technology Research Companies - IDC and Gartner

I have studied their UC products and services to a certain extent. Basically, they are somewhat offering very similar things to the users. Microsoft is focusing on the desktop developments while Cisco is more on the hardware developments (e.g. phone set). Avaya claims that backend technologies are her primary concern. Anyway, this is a very competitive game, one will win and the other will lose. Telecommunications will soon be unified with networking. In other words, telecommunications will be part of your network and run on your network. The traditional phone systems such as PSTN, PBX and ISDN will be phasing out in the future.

My job is to study the available IPT solutions and recommend the good one to the top management.

Security

Security is always important.

Infrastructure IX - Next Generation Network (NGN)

The Telecommunication Standardization Sector of International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) has made recommendations on Next Generation Network (NGN) which is conceived as a concrete implementation of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII). Throughout the years, different study groups have published the results of their researches and developments in this regard.

ITU-T (2004) note that ‘the target of NGN is to ensure that all elements required for interoperability and network capabilities support applications globally across the NGN while maintaining the concept of the separation between transport, services and applications.’

I quote the definition of NGN from ibid (2004, p.2)

‘A packet-based network able to provide telecommunication services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport related technologies. It enables unfettered access for users to networks and to competing service providers and/or services of their choice. It supports generalized mobility which will allow consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users.’

Nowadays, there are many different NGN communication operators such as PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), and they are internetworked by means of gateways. We see the applications of them in the following manner, the communication devices connected to NGN will include analogue telephone sets, fax machines, ISDN sets, cellular mobile phones, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) terminal devices, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) terminals, IP phones through PCs (Personal Computers), digital set top boxes, cable modems, etc.

The NGN is characterised by the following fundamental aspects (ITU-T 2004, p3):

Packet-based transfer

Separation of control functions among bearer capabilities, call/session, and application/service

Decoupling of service provision from transport, and provision of open interfaces

Support for a wide range of services, applications and mechanisms based on service building blocks (including real time/streaming/non-real time services and multi-media)

Broadband capabilities with end-to-end QoS and transparency

Interworking with legacy networks via open interfaces

Generalised mobility

Unfettered access by users to different service providers

A variety of identification schemes which can be resolved to IP addresses for the purposes of routing in IP networks

Unified service characteristics for the same service as perceived by the user

Converged services between Fixed and Mobile networks

Independence of service-related functions from underlying transport technologies

Support of multiple last mile technologies

Compliant with all Regulatory requirements,
for example concerning emergency communications and security/privacy, etc.

The aspects have been illustrated the characteristics of NGN. Needless to say, the scopes of ITU-T are very wide and in-depth. But I myself find it the most conclusive aspect of NGN is to generalise mobility, which will allow a consistent provision of services to a user. In other words, the user will be regarded as a unique entity when utilizing different access technologies, regardless of their types (ITU-T 2007, p.3).

I only focus the discussion on Generalised Mobility. In the future, mobility will be offered in a broader sense where users may have the ability to use more access technologies, allowing movement between public wired access points and public wireless access points of various technologies. It actually means that this movement will not necessarily force an interruption of an application in use or a customer service. However, this requires significant evolutions of current network architectures. Enabling more transparent fixed-wireless broadband communications and mobility across various access technologies appears as a major issue (ibid 2004, p.7).

Therefore, the ICT industries are achieving this objective. Gohring (2007) reports that RIM plans to issue a new model of BlackBerry with both cellular and Wi-Fi wireless capabilities as well as Motorola and Nokia were both selling phones with Wi-Fi and cellular aimed at business users last year. This indicates that the developers and manufacturers of mobile devices need to enable their products to be compliant with multiple operators and multiple access capabilities.

References

Gohring N 2007, ‘RIM plans Wi-Fi/cell phone BlackBerry’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 28 May 2007, viewed 15 September 2007, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=429669>.

ITU 2005, home page, ITU-T’s Definition of NGN, updated 19 December, viewed 13 September 2007, <http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/ngn/definition.html>.

ITU-T 2004, ITU-T Recommendation Y.2001 (12/2004) - General overview of NGN, Series Y: Global Information Infrastructure, Internet Protocol Aspects and Next-Generation Networks, Next Generation Networks – Frameworks and functional architecture models, Geneva, Switzerland.

ITU –T see Telecommunication Standardization Sector of ITU

Infrastructure VIII - IEEE 802.11n

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) both have task groups to research and develop the new standards of networking protocols and mobile technologies. These have indicated the directions of building up our infrastructure. Meanwhile, the ICT industries have been making great efforts to launch their new products and services in the wireless era. I myself receive a few promotions via emails or phone calls every week.

First of all, I would like to look into the developments of IEEE. Without doubt, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) have long-standing recognition in the field. They have established the ‘Wi-Fi’ standards (i.e. IEEE 802®), one of the well-known mobile technologies and have various working groups and study groups to research and develop these standards. Meanwhile, ‘WirelessMAN’, IEEE 802.16 specifications support the development of fixed broadband wireless access systems to enable rapid worldwide deployment of innovative, cost-effective and interoperable multi-vendor broadband wireless access products (IEEE-SA 2007). More information regarding IEEE 802® is able to be found from IEEE website. The other standard IEEE 802.3™ is moving steadily which is for Ethernet wired LANs/WAN. More information regarding IEEE 802® is able to be found from IEEE website. The other standard IEEE 802.3™ is moving steadily which is for Ethernet wired LANs/WAN. In addition, the IEEE 802.11 specifications address both the Physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) layers and are tailored to resolve compatibility issues between manufacturers of Wireless LAN equipment.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is a global, non-profit industry association that have certified Wi-Fi products from March 2000 till now. According to (Wi-Fi Alliance 2007), they have certified over 3400 products in the industry and have more than 300 member companies devoted to promoting the growth of wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs).

Nowadays, ‘Wi-Fi’ has been adopted by ICT industries. TGn (2007) has just approved IEEE 802.11n draft 2.05 in July 2007 and Draft 3.0 is on the way and will be finalised and approved in 2008. In fact, Many ICT companies have competed with one another to issue the Draft 2.0 compliant equipment such as wireless router, wireless switch and wireless client. Wi-Fi Alliance (2007 p.4) claims that the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) technology, multiplies the performance of the Wi-Fi signal, and is reflected in the two, three, or even more antennas found on some 802.11n routers and support 5GHz radio frequency. Additionally, its capacity is five times of 802.11g, rise from 54Mbit/s to 300Mbit/s that is able to fulfil today’s multimedia applications and products demand. This is a breakthrough to the wireless technology. But in practice, Judge (2007) reports that it will not be able to reach the data rate 300Mbit/s as the Ethernet standard, 802.3af cannot support two different radio frequencies, the 2.4GHz band (802.11bg/n) and the 5GHz bands the 5GHz (802.11a/n). Therefore, it will probably reach only half of the data rate (i.e. 150 Mbit/s).

The other concern about 802.11n standard or wireless LAN is security. Dr So (2007) mentions four major attacks on wireless LAN including Intrusion, Denial of Service, Phishing and Eavesdropping. The most risky one is Eavesdropping because the attacker listens to the traffic on the wireless network and grasps useful information including passwords for online banking service and e-commerce but, can hardly be identified.

I would like to discuss about the researches and developments of ITU on Mobile Technologies tomorrow.

To be continued

References

Judge P 2007, ‘Aruba set to launch 802.11n access point’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 14 September 2007, viewed 15 September 2007, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=457611>.

Wi-Fi Alliance 2007, ‘Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ 802.11n draft 2.0:Taking Wi-Fi® to the Next Level’, published May 2007, pp.1-2

So R 2007, ‘Wi-Fi threats stay alive’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 10 May 2007, viewed 15 September 2007, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=425942>.

TGn 2007, Status of Project IEEE 802.11n, Standard for Enhancements for Higher Throughput, updated July 2007, San Francisco, California, US, viewed 17 September, <http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/>.

TGn - see IEEE P802.11 Task Group n 2007

Infrastructure VII - Disaster Recovery in practice

People still think Disaster Recovery (DR) is important but not necessary, or not cost effective. Many years ago, we proposed the management for replacing the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) in our server room. The management asked us when the power failure occurred last time. Hence I understood that he did not see need for it.

Fonseca (2007) reported that

‘Peltzman said he understands why corporate management puts constraints on disaster recovery spending even though business people are the ones who complain when their systems fail. However, many of his IT brethren are often at odds with business leaders on the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery technology.’

Steven Peltzman who is the CIO of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, has also faced the disagreement with business executives regarding the IT spending on disaster recovery. In fact, many CIOs and business executives have very diverse point of views on Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity (DRBC) in accordance with SunGard’s survey. Harris Interactive Inc. polled 176 corporate executives and 351 IT managers in February and March. The brief results of the survey are listed below.

From the above results, we can see that more likely IT respondents focus on the backend operations rather than the frontend applications. When identifying which systems are essential to safeguard from disaster, business and IT executives are in agreement regarding the top four systems that impact revenue. Both groups identified e-mail, back-office applications, customer service and telecommunications in their list of top five systems that would affect the bottom-line if they were unavailable. That means they have diverse views but also, share some views.

I am an IT specialist and I would very often see only a corner of a picture. To really have successful disaster recovery solutions, we should at least pull all the key decision makers together from all parts of the business such as business development, finance, HR, IT and etc and work out the plan for DR in advance, going through a business impact analysis to define the critical systems and applications so the plan is clearly defined before any interruption occurs.

To be continued

References

Robins B 2007,‘Survey Reveals Limiting IT Downtime Window Major Concern; Business And IT Executives Disagree On Importance Of Disaster Preparedness’, SunGard, <http://www.sungard.com/news/default.aspx?id=2&announceId=844>.

Fonseca B 2007a, ‘IT trying to work with execs on disaster recovery’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 2 May 2007, US viewed 6 September, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=423990>.

Fonseca B 2007b, ‘Survey: Business, IT differ on disaster recovery’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 2 May 2007, US online, viewed 6 September, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=423976>.

Infrastructure VI - Disaster Recovery

Last time I mentioned about Contingency Plan. Today I further the discussion of it in a practical sense and I would bring up something about Disaster Recovery (DR) which is actually a kind of contingency plans.

The need for DR is to ensure the business continuity whenever the crisis arises such as fire, power failure, storm, disease outbreak (e.g. SARS) and any other unexpected events which can damage your business, and your precious data.

Smit (2007) reports that:

‘According to the Meta Group, the average cost of an hour of downtime for data centre applications is $330,000. According to the Strategic Research Corp., if that data centre belongs to a credit card authorization company, the loss jumps to $2.6 million. And if it belongs to a brokerage house, it climbs to $6.5 million. One day of lost productivity costs a company an average of $432 per employee.’

Without doubt this is a great loss to a company. Don’t expect your clients would understand your difficulties and accept your apologies. The best solution is to plan ahead before the disaster occurred. Reducing the downtime means cutting down the loss. But how?

Ibid (2007) has given us the directions to ensure high availability and business continuance.

Protecting, replicating and backing up data

First of all, we need to build up a high-capacity and low-latency data centre, which is interconnected to MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network). This can enable zero-data-loss data mirroring to protect user sessions, prevent transaction loss, and support automatic failovers between mirrored sites. SAN (Storage Area Network) technologies which enhance the distance, security, bandwidth utilization of replication and backup to remote sites, however it has not been really popular. In addition, technologies such as write acceleration, tape acceleration and server-less backup reduce latencies, extend distances and reduce application impact of storage replication applications. Moreover, it needs support for business continuance applications, especially those that provide replication and data protection.

sourced from Javvin

Enhancing application resilience

Companies can remove single points of server failure by deploying high-availability clusters or load-balancing technology across Web and application servers. Apart from that, connectivity can be extended between clusters in different data centres to protect against major disruptions. Achieving this type of redundancy requires a high-speed, low-latency metro network.

Ensuring user access

Companies can employ technologies such as VPN to allow users from branch offices and telecommuters to reconnect to applications quickly as soon as they are up and running. In addition, technologies such as global site selectors can allow users to manually or automatically connect to the most available web application available at any given time. In the case of a disruption in any one application environment, users continue to have access to the alternate site.

Needless to say, we all realised the devastating impact of 911. It just happened once in the past 6 years. Do we really have to focus on this incident too much and then, spend tens and thousands dollar on the above systems. Some may not be used even once in 10 years. The answer is absolutely. I still remember the disaster happened around 6 years ago. Due to the disorder of the fire sprinkles of an office on the high floor, it flooded the whole commercial building with water and thereafter, the power was suspended for a day. At that time, what we could do was to shut down all our mission critical servers before the UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) has been worn out. This action was to protect our servers and data. Lucky we had installed the UPS for all mission critical servers.

You can probably imagine how big the loss was caused by this incident. Very unlikely, DR is able to fully eliminate the loss but at least, it can lighten it. Anyway, DR is totally a choice of investment. What is your choice?

To be continued

References

Javvin, ‘Metropolitan Area Network and MAN Protocols’, Javvin Technologies, Inc, California, <http://www.javvin.com/protocolMAN.html>.

Javvin, ‘Storage Area Network and SAN Protocols’, Javvin Technologies, Inc, California, <http://www.javvin.com/protocolSAN.html>.

Javvin, ‘WAN: Wide Area Network’, Javvin Technologies, Inc, California, <http://www.javvin.com/networkingterms/WAN.html>.

Smit A 2007,’Data centre safety measures protect business’, Enterprise Innovation, Technology, posted 28 August 2007, viewed 8 September 2007, <http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/article.php?cat1=2&id=1847>.

Infrastructure V – Business Concern

In the business world, people have to be very dynamic and are able to forecast the changes. We IT people need to have this sense as well to adopt the new technologies and adapt to the changes. If we fail to see the problems, sometimes the consequences will be very costly and unbearable.

Last month, the typhoon Pabuk made Hong Kong very chaotic because the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) announced they would hoist Signal 8 within an hour, then changed their minds and flashed the 8 signal almost immediately. Due to this sudden change, the mobile networks overloaded and landlines also crashed. Meanwhile the HKO site kept crashing due to overload as people checked the latest typhoon conditions (Hammond 2007). Obviously, this was a communication breakdown. The question I would ask is why didn’t the infrastructure function properly in an urgent situation? Any contingency plans?

The other case just happened in US recently. Owing to the breakdown of the major switch in the LA airport, over 20,000 people were trapped on planes and 60 planes were sitting on the tarmac (Hammond 2007). Hammond claims that ‘If that switch was mission-critical, why was there no backup system?'

Through the above two incidents, we understand that very often systems are functioning properly under normal circumstance, but they fail when encountering the crisis. In the service industry, this problem would not be acceptable and bearable. The worst thing is you will lose your creditability and you are actually paying very high price for not investing on the contingency plan or disaster recovery solution.

To be continued

Reference

Hammond S 2007, ‘Communication breakdown’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 1 September 2007, viewed 5 September 2007, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/Communication-breakdown/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/454130>.