Think your IP VPN bills are too high? Then don’t move to Jakarta, Indonesia, home of one of the world’s most expensive 2 Mbit/s E-1 VPN ports, priced at over $11,300 per month Yes, IP VPNs have become a staple within multinational corporations, proving a secure tunnel into the company headquarters from remote offices and locations around the world. But their popularity doesn’t make them a commodity. Now, wanna hear something really sick? You can get the same VPN service in Jakarta, via a different carrier, with the same bandwidth, for a mere $1,347 a month. The difference in price has to do, of course, with where the connection is headed. “The foundation of price discrepancy has to do with bandwidth pricing in and out of the country,” says Greg Bryan, pricing research analyst with Telegeography. “If it’s a country that isn’t deregulated yet where bandwidth is difficult to acquire, that adds to the cost.” So the ports are the same and the technology is the same, but the price of bandwidth coming in and out of the country is not. That’s why in places such as Indonesia, you find such a wide range of prices — the most expensive ones are linking single locations within that area back to a more competitive western market. The cheap ones are only linking within Indonesia. Compare that to IP VPNs in New York which consistently cost around $1,000 a month whether they link in or out of the country. There is ample bandwidth coming in and out of the city which makes proving an IP VPN a relative cinch. Another factor in pricing discrepancy is service level agreements (SLAs). All enterprise customers want strong SLAs and providing service guarantees between remote countries is expensive. In New York or London, cities with widely developed infrastructure and an abundance of carrier hotel facilities, a VPN that connects locations within the city will likely cost the same as one that connects elsewhere in the world. And that cost will be relatively cheap in the area of $1,000 a month.
Archive for July, 2011
Networking company Brocade has earned a $2.1 million incentive from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), one of the largest ever under the utility’s Non-Residential New Construction Program. Central to Brocade’s campaign to collect that money was a new data center and research laboratory on its year-old corporate campus in San Jose, Calif. The campus itself is Gold-certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. The new data center, which is approximately 5,000 square feet, squeezed the equipment of three data centers into one while achieving a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.2. PUE describes the ratio of cooling equipment to information technology in a given data center. The closer to 1.0, the better. The entire research and development facility housing the data center is 70,000 square feet. From an efficiency standpoint, here are some other things to know about the facility: The consolidation saved roughly 14 million kilowatt-hours per year in electricity consumption, or $1.5 million in electricity costs Carbon dioxide emissions were reduced by 5,700 tons Water consumption decreased 40 percent A 550-kilowatt photovoltaic array system on campus has helped save about $100,000 per year in electricity costs Michael Hirahara, vice president of global real estate, facilities and services for Brocade, said: “Our headquarters project is just one example of how we apply cost-effective and environmentally friendly solutions to our business operations and our products. Looking forward, we are also evaluating alternative energy solutions like wind and fuel cells as we strive to be good stewards of our communities, the environment, and our shareholders’ investment, now and into the future.” When I spoke with Hirahara about the data center this week, he told me there were five key design factors key for squeezing the most energy efficiency out of the facility: A power distribution architecture that brings high voltage electricity into the campus, resulting in less line loss. The high-efficiency chillers (see photo) are in an central plant with only one primary loop for higher efficiency. Water-side economizers are used extensively during the winter months and they help keep the data center pre-cooled so that less energy is necessary to cool things down In-row cooling units and hot aisle containment Servers that are more than 75 percent virtualized A modular design approach that uses pods to expand, as necessary
Following up on last week’s announcement that it would soon be opening up to U.S. users, popular music-streaming service Spotify today said its stateside launch is happening tomorrow morning. “Spotify, the award-winning digital music service loved by millions of Europeans, will become available tomorrow morning in the United States by invitation and subscription,” the company said in a statement. It has promised to deliver more details about the launch at tomorrow at 8 a.m. ET. As CNET noted last week, eyes have been on Spotify to announce a U.S. version of its service for months, though particularly after the company began signing licensing deals with the four major record companies in the U.S. The first of those deals was struck with Sony back in January. AllThingsD notes that the U.S. version of the service will be invite-only at first, opening up for general use later on. There will also be multiple versions of the service: a free, ad-supported version that’s time limited, along with $5 and $10 monthly plans that take away the limits and let you access music tracks on mobile devices. The U.S. launch paves the way for Spotify to integrate with a number of other services based here, notably Facebook. Earlier this month, sources told CNET that the two companies recently held discussions about integrating the music service into Facebook, which last week noted that it’s topped 750 million active users. Spotify opened up to the public in late 2008, and has attracted a following by offering free, ad-supported music streaming of its catalog. The service currently touts some 13 million music tracks.
BOSTON, USA: It will likely take more than a quick reorganization for Cisco Systems Inc Chief Executive John Chambers to turn around the troubled technology bellwether.Chambers, a Silicon Valley icon who has run the company for 16 years, put his job on the line last month when he told investors that Cisco had lost its way in recent years as it spent heavily to expand into dozens of new markets. Since the rare admission, he has trimmed the company’s bloated management structure, offered early retirement to some employees, killed the Flip camcorder and laid off 550 workers. More changes are in the works. Wall Street analysts will grill him about what’s next on Wednesday when Cisco holds its quarterly earnings conference call. Expectations are low as the company has disappointed for the past three quarters. Its shares have lost 20 percent of their value since the company’s last quarterly report, on Feb 9. Analysts want to hear how Chambers intends to revive his bread-and-butter business of selling the plumbing of the Internet and corporate networks. They will zero in on its switching business, where sales dropped 7 percent in its most-recent quarter. “They’ve been under margin pressure and share pressure and it’s only going to get worse,” said Joe Skorupa, an analyst with Gartner. The research firm recently issued a report advising clients who had long used Cisco switches to diversify their networks to include products from other manufacturers including Hewlett-Packard Co and Juniper Networks. MULTIPLE RIVAL PROVIDERS Conventional wisdom has been it was cheaper to build a network with equipment from a single provider — Cisco — because those switches were designed to work together. But Gartner told its clients they were better off using multiple vendors — summing up the trend of past years in the $21 billion-a-year market for switching equipment, where Cisco commands a 67 percent market share. Rivals such as Juniper and HP have caught up with Cisco in terms of features, sell their products for less and provide software for operating their switches that is easier to manage than Cisco’s offering, Gartner told its clients. “Folks are nipping at their heels from a technology perspective,” said Gerard Gibert, CEO of Mississippi-based Venture Technologies, a firm that sells Cisco equipment. One area where Cisco has fallen behind is in manageability. The company sells several lines of switches, which run on different operating systems. HP and Juniper, by contrast, offer their customers one piece of software for managing all their switches. That means customers need to spend less training IT staff. Cisco has begun to address the issue through a new product dubbed Cisco Prime, which it recently introduced. “I do think there are some improvements they could make in some of their products,” said Rolf Versluis, CEO of Adcap Network Systems, another Cisco reseller.
BANGALORE, INDIA: ATMs going out of order and networks going down at bank branches and reservation counters are a common scene. With roads being dug every now and then in the name of infrastructure development, the underground telecommunication network is the worst hit and its impact is experienced by every one of us. However, you may not have to face such hardships anymore, thanks to BSNL which has come up with integration of different networks such as CDMA and MPLS cloud to offer an extraordinary solution to customers on a different media using omnipresent CDMA network. “Bangalore being the hub of IT business and Enterprise services, the expectations of Enterprise customers are very high on service availability and service back up. Provision of service in technically non feasible areas and in areas where underground cables are impacted, in a cost effective manner, in lieu of VSAT for low bandwidth customers has been a constant challenge,” said a senior official in the Enterprise Data services divison of Bangalore Telecom, BSNL. “From operations perspective, BSNL has observed three areas of challenge in Enterprise services, namely, keeping SLA commitments, cost effective ways to deploy low bandwidth services in non feasible areas and emergency deployment of bandwidth services for back up in highly fault prone areas due to developmental works,” he said. “In order to enable real time connectivity 24/7 to our enterprise customers, especially the BFSI sector, the Bangalore Telecom started working on integrating different networks such as CDMA and MPLS cloud on the CDMA network. It took almost 11 months of constant effort to integrate and stabilize the solution and deployed it for the first time in the country in BSNL,” he informed. He further added: “This initiative opened up new solution on alternate media to offer SLAs in a cost effective manner. The banking and corporate customers are eager to have this solution in place, and we want to deploy this solution all over the country.” BSNL Bangalore has completed proof of concept (POC) for this solution for various banks, corporate customers and oil companies. The solution has been tested in over ten banks and two of them have already placed a commercial order to deploy in branch locations as back up solution. “The feedback from already deployed branches has been very good,” he added. “Though there is back up service in banks in the form of ISDN it is prone for isolation during cable cuts as the ISDN and main link are both available on the same cable. But the CDMA solution provides a stable back up, through its Radio media in a cost effective manner,” the official explained. Low bandwidth ATM functionality was tested in the initial phase and BSNL graduated to leased circuit back up for Banks’ branches up to 256 kbps in areas where there is EVDO coverage, he added. Now, BSNL is proactively encouraging bulk customers to take back up service on CDMA back up so that Location Isolations can be minimized leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and business efficiency.
