Enhance Collaboration and Automate Business Processes using an ECM

The use of shared folders as a means of allowing multiple persons to access documents may seem like an efficient approach but in a world where decisions taken minutes too late could cost millions there is a greater need for more efficient solutions.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems provides a more efficient means of storing, searching and capturing hard and soft copies of your documents. An ECM also allows greater collaboration by allowing the assignment of business rules and workflows to your documents. Unlike traditional shared folders an ECM allows owners of content such as Word files to be able to share their content without the intervention of a Systems Administrator.

Lets say you work in insurance and your business process dictates the following. The collections department collects applications from potential customers and reviews them for completeness. If the collected application is complete route to your risk department, if the application is incomplete reject the application. The risk department will either approve the application and assign an insurance cost or reject the application. The risk departments’ decision can be communicated via email to both the customer and the collections department.

By assigning business rules to these applications, if-then-else logic can be applied to these documents. Metadata can be added to documents to store the validity, the decision taken on a application and any other Metadata deemed useful. This Metadata can be used as conditions in your business logic.

At LTGJAMAICA we want to help your company become as efficient as possible.

 

A guide to choosing the appropriate wide Area network technology

As your organization grows and need to open offices in disparate geographic Locations, the question of how to access IT resources such as your SAP/Dynamics ERP systems and other centralized applications will arise. Currently business may choose to use one of three technologies to meet your connectivity objectives.

1:Businesses may choose to use IPsec based VPNs. These VPNs connect your locations using commodity internet services which will greatly reduce your Wan charges since you will not be required to pay for a dedicated WAN service. IPsec VPNs provide security via symmetric encryption algorithms which are used to protect data traversing the internet.

The primary advantage of IPsec VPNs are cost and security but the down side relates to the internet services over which it is constructed. Typical non dedicated internet services provide asymmetrical bandwidth which usually means that download speeds are much greater than its upload speeds. The nature of these connections means that data access will only be optimal in one direction.Also since these IPsec VPNs utilize the public internet they will be unable to  provide quality of service to traffic between sites,lack of QOS means that Voice and Video Traffic might suffer from high delays and latency which will result in skipping and choppines of voice and video sessions between sites.

2: Multi Protocol Label Services or MPLS is a layer three WAN service that provides enterprises with symmetric bandwidth,Security and Quality of services. MPLS is a very scalable Wide area solution based on BGP routing and Label switching of customer traffic.

MPLS services relieves enterprises of the routing and qos configuration necessary when dealing with layer 2 services such as ATM and Frame relay. The only major disadvantages of MPLS is latency when compared to Metro Ethernet and Cost.

3: Metro Ethernet uses Optical networks to transmit customer traffic encapsulated as Ethernet frames. Ethernet scalability is limited by Spanning Tree and a hard limit of on the number of VLANS that can be supported by an Ethernet network. Metro Ethernet scales up to 10 Gigabits per second and provides low latency forwarding of customer traffic.

The main drawbacks of Metro Ethernet is the need for the customer to configure their own routing policies and the potential for network outages due to STP loops should the customer decides to use layer two switches instead of routers to terminate the Metro-E circuits at each location.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building a Vmware Powered Hybrid Cloud using Ecalyptus

The Cloud means many things to many different persons,but personally I view a Cloud as a distinct pool of  computing resources that can be manage centrally, provides the ability to scale resources via pre configured policies and lastly provides the ability to automate manual requests such as Virtual Machine creation and deployment.

Though not recommended by many IT professionals, I am planning on making our IT department an internal service provider. In this vain it is my vision to build out a Private Cloud that can provide self service to authorized internal clients such as our developers and application administrators.Currently we utilize a Vmware Vsphere platform, but in another few months this platform will possess all the attributes of a true cloud.To provide the functions necessary I have decided that we will look at the Open Source Eucalyptus platform.

Eucalyptus is Open Source so it reduces our initial capital expenditure ,it is compatible with Vmware and it has the ability to support Amazon based workloads thus providing a Hybrid platform mangement tool.

At Stage one, we will roll out a Private Cloud  that will allow authorized internal clients to perform various tasks related to a an assigned blocked of computing resources.

At Stage two we will seek to allow the migration of workloads between Amazon and our Vmware based private cloud,this should provide Disaster recovery and scalability benefits to our group.

 

 

Open Source Unified Communications

Unified Communications or UC is ruled by the Cisco,Microsoft and Avaya. All three companies are developers of great UC software suites but come in at prices that may be out of range  for small and medium sized companies. Now i am huge proponent of cutting costs when possible and as such my advice to small companies is to evaluate Open Source UC tools when looking for a new solution to replace your PBX systems.

The state of affairs in the Open Unified Communications market is as follows. The most popular Open Source UC package would be asterisk but it also a little harder to manage than alternative packages. For a small shop with less than 100 phones my recommendation would be Fonality’s Trixbox. Trixbox has a commercial and community edition which is backed by a large user base. Trixbox’s major drawback is its inability to scale for large installs but this is not an issue for a small company.

The best Open Source UC package for Small and Medium size companies is sipXecs. SIPX is totally sip based and was built to scale up to 1000 users. Unlike asterisks which switches voice streams and was built to sit between endpoints, SIPX functions as a sip proxy and does not require endpoints to pass voice data through the SIPX server, it is this fact that allows SIPX to scale better than asterisks.While not as extensible as asterisks SIPX represents a great option for medium sized companies looking to jump into the UC world and at this moments represents the top of the open source UC pile.

 

 

Large Layer 2 Domains and Vmotion

Vmware V-motion requires physical hosts to be in the same layer two domain. This goes against the grain in networks that were built around the principle of reducing the size and reach of broadcast domains.Layer 2 broadcast domains reduces the bandwidth available to our applications due to effect of frame flooding and also because Spanning tree’s operation disables redundant paths in our layer 2 networks.

Vmotion’s layer 2 requirement may be one of major reason why Flat layer 2 networks are being optimized.These optimization’s mitigate against the effects of broadcasts and unknown Unicast flooding which wastes network bandwidth.TRILL which is not really necessary to support Vmotion, has been developed to replace spanning tree in bandwidth intensive use cases that need all links to be forwarding at once. The existence of applications that require huge Flat networks will ensure the continued evolution of the layer 2 switching space and thus augment the simple plug N play nature of Ethernet networks that most people appreciate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking at Dell Force 10

Dell has hit a home run with their force10 line. Born in the world of high frequency trading, Force10 with its huge output buffer provides Dow Jones, twitter and Facebook with low latency switching infrastructures. At prices lower than the nexus line and providing a command line that is syntactically similar to Cisco’s IOS. Force10 represent bridge to a hybrid network where Cisco IOS and force10 FTOS in concert with open standards such as lldp and gvrp gives the enterprise the ability to ensure that we receive the best features at the lowest pricepoints.

 

Multicast Application Design

Multicast is used to distribute data from one source to many receivers.These receivers normally are executing an application which in its underlying logic has joined a multicast group which is essentially a ip address that is able represent multiple nodes on a network. Public multicast ip addresses are rarely available to network managers or application dev teams hence applications should be developed to accept multicast ip address and port information in its initializtion code. This approach allows an application to be ip address agnostic and and allows the app to join any available multicast address

 

Nexus 7000 Virtual Data Centers

Virtual data centers allows enterprises and Service providers to create truly distinct DCs that overlay a single physical infrastructure.The Cisco nexus provides the ability to virtualize all three planes namely the control,forwarding and management planes. For enterprises the ability to create logical virtual networks for testing purposes can provide significant cost savings since the need to buy test equipment is eliminated.

 

Successor based Flow Failover in Open Flow Networks

The failure of links in software defined networks based on Open Flow will result in the need to converge on a new topology which will be the same at layer 2 or 3 since open flow seems to merge the control and data planes resulting in unified logical topologies. Since Open Flow utilizes flow tables the concept of feasible successors can be applied to flow tables by inserting alternate paths as less preferred flow entries. The use of successor routes will result in no need to contact a controller on link failures.

 

My Software Defined Networking Wishlist

The primary goal i would be seeking to meet when i decide to implement Open Flow or some other SDN framework is management simplicity.Below i have listed two things that i hope SDN will address when it becomes main stream in enterprises.

Automatic VLAN Grafting

Connectivity issues resulting from the absence of Vlans on trunk links is a common problem that network techs face when provisioning access ports.SDN can be really valuable if it is able to graft vlans to trunk links based on learnt layer two traffic flow.

Advanced Optimized Edge Routing that integrates QOS

Currently OER/PFR is unable to implement QOS policy decisions on flows that are not operating within a certain threshold. An OPEN FLOW controller that implements QOS policies while managing policies below edge devices such as those in the network core would greatly enhance policy based routing design and overall network architecture design.