Subject: [Ieprep] FW: How does automated QoS work?

From: "Nguyen, An" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 12:28:16 -0400

It looks like hardware vendors pay more attention to QoS.

An

-----Original Message-----
From: NW on Wide Area Networking [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2003 9:00 PM

Today's focus:  How does automated QoS work?

By Steve Taylor and Joanie Wexler

We mentioned last time that, as more and more application 
traffic (including voice) joins IP networks, the ability of 
enterprises to get their arms around quality-of-service 
provisioning and management is growing more important. Some of 
the router vendors, including Alcatel and Cisco, have begun 
automating this process for their switches and routers. Their 
early systems focus on voice over IP, for the obvious reason 
that VoIP is the most persnickety of applications in terms of 
latency and jitter.

Alcatel announced automated QoS in the form of a network 
management feature called OneTouch last summer. OneTouch is a 
capability of the PolicyView module in Alcatel's OmniVista 2000 
Version 2.0 network management software. It uses preconfigured 
QoS templates to enable network managers to configure QoS 
settings once, then distribute them across multiple, distributed 
switches, says John Reidy, a senior product manager at Alcatel

Similarly, Cisco's AutoQoS feature, released earlier this year 
for Cisco switches - and last month, for use on most Cisco WAN 
edge routers - also uses templates to automate policy and QoS 
provisioning networkwide. Cisco routers support perhaps the 
industry's most exhaustive list of QoS features. But the company 
finally realized that the richer its portfolio of QoS features 
became, the more overwhelmed enterprises grew at the prospect of 
tackling QoS.

According to Cisco, AutoQoS reduces the network manager's QoS 
provisioning tasks down to just three steps: configuring an IP 
address, specifying the amount of bandwidth on a link, and 
enabling the Cisco AutoQoS feature. The router maker says it has 
calculated that AutoQoS reduces the complexity, cost and time of 
QoS provisioning by two-thirds.

The Alcatel and Cisco template-based automated QoS systems work 
in similar ways.

Cisco AutoQoS, for example, detects the underlying network 
protocols and connection types. It identifies the application 
traffic on the network using the crown jewel in Cisco's QoS 
arsenal, a capability called Network Based Application 
Recognition, or NBAR. AutoQoS matches the autodiscovered network 
variables to a template that has the proper configuration 
settings to automatically invoke all the appropriate marking, 
classifying, queuing, and fragmenting parameters.

In theory, this means you should no longer have to worry about 
how to group application traffic into service classes, figure 
out which link-layer protocols are running, and determine which 
specific QoS features to turn on and how to configure them for 
each service class.

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From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 12:59:53 -0400

> It looks like hardware vendors pay more attention to QoS.

Probably not.  The products described are mostly application
software "element manager" enhancements to make it easier
for users to configure sets of switches, combined with some
analysis of existing network traffic (in some cases).

Many other vendors (e.g. Extreme, others) have had similar
capabilities available commercially in products for years.

Such tools can be useful if one has a single administrative
domain and wants to deploy a domain-wide QoS policy to all
the affected devices.  However, they aren't a panacea
-- and there is still no substitute for the operator of
an administrative domain actually thinking about what QoS
policies (if any) the operator wants to deploy.

Example:		An operator might have over-provisioned their
	entire enterprise, so doesn't want any QoS mechanisms
	enabled.  This is pretty common with the advent of
	Gig Ethernet a few years back and now with 10 Gig E
	being widely available.  Vendor-neutral surveys of
	enterprise/ISP operators indicate that only a very small
	percentage of networks have QoS enabled in any way.

Example:		One's network might have multimedia MBONE traffic,
	but that might not be the priority of the business that owns
	and operates the enterprise's network.  In such a case, one
	might actually want to make such traffic lower priority,
	while application software might (quite reasonably) guess
	the opposite and configure higher priority for that traffic
	-- unless the operator intervenes.

Note also that there is no new QoS mechanism mentioned.  A likely
scenario is that these are tools for configuring existing, standard,
and widely implemented mechanisms -- for example 802.1p Ethernet
precedence, IETF IP ToS, or IETF DiffServ, with industry-standard
queuing/shaping disciplines such as WFQ, RED, or WRED.

Regards,

Ran
[email-masked]