Q&A: Allot exec predicts new demands for QoS

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: August 25, 2004 9:35:26 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Q&A: Allot exec predicts new demands for QoS
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

Today's focus:  Q&A: Allot exec predicts new demands for QoS

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan

Allot Communications provides IP-based traffic management
systems to ISPs and enterprises that want to optimize network
bandwidth and support differentiated classes of service. In
business since 1997, the Israel company has shipped more than
10,000 systems to such heavy hitters as Verizon, British
Telecom, Lowes and Starbucks.

I recently interviewed Azi Ronen, executive vice president of
technology and marketing with Allot, about the trends he is
seeing in the deployment of QoS systems. Here are excerpts from
our telephone conversation:

Q. What new features or capabilities are you adding to your
products?

In the enterprise world, there is a constant effort to improve
and add support for more protocols and more sophistication in
the way we analyze protocols. One big example of this is in the
area of peer-to-peer traffic. The ever-changing peer-to-peer
environment requires us to assign a team of people to follow the
peer-to-peer world and see all of the new changes, such as the
recent decrease in Kazaa traffic and the increase in BitTorrent
traffic. We have to follow these trends and adapt to them.

We used to analyze peer-to-peer traffic using TCP headers and
later application signatures, but now with some protocols this
is not enough. Some applications use encryption, and you need
more sophisticated ways to understand that a certain application
is [peer-to-peer traffic].

The other aspect of advancement is in traffic monitoring and
reporting. It turns out that many customers are using our
systems not only for QoS or traffic management, but to
understand what's going on in their networks. You can't really
assign a policy to manage your traffic if you don't understand
what traffic is on your network. For that we provide real-time
monitoring and longer-term historical analysis. We have over 100
graphs that allow you to understand what the applications are up
to Layer 7 and understand who are the top users.

Q. What trends are you seeing among your enterprise customers?

One trend that we see is [Multi-protocol Label Switching]. We
see more and more enterprise networks using MPLS services from
their carriers. MPLS replaces the older frame relay
infrastructures. We do not yet see the carriers taking advantage
of the lower levels of granularity of MPLS. Customers might be
able to get differentiation between voice and data from the
carrier, but they can't get differentiation between particular
data applications.

Q. How about your ISP customers? What trends are you seeing
there?

Smaller providers - those that don't have their own backbones -
want to reduce their operating costs. They're doing this mostly
by reducing the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer
applications. Or they offer service plans that provide a certain
amount of peer-to-peer traffic to subscribers.

We see both DSL and cable carriers wanting to deploy a service
control environment to a much higher granularity. The goal is to
generate more revenue and to increase the average revenue per
user. One of the examples is what [carriers] call a service
boost, which is the ability of the subscriber to click on a
button and get additional bandwidth for a short period of time
to, say, watch a movie. If [the user] does that two or three
times during the month, the carrier gets incremental revenues
from that.

Carriers are also interested in quota-based accounting. We see
some ISPs with policies that say subscribers may download all
the peer-to-peer material as they wish but uploading is limited.
Other ISPs are watching how much traffic subscribers can
initiate so they can control or stop denial of service attacks.
All of these new services stem from traffic monitoring and
understanding what's going on in your networks.

Q. What impact will VoIP have on the demand for traffic
management products in enterprise and ISP networks?

In the enterprise, we believe that more and more organizations
will be implementing converged networks of data and voice.
They're going to need some kind of control equipment to ensure
that the VoIP quality will be similar to what they expect to
have in the PSTN or a separate dedicated VoIP network.

On the service provider side, we see the desire for cable
operators and others to prioritize their own VoIP services over
alternative services. They don't like to see people using the
VoIP services of other providers that anyone can use without a
special configuration. The recent introduction of a PC-to-phone
service by Skype may be the first time that a general Internet
solution is considered by many service providers as a threat to
their own services.

What DSL and cable operators will do about these VoIP services I
can't really say. But the basic requirement is for equipment to
be able to classify traffic like Skype or Vonage and have
billing mechanisms or QoS mechanisms do something about them. I
have no idea about the legality of this issue, but we do see
ISPs thinking about this issue and asking about our equipment.

Q. What can I expect to see from Allot during the rest of this
year?

You will see higher capacity. We will continue the trend that we
started at the gigabit level. You will see more centralized
management capabilities. That's really all I can say now.

Go to <http://www.allot.com/>  to learn more about Allot.
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Carolyn Duffy Marsan

Carolyn Duffy Marsan is a senior editor with Network World and
covers emerging Internet technologies and standards. Reach her
at <mailto:cmarsan () nww com>
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Alterpoint

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Services):
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