Segment 1

"The next set of standards haven't come out yet. But we're going to be either a terabit or 1.6 terabits to the client. So huge increases coming. "

Jim Westdorp

Chief Technologist, Ciena Government Solutions

Segment 2

"We spend a great deal of effort making sure that we can build a network with sufficient redundancy. Part of that is moving to the edge, and having a more distributed network."

Jim Westdorp

Chief Technologist, Ciena Government Solutions

Top government IT priorities require agencies to modernize their networks. Up-to-date and high capacity networks must be in place to support improvements in customer experience, big data analytics, a hybrid and geographically dispersed workforce, multi-cloud environments, and large scale internet-of-things applications that use edge computing.

Jim Westdorp, the chief technologist at Ciena Government Solutions, emphasized the importance of looking at the infrastructure comprehensively, form the core to the edge. The 100 gigabit-per-second baseline for agency networks is about to be supplanted by much greater capacity. That’s thanks for advances in optical fiber capabilities, which will soon reach a terabit-per-second, per wavelength, per client, Westdorp said.

“So some very substantial changes and evolution in terms of the capacity” are ahead, he said, with the emerging standard of 400G to each client.

“And the next set of standards haven’t come out yet,” Westdorp said. “But we’re going to be either a terabit or 1.6 terabits. So huge increases coming.”

Ethernet and internet protocol packets make up most traffic, Westdorp said. “But there’s still a fair bit of what I call legacy, older protocols, which are time division multiplexed networks, SONET ([synchronous optical network], and SDH [synchronous digital hierarchy],” he added.

Ciena’s goal for its customers, Westdorp said, is to “put all that together and converge that into a single overall network. So that you can work all your services and applications across a single network, and not have disparate networks for storage and SONET and Ethernet. You can do that all at once.”

He cautioned, it can be prohibitively expensive to replace all of the network gear, such as SONET edge equipment supporting diverse applications such as satellite data or even radar applications. With translation software, an agency can continue to support this paid-for gear even while modernizing the core network.

On the other hand, Westdorp said, recent trends show a return to distributed computing, with compute and storage deeper in the network, closer users. This is to avoid network latency for increasingly data-intensive applications.

Distributing instances of virtualized applications also adds resiliency in the event of a cyberattack by ensuring there’s no single point of failure.

“We at Ciena and others in the industry spend a great deal of effort making sure that we can build a network with sufficient redundancy,” Westdorp said. “Part of that is yes, moving to the edge, and having a more distributed network, which, by its very nature, is more resistant to failure and attack”

He noted the ever-decreasing cost of a unit of storage and compute, driven my advances in silicon, makes edge computing ever more affordable. That in turn drives the ability to place virtual switches, routers, firewalls and terabytes worth of encryption to the edge. Westdorp said no agency has the budget to upgrade everything at once. He recommended analyzing where demand is growing the fastest, and priorities investments there.

Fifth generation wireless, or 5G, will also drive the need for boosting wired land networks, Westdorp said. 5G creates exponentially more bandwidth between mobile devices and the nearest cell tower. But towers connect to a terrestrial network.

Traffic, he said, “goes into a classic fiber optic infrastructure network to go across the country to a cell tower that’s one mile away from the person you’re talking to. So there’s a lot of physical network infrastructure that has to be involved to make your to make the mobile wireless infrastructure work.”

He added, networks will also have to support a shift from Ethernet to IP at the base of the tower. “So there’s a whole new set of functionalities, a whole other layer of the network that needs to be supported closer to the edge of the network than it had been before.”

But the influence of 5G doesn’t end with the commercial infrastructure. Westdorp predicted a shift to 5G within an enterprise for data communications with a campus or warehouse, or even a single building.

“There’s certainly a desire with a number of government customers for next generation WiFi,” he said. “Instead of redoing all your access points, just make them 5G, and now you can have a seamless protocol, one ‘wireless’ wire, if you will, for traffic and application services, both inside the building and without.”

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