Advanced Feature Usage – 48% of Dyn's enterprise customers are utilizing a traffic management service for disaster recovery, cloud load balancing, geographic regional routing, latency-based routing, or our granular geographic IP routing services.

If we look even deeper into the actual usage of these advanced features, we see some customers using traffic management on as many as 310 zones. We have some of the data summarized below.

	Active Failover	Traffic Management
Customers using the feature	440	671
Total Zones using the feature	2936	4470
Avg. Zones/Customer	6.66	6.67
Median Zones/Customer	2	2
Highest Advanced Feature Usage	350	310

At this point, a significantly higher portion of our customers in the higher traffic tiers use these advanced services:

Advanced Feature Usage by Traffic Tier – The usage of advanced features is especially high in certain verticals of technology companies.The usage of advanced features is especially high in certain verticals of technology companies. Advertising (74%) and Games/Video/Entertainment (60%) particularly stand out.

Today, our customers are creating an Infrastructure stack with redundant providers of colocation, cloud or managed hosting, content delivery, web acceleration, transit, storage/database servers, routers, switches and more. The amount of money spent behind our content agnostic services makes the investment in what we do a simple one. We help prevent vendor lock-in and allow our customers diversity across and down the stack.

The market has caught up and now we innovate on that top 15% as they drive our product roadmap forging ahead. It's a proven way to do R&D and serve a rapidly growing Internet audience who's end user expectations are higher than ever.

As Dyn evolves from a world leading DNS and email delivery provider to a more rounded provider of Internet performance technologies, we'll continue to expose more stats like this (like we did last month with what hosting providers our clients use) and provide even more insight into your entire external infrastructure — traffic, messaging and more. Your customers' experience is on us to help solve.

"Netflix has more than 36 million subscribers. They watch about 4 billion hours of programs every quarter on more than 1,000 different devices. To meet this demand, the company uses specialized video servers scattered around the world. When a subscriber clicks on a movie to stream, Netflix determines within a split second which server containing that movie is closest to the user, then picks from dozens of versions of the video file, depending on the device the viewer is using. At company headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif., teams of mathematicians and designers study what people watch and build algorithms and interfaces to present them with the collection of videos that will keep them watching."

Here are some of our key takeaways:

• The top 15 hosting providers together accounted for under 35% of where our customers are hosted.
• This means the remaining 65% are either self-hosted or are using smaller hosting providers.
• These numbers go further when we look at a wide cross-section of Alexa websites: 25% for the Alexa 10K and 21% for the Alexa 100K.

Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer clearly hold the top three spots for market share.

Here's what we found, thanks to some great insight from our friends at Datanyze:

DynECT Customers

About 22% of our 2000+ DynECT enterprise level customers are hosted at either Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer with Amazon ranking No. 1.

Alexa 10K and Alexa 100K

Next up: Alexa 10K and 100K segments. Did we see any interesting patterns?

• AWS and Softlayer seem to have the highest market share in the Alexa 10K segment.
• Softlayer has the largest share in in the broader & lower traffic Alexa 100K segment.
• As expected, lower-priced hosting sites like GoDaddy, Ovh, and Hetzner had relatively higher market share in the Alexa 100K than in the Alexa 10K websites.

Large Enterprises

For this study, it was important for us to review websites with high traffic. However, we also wanted to look at where the large enterprises were hosted, defined as any company with more than 1000 employees. We looked at a total of 25K such enterprises globally for this analysis.

The total penetration for this segment is about 11.3%, with the graph below showing Rackspace with thrice the market share as the next largest provider. This will be an interesting market segment to keep an eye on.

Our conclusions

We'll use this unique to Dyn customer hosting data to improve DynECT Managed DNS and Traffic Management services, prospect more joint accounts, and forge strong hosting partnerships with shared vendors of our esteemed clients. Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer prove to be glaringly obvious collaborative partners, but the opportunity for lower cost or specialized hosting providers to layer on a premium DNS services is equally apparent (see our favorites and host of Dyn.com, Firehost).

Using Managed DNS and DNS-based Traffic Management (load balancing) services as a performance facilitator, traffic controller, hosting redundancy enabler and overall abstraction layer for content delivery is on the rise. Contact us if there are any other interesting studies you'd like us to research and share.

The principle of M2M communications is straightforward. Sensors are installed on consumer or commercial hardware to transfer application-relevant information to other sensors and/or to a centralized storage facility. Using this information, complicated algorithms infer decisions relevant to the specific application, and are executed accordingly. While this is simple in theory, in-practice, it actually requires the construction of a complex network, with a clear path between devices and storage; the ability to store, process and analyze large amounts of data; and the ability to take action based on this intelligence.

As evidenced by recent reports, it's clear that the industry believes that cloud computing is becoming a viable service option for mission critical business applications. In a 2012 survey conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners, and sponsored by 39 cloud companies including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, and Glasshouse, found a meager 3% considered adopting cloud services to be too risky — down from 11% the previous year. In addition, only 12% said the cloud platform was too immature, and that's down from 26% the year prior. This evolution of the computing industry towards cloud has enabled the storage of vast amounts of data from devices and also made the analysis of this data more feasible. In fact, Microsoft recently said that its Azure cloud has more than four trillion objects stored in it, a fourfold increase from a year before. Its Azure cloud averages 270,000 requests per second, while peaking at 880,000 requests per second during some months. The requests per second have increased almost threefold in the past year, a Microsoft official wrote in a blog post. As a comparison, Amazon Web Services said that just its Simple Storage Service (S3) holds 905 billion objects, and was growing at a rate of one billion objects per day, while handling an average of 650,000 requests per second. As cloud becomes the de facto model for M2M communications, M2M vendors must understand what it takes to enable secure and reliable transfer of information via that vehicle.

It is also important to note that M2M communications can be triggered by both planned and unplanned events. For example, in a smart grid application, smart meters can send information about electricity consumption to a centralized database at pre-scheduled times. Sensors can also be designed to react to unplanned events, such as extreme weather conditions, and trigger increased communication in a certain geography or location. As such, the network that connects these devices to each other, and to the cloud, has to perform in both instances, adapting to both forecasted increases in traffic and random spikes, with automatic, assured performance.

Cloud Infrastructure Requirements for M2M Communications

The network platform that enables M2M communications has multiple segments: the access segment (wireless radio or wireline-based), backhaul to the cloud and the cloud network.

Figure 1: Information from billions of sensors is captured in data centers for processing. Sensor data is transmitted over a wireless access network, mobile backhaul and core network to the data centers.

Sensor data travels to the cloud over wireless/radio or wireline access infrastructures. The aggregation network has to provide highly resilient, scalable and cost-effective backhaul either from mobile or wireline access to be effective. If not the case, M2M communications would be unreliable and many of the new-age applications could never be fully realized.

In order to enable cloud as a platform for M2M adoption, innovation and communication, the cloud has to serve as a high-performance computing platform, often referred to as an enterprise-grade or carrier-grade cloud. High-performance cloud networks need terabit-level connectivity to be able to withstand the projected volume of M2M traffic. These networks will require a provisioning tool so that administrators can allocate resources to where and when they are needed, and also ensure that network assets are available to support delivery of bandwidth-rich applications and services. And, finally, data centers and the cloud backbone need to function as a seamless, single network — a data center without walls — to optimize performance and economics.

Widespread availability of M2M technology has already spurred innovative use cases across different industries, such as: smart grid in energy/utilities; communication between various devices for security and industrial/building control; environmental monitoring; and many applications in the consumer domain ranging from retail to home appliance intelligence.

For example:

• In healthcare, mobile platforms can be connected wirelessly to a patient's body or garments for doctors to observe glucose, blood pressure, temperature, EKG and imaging data to alert staff to any abnormalities without the patient having to be checked into the hospital.
• Innovative "green" solutions including, solar-powered, wireless parking meters that allow credit card payments to a web-based irrigation control system, which protects the environment and saves money and time for businesses and consumers.
• Fleet management specialists can optimize fleet performance through integrating GPS capability, vehicle diagnostics and wireless communications to provide real-time field status information, including current location and diagnostics alerts. Fleet managers are able to monitor and manage driving behavior to improve safety and reduce risk, as well as log drivers' hours to ensure they comply with regulations.

Keys to success

To foster adoption of M2M-enabled technology, initiatives such as GSMA's Connected Life regularly bring together thought leaders within the M2M ecosystem to share their insights to help increase availability of anywhere, anytime connectivity.

The successful adoption of M2M depends on the maturity of multiple elements in the ecosystem, including the wireless technology and business system; the network connectivity that connects the machines and sensors to the cloud; the cloud computing platform; and the software applications that translate the huge amount of data into useful intelligence.

To build an enterprise or carrier-grade cloud platform that can support the projected volume of M2M traffic, the underlying network that connects enterprise data centers, and data centers to the cloud, has to be reliable, high-performing, connection-oriented and have low latency. It must be responsive and integrated into the cloud ecosystem to satisfy connectivity requirements of storage and compute cloud subsystems. It must also enable elastic/liquid bandwidth to ensure the performance and economic benefits of the cloud are realized. Carrier-class network infrastructure — with the ability to scale to 100G today and terabit capacities in the future and with multiple levels of resiliency enabled by an intelligent control plane — will be critical to enabling these cloud networks.

Written by Mariana Agache, Director of Service Provider Industry Marketing at Ciena

I suspect at the end of the day the US government will approve the pipeline as GDP growth and potential job losses will always trump concerns over the environment.

However, the US government has been putting on a lot pressure on Alberta to improve its environmental standards as a quid pro quo for approving the pipeline. In response Alberta is exploring expanding their current CO2 emissions program to a $40/tonne carbon levy. In the past, all of the funds raised by Alberta's carbon emissions program was returned to industry to invest in dubious energy efficiency programs. But Alberta could really have a much more meaningful impact in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, that would more than compensate the emissions from the oil carried in the Keystone XL pipeline, if it invested some of this money into its local universities and R&E network — Cybera.

Although on the production side the tar sands are one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry, globally is the fastest growing and soon will be the largest source of CO2 emissions on the consumption side of the equation. ICT emissions are produced indirectly from the coal generated electricity that is used to power all of our devices. Currently it is estimated that ICT consumes around 10% all electrical power growing at about 6-10% per year. According to the OECD and other studies ICT equipment in our home now consumes more energy than traditional appliances.

New studies suggest that the growth in wireless networks could be the single largest component of that growth in CO2 emissions from the ICT sector. In a recent report by the Centre for Energy-Efficient Communications, at the University of Melbourne-based research centre claimed that by 2015, the energy used to run data centres will be a "drop in the ocean", compared to the wireless networks used to access cloud services. The report predicts that by 2015 energy consumption associated with 'wireless cloud' will reach 43 terawatt-hours, compared to 9.2 terawatt-hours in 2012. This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012, up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015, which is the equivalent of an additional 4.9 million cars on the road, the report states.

More worrisome is another report from Sweden KTH that predicts will need to increase the density of wireless base stations by 1000 times to meet the insatiable demand for the "wireless cloud". If this came to fruition, it would be incredibly huge jump in the demand of electricity by the ICT sector.

The wireless industry in particular is an ideal sector to be powered by local renewable energy sources such as solar panels and windmills. Already many wireless towers in the developing world are powered by renewable energy (but unfortunately often with diesel backup). Because of it is inherently distributed, lower power architecture the wireless industry is ideally suited to be powered by local renewable energy.

I have long advocated that universities and R&E networks are the ideal environment for deploying wireless networks that are powered solely by local renewable power sources. By integrating WIfI and 4G networks with multiple over lapping cells it would be possible to provide seamless service zero carbon wireless services.

For more details see:

High Level Architecture for Building Zero Carbon Internet Networks , ICT products and services

Alberta could be a world leader in deploying such zero carbon networks starting first at universities in partnership with Cybera. The global CO2 impact of developing such technology in terms of removing additional 4.9 million cars from the road would be much greater than expected emissions from the oil to be carried in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline

Additional pointers:

Cloud's real ecological timebomb: Wireless, not data centres

Thousand times greater density of base stations
J. Zander, P. Mähönen, "Riding the Data Tsunami in the Cloud – Myths and Challenges in Future Wireless Access", IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol 51, Issue: 3 (March 2013), pages 145-151 http://theunwiredpeople.com/author/jenz/

Solar powered WiFi allows control of bugs instead of using pesticides

ICT industry on track to be largest sector for CO 2 emissions

Solar Powered DIY Portable HotSpot

More on revenue opportunities for R&E and open access networks – building next generation "5G" wireless network

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

In a recent survey by PB7 sponsored by EuroCloud Netherlands and others, a group of Dutch companies was interviewed about their motivations and hesitations around cloud computing. The survey's results were quite a bit more interesting than the usual lot. In this article I have cherry picked a few observations from the larger survey. The full survey is reported on in http://www.slideshare.net/peterthuis/ecm12-ghgg (in Dutch).

The majority of companies are using cloud computing these days, and this includes government organizations by the way. That adoption rate is not growing so fast anymore. The growth is in the number of cloud applications that are being deployed (and presumably also in the number of users of those applications).

How does cloud computing fit business strategy? Companies change for a number of reasons and objectives, and cloud computing as a driver is no different. Some organizations innovate using cloud computing, but from the survey it appears most are just optimizing business process, or even just substituting current solutions.

Substitution happens when an existing solution is replaced by a cheaper one. Examples of these can be seen across the board. As you can expect from a wide survey, the most common applications are mail, messaging, document processing, sales, marketing, distribution, HR. One striking category though is field service where a lot of adoption is going on. Inhibitors for these types of applications include are the value of current investments ("the server in the closet has not been fully written off").

Optimization involves process change: doing things differently. This could involve people inside the organization as well as outside the organization. From anecdotal evidence, we know that collaboration tools are on the rise, in particular when they serve to communicate over organizational boundaries. Think procurement, project collaboration and marketplaces. These are the 'cloud native' apps so to say. The other category involves empowering the current workforce, especially if it is mobile already, a trend we see happening in airlines and retail. Cloud productivity solutions allow the inclusion of staff that was not equipped with computers before. This is clearly a big market for horizontal application suites such as Google Docs and Office 365. Vertical applications areas include HR and e-learning.

The less predictable the workload, the bigger the advantage becomes that cloud applications have over non-cloud applications. About a tenth of the researched applications have a 'rapid growth' workload pattern, i.e. new applications, new business. For these categories cloud is by far the preferred solution.

These trends align very well with two important cloud characteristics: elastic scalability (especially from a financial perspective), and broad network access (anytime/anywhere/anydevice). Broad network access allows the inclusion of users that are not within the corporate firewall.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is definitely on the rise across the board: small/large enterprises as well as governments. It is expected to increased penetration to 30 percent in 2014, a twofold increase in two years. Still, this is a lot less than the penetration of SaaS.

As the number of cloud applications per organization rises, integration concerns increase. From the survey, it appears cloud consumers are seeing three different avenues to address these concerns. They call for open standards, they turn to cloud brokers to do the integration for them, and they hope to see ecosystems such as app stores providing this integration for them.

Other concerns are security and privacy in general, though it is unclear to what extent these fears are actually translated into action. It is peculiar in this respect that only 40% of cloud users has a clear exit plan.

There are quite a few implications for service providers in these findings. The biggest demand for cloud services is for rationalizing existing IT systems, and if they are internal, expanding their use cases to include mobile employees and business partners. As an extension of these, inclusion of more people and partners can allow business processes to be reengineered. Partnering with consultants to help effect these changes might make sense.

Potential clients are concerned about integration and security risks. Conceivably, adequately addressing these concerns can be a selling proposition. For the mechanics of that, have a look at another article I wrote (see Can we simplify cloud security?). A lot of these concerns (including integration) are expressible in terms of the CSA Cloud Control Matrix (Disclosure: I updated some of these controls recently as a CSA volunteer).

If you are a cloud provider and wonder how to improve your offering, you may be interested in having a look at www.cloudcomputingundercontrol.com where I have outlined a Governance, Risk Management and Compliance roadmap.

Written by Peter HJ van Eijk, Cloud Computing Coach, Author and Speaker

Regardless of the size of your organization, your firm's core network infrastructure including your DNS, DHCP and IPAM servers are the backbone of your IT system, supporting the growth and scalability of your business. Unfortunately though, many IT departments fail to realize that home-grown solutions, stand alone systems and Excel spreadsheets used to manually manage their IP-dependent infrastructure, simply can not support the dynamic nature and scalability demands of today's networks. With the imminent move to the cloud and the introduction of the hybrid cloud model to organizations' network infrastructure, how you manage your IP address space becomes even more important.

IPAM consumed as a software service on the cloud is one viable solution, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with limited IT budget for capital infrastructure investments. Simply put, IPAM SaaS is a shared IPAM on the cloud through which the organization's DNS and DHCP servers are managed. These servers could either be in the organization's own private network or then dedicated server instances on the cloud. Here, the enterprise's own IT department would be utilizing the IPAM service on the cloud, through a secure remote access, to manage the DNS and DHCP servers. With a pay-as-you-go business model, this approach allows the SME to have access to state-of-the-art, scalable IP address management system with zero requirements for capital expenses, maintenance, license and renewal fees.

Another approach is to dispense with the major part of the operating costs by dedicating the task to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who would then be managing the IPAM for you. Here, the MSP would be running a dedicated IPAM instance on the cloud to manage the organization's core IP network. All communications between the IaaS cloud and the organization's network are conducted through a secure tunnel without any need for public IP address routing, making the IaaS cloud a transparent extension of the organization's resources (see this post for more on security). In practice, this approach has all the advantages discussed in the previous paragraph plus the added benefit that it considerably reduces the operating expenses.

This has huge implications for an organization's resource planning strategy, and changes the competitive landscape in the industry. Thanks to services such as IPAM SaaS and IaaS, SMEs and start-ups now have access to the same computing resources and capabilities as their bigger rivals, allowing them to focus on getting the services they need without being constrained by the technology on which those services are based. Cloud-based service delivery with a pay-as-you-go business model has changed the rules of the game, paving the way for a fairer competitive environment based on innovative business models and sustainable capabilities.

Written by Hanieh Taipalus, Marketing Manager at Nixu Software

Over the last 10 years, the principle of security by design has been gaining popularity within software engineering. This concept should also be incorporated into the SDDC and cloud architectures, to ensure that organizations leveraging the promise of cloud computing will not be compromised for their forward looking thinking.

I guess it would be fair to say that perimeter security is currently the most widely used protection for IT infrastructure. By implementing firewalls, VPNs, intrusion prevention, attack detection and the like, it has been possible to deploy reasonably secure private computing environments. To complement the perimeter security, most organizations are taking further measures inside their enterprise networks, to make sure that threats are promptly detected and dealt with.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that information security professionals are skeptic about public and hybrid clouding models. After all, both introduce a number of new attack vectors into the secured environments. But what if the hybrid cloud did not require communication with applications and servers running in the public Internet, but rather involved an architecture that was secure by design?

The problem with most IaaS cloud offerings out there today is that their hybrid offering usually relies on public IP addresses. The customers are expected to network to the extra capacity over the Internet. While this may be an easy solution for an IaaS cloud provider leveraging standard cloud stacks and DHCP, the publicly routed IP addresses assigned to the workloads introduce a new attack vector to the end-user's private network environment.

The simplest way to overcome this security issue is to create a secure tunnel between the IaaS cloud and its end-users' enterprise networks, and to assign every single workload an IP address that matched with the IP addressing scheme used in end-users' private networks. While Cisco says that VXLAN is intended for intra data center connectivity only, for example VPN could be used for tunneling just as well.

This straightforward solution brings about two major benefits. First, since the IP addresses in the IaaS cloud are part of every end-user's own IP addressing scheme, the hosts will have no trouble networking between the cloud and the enterprise network back home. Second, if the VLANs in which the workloads are deployed are not routed to the public Internet at all, they will be less prone to various security threats lurking there.

When an IP addressing model described above is merged with a dynamic DNS provisioning engine, the outcome becomes extremely powerful. After all, what organization would not want to tap into is the economics of an IaaS cloud, knowing that it was as secure as their enterprise network. This proposition becomes even more compelling when the workloads have names and IP addresses that match with end-users' own enterprise networks, making the IaaS cloud a transparent extension of one's own computing resources.

In the context of orchestrated cloud application deployment, the technologies I've outlined in this trilogy are generally related to release parameters. So rather than talking about DHCP, IP addressing or DNS as isolated technologies, I argue that they should be merged into automated and holistic Release Parameter Provisioning (RPP). More importantly, rather than trying to make cloud orchestration solutions perform tasks they are not good at, I claim that RPP merits its own layer in the SDDC and cloud stacks, functioning as a neat bridge between the SDN and the cloud orchestration layers.

Written by Juha Holkkola, Managing Director of Nixu Software

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it was a nail.”
—Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science

Until the late 90s, the networking industry largely depended on static IP address allocations. Around that time, the number of connected devices started growing rapidly, making it impossible for the network administrators to keep up much longer with the manual configuration of the equipment. To solve this problem, along came the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and the fireworks of dynamic IP assignment.

The trouble is, the networking community has not got anywhere since the late 90s. Granted, there have been new RFCs relating to DHCP along the way — DHCPv6 being the most notable example — but deep down the IP addressing paradigm has remained exactly the same. Either the addresses are static or they are issued dynamically by a DHCP server. In this regard, insofar the cloud has been no different.

When one takes a look at various cloud stacks, they mostly rely on DHCP as far as IP addressing is concerned. Admittedly, that works fine in public clouds where no one really cares what IP address is assigned to a given tenant. Ditto for private clouds, as all tenants are firmly sitting in the same enterprise network. But as soon as one gets around to multi-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, that's when DHCP goes sour.

Looking at an enterprise out there, the chances are it takes good use of a private network. Looking at two, the chances are their private networks overlap. And once you have an IaaS Cloud provider trying to service both simultaneously in a multi-tenant cloud environment, the DHCP service no longer works, unless you set up and manage a dedicated DHCP service for each enterprise end-user. Even if the IaaS Cloud provider didn't have more than a few dozen customers, DHCP would likely become a no-go. Just imagine the Operating Expense and you will know why.

Interestingly enough, VMware and Cisco both acknowledged the VLAN and IP Address Management challenges in data centers already in 2011. Their solution was Virtual eXtensible Local Networks, or VXLANs, extending the VLAN address space to gazillion available IDs.

Although I am confident that having network equipment that supports VXLAN Tunnel End Points (VTEP) allows the software defined data center to scale better, it actually does nothing to address the IP allocation issue. In fact, in isolation, it has the potential to make things worse, since in addition to allowing the managed address spaces to grow larger, it also allows the address spaces to span across a number of VLANs.

To address the root cause, the networking community has to take a hard look at the IP addressing methods used in connection with SDDC. While DHCP continues to be a good technology as far as IP allocation to physical devices is concerned, it is not well-suited for multi-tenant cloud environments. Rather, what is needed is an automated IP commissioning system that supports overlapping private networks with tagging for appropriate VLANs and/or VXLANs, with open APIs used to integrate the whole enchilada with cloud orchestration and DNS architectures.

To wrap up this SDDC trilogy, my next blog will discuss how IP commissioning should work in practice.

Written by Juha Holkkola, Managing Director of Nixu Software

SDN environments consist of a virtualized controller layer containing software-based intelligence required to dynamically formulate and provision routing rules into x86-based commodity networking equipment, leveraging open APIs and protocols such as OpenFlow. In VMware's vision of Software Defined Data Centre, their vCloud orchestator becomes the source of the data pushed out to the SDN controller, bridging Layer 2-4 network equipment and the dynamic workloads coming and going from the cloud.

The problem I have with VMware's Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) stack is that it sort of ignores the biggest concession in networking made to us humans. That is, the DNS. In order for people to be able to connect to the virtual server instances running in the Software Defined Data Centre, they probably expect to use names as opposed to IP addresses, particularly in IPv6 enabled environments.

And of course from the data centre elasticity perspective, using names as opposed to IP addresses is more administrator-friendly too. After all, it is a lot easier to change the IP address of a hostname, than it is to change an IP address in all the clients and equipment that need to connect to a given machine. Bearing this in mind, I think we can rest assured that DNS will continue to have a bright future also in connection with SDN and SDDC. The more dynamic the data centers become, the more utility the good old DNS offers.

With that said, I do believe that standard DNS architectures will have to evolve as the Software Defined Data Centre marches on. To this end, here's a two-point checklist to all the data centers out there:

1) Dynamic DNS Provisioning. As data center workflows are being automated, there will be very little room for command-line prompt or home-grown scripts. Rather, the DNS platform must have an open API that can be used to provision changes, in real-time. Forget the manual management of static DNS entries, that's not for the 10s.

2) DNS Management Automations. To make sure that the integration is kept simple, the DNS platform to which the changes are provisioned must include automation features such as creation of slave zone files (when master is created) and reverse mappings; automated allocation of next available IP address; automated generation of names based on user policies; and data validation to make sure an invalid entry does not take down the DNS service. In other words, the whole nine yards.

In many ways, this architecture is actually quite similar to SDN. The DNS primary becomes a virtualized, intelligent controller used to provision changes in real-time to the virtualized DNS secondaries serving out traffic on Layer 5. So in case you happen to work for VMware, please tell your colleagues that without a virtualized DNS architecture such as this, your SDDC stack is not complete.

What remains debatable is the part of the Software Defined Data Centre stack that triggers the changes provisioned to DNS. I will discuss this in my next blog, so stay tuned.

Written by Juha Holkkola, Managing Director of Nixu Software

Top Ten Featured Blogs from the community in 2012:

#1		DNS Changerby Paul Vixie | Mar 27, 2012 | Viewed 66,094 times
#2		Trademarking .generics - the .bank Fiasco!by Konstantinos Komaitis | Jan 18, 2012 | Viewed 17,124 times
#3		Refusing REFUSEDby Paul Vixie | Jan 11, 2012 | Viewed 11,860 times
#4		MegaBust's MegaQuestions Cloud the Net's Futureby Philip S Corwin | Feb 13, 2012 | Viewed 10,430 times
#5		Anonymous Plans to Go After DNS Root Servers. What Will Be the US's Response?by Terry Zink | Feb 15, 2012 | Viewed 9,813 times
#6		Why the Dot Com Kingdom Will Continue to Rule Post New gTLDsby Naseem Javed | Jul 24, 2012 | Viewed 9,771 times
#7		Fake Bank Site, Fake Registrarby Garth Bruen | Mar 27, 2012 | Viewed 8,977 times
#8		Why Vint Cerf is Wrongby Wout de Natris | Nov 21, 2012 | Viewed 8,891 times
#9		Internet Governance and the Public Interestby Paul Diaz | Mar 19, 2012 | Viewed 8,384 times
#10		IPv6 Subnetting - The Paradigm Shiftby Chris Grundemann | Jul 19, 2012 | Viewed 8,380 times

Top 10 News in 2012:

#1		ISPs Are Not Broadcasters, Says Supreme Court of CanadaFeb 10, 2012 | Viewed 35,128 times
#2		Iran Blocks HTTPS, 30 Million Reported Losing Email AccessFeb 11, 2012 | Viewed 11,016 times
#3		Vint Cerf: The Launch of a New Larger InternetJun 05, 2012 | Viewed 8,257 times
#4		The Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress Announces Keynote, Speakers, Initial PartnershipsJan 08, 2013 | Viewed 7,841 times
#5		Akamai Reports 460 Times Increase in IPv6 Requests Over Its Platform Since Last YearOct 22, 2012 | Viewed 6,976 times
#6		Saudi Arabia Objects to Certain Proposed New gTLD Strings Such as .Gay and .WineAug 15, 2012 | Viewed 6,764 times
#7		Department of Commerce Cancels IANA Contract RFPMar 09, 2012 | Viewed 6,343 times
#8		SPECIAL: Updates from the ICANN Meetings in TorontoOct 17, 2012 | Viewed 5,802 times
#9		Most U.S. Agencies Expected to Miss IPv6 DeadlineSep 28, 2012 | Viewed 5,411 times
#10		Websites Go Dark Protesting SOPA and PIPA, Senators Change CourseJan 18, 2012 | Viewed 5,299 times

Top 10 Industry News in 2012 (sponsored posts):

#1		MarkMonitor Offers New gTLD Application Databaseby MarkMonitor | Jun 15, 2012 | Viewed 6,992 times
#2		DotConnectAfrica Participates in ICANN-45 Toronto, Unveils New IBCA Initiative at ICANN Public Forumby DotConnectAfrica | Oct 23, 2012 | Viewed 6,822 times
#3		ICANN 45: New gTLDs Not Far Away Nowby Afilias | Oct 25, 2012 | Viewed 5,676 times
#4		MarkMonitor to Exhibit at Internet Tech Policy Exhibition and Reception to be Held on Capitol Hillby MarkMonitor | Jan 24, 2012 | Viewed 5,355 times
#5		CentralNic and REG.RU Confirm Strategic Partnershipby CentralNic | Jul 30, 2012 | Viewed 5,244 times
#6		MarkMonitor Fraud Intelligence Report, Q4 2011by MarkMonitor | Feb 17, 2012 | Viewed 5,037 times
#7		Afilias Participates in Global Test of Multilingual IDN Emailby Afilias | Jun 28, 2012 | Viewed 4,857 times
#8		Implementing a Cyber-Security Code of Conduct: Real-Life Lessons From Australia (Webinar)by Nominum | Apr 30, 2012 | Viewed 4,665 times
#9		Top-Level Domain Survey Findings Not Surprising, But Still Concerningby MarkMonitor | Sep 05, 2012 | Viewed 4,509 times
#10		Public Interest Registry Releases Results of Bi-Annual Domain Name Reportby PIR | Aug 14, 2012 | Viewed 4,462 times

Additionally, you can also check the leaderboards for CircleID's overall top 100 community and industry participants.

Written by CircleID Reporter

Not everyone rushes to the mall on Black Friday anymore. Instead of visiting brick and mortar stores, more and more shoppers are perfectly content to go online. In fact, this year Black Friday online sales reached $1 billion for the first time. Of course, Cyber Monday is the busiest e-commerce day of them all. Sales for Cyber Monday reached $1.5 billion this year, a 30 percent increase from 2011. E-commerce continues to be the bright spot in retail as sales at brick and mortar stores slow.

Amazon has found that a 100 milliseconds delay can cause a one percent drop in revenues. With Cyber Monday generating 2.2 percent of domestic sales, Amazon like the other e-tailer behemoths, has huge incentives to squeeze the last millisecond of performance from its site.

Website providers have been moving to cloud computing so they can instantly scale to meet increased traffic. But what happens when everyone needs to scale at the same time?

Top 100 Retailers: Neustar's Analysis

For this Thanksgiving holiday season, Neustar monitored the websites of 15 of the top 100 retailers to see how they behaved under the influx of bargain hunters. In monitoring the 15 sites, Neustar throttled our monitors to simulate the connection speeds of the typical web user, with maximum download speeds of one megabit per second and 50 milliseconds of latency. These are typical of a business DSL connection or a home connection, and much better than what most mobile users can expect. Each website was sampled every five minutes from multiple locations, starting on the Monday before Thanksgiving and through Cyber Monday. We set timeouts of 30 seconds, which are likely to exceed the patience of most web users.

The timings shown are the total page load time for all page elements. In some cases, this may include items that have little or no impact on the user experience. As a result, the raw page load times need to be read with a careful eye. For instance, the average Amazon page load time of 13 seconds may appear to indicate a very poor performance, but a closer look at the page behavior shows that the main page loads in 1.5 seconds, followed by images, most of which will be below the 'fold' for users, and lastly a single flash object adverted to the right margin delivered by Doubleclick.

For most of Wednesday, the object was not arriving before our 30 second cutoff. This resulted in Amazon showing a lower success rate in our table below. However, despite the imperfections, a relative change in a webpage's load time generally indicates a poorer web experience.

	Load Time: Week	Load Time: Cyber Monday	Delta	Success %
overstock.com	4.26	3.94	92.49%	99.00%
Macy's	4.49	4.8	106.90%	99.00%
JC Penny	5.42	5.23	96.49%	99.00%
Staples	6.76	6.8	100.59%	99.00%
Barnes & Noble	7.85	7.42	94.52%	99.00%
Target	7.7	8.09	105.06%	99.00%
Dell	10.87	10.4	95.68%	99.00%
Home Depot	10.91	11.62	106.51%	98.00%
Sears	11.97	11.64	97.24%	97.00%
Amazon	13.07	12.14	92.88%	85.00%
Kohls	13.36	12.36	92.51%	98.00%
Gap	13.25	14.9	112.45%	98.00%
Toys R Us	13.54	16.13	119.13%	98.00%
Walmart	13.18	16.56	125.64%	99.00%

A Closer Look at Walmart

The good news is that most sites we looked at survived Cyber Monday without incident. The single most notable feature of the analysis was the near doubling of Walmart's load time at about 11:10pm PST on Thanksgiving Day. Analyzing the sample times shows a dramatic shift from a consistent page load time of about nine seconds to about 16 seconds.

A quick side by side comparison of the Walmart HAR file immediately preceding the change and the one after the change shows that the addition of a single JPG image could explain most of the increase in the page load time.

This image was below the 'fold,' so it may have had little or no effect on user satisfaction. The image, a not particularly large 800 pixels by 300 pixels, was 405 kilobytes in size. It was compressed on Tuesday morning to less than 95k, and its load time fell from eight to less than two seconds.

Walmart has a great reputation for analyzing the relationship between website performance and business value, so they would have insights into how much, if anything, this oversight cost them.

A Closer Look at Toys "R" Us

Another e-tailer worth mentioning is Toys "R" Us. Their website didn't show any significant changes, but started to exhibit significant slowdown from about 9am EST, and suffered degraded performances throughout the day, recovering around 9pm EST. We infer that a large volume of web-traffic caused this slow down. How much revenue did Toy "R" Us lose from customers abandoning the site?

Toys "R" Us website performance on Cyber Monday.

See all the results for yourself at our interactive graphs for Cyber Monday and for the Thanksgiving Week.

Written by Diem Shin, Product Marketing Manager at Neustar

Nixu NameSurfer 7.3 Series introduces the following features:

• An extended Application Programming Interface (API) developed in cooperation with cloud orchestration solution vendors;
• New IP Address Management (IPAM) features designed in cooperation with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) leveraging multitenancy in connection with their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings;
• More than 50 enhancements based on customer requests and feedback.

"Since our inception in 2006, Nixu Software has been an avid advocate of software-based networking. After becoming VMware Technology Alliance Partner in 2007, we have been implementing virtualized IPAM and edge services such as DNS, DHCP and L2/L3 in some of the most demanding networking environments in the world" said the Managing Director of Nixu Software, Juha Holkkola. "Along with the release of Nixu NameSurfer 7.3 Series, we have taken our vision further by expanding our IPAM solution into a virtualizable platform that can be used to connect the orchestration systems and virtualized networks in the Software-Defined Network stack" he continued.

Find out more about Nixu NameSurfer Suite and download a free 30-day trial.

The hybrid cloud model is all about economies of scale. When managed service providers are operating the clouds for enterprises, they want the associated workflows to be automated. That facilitates an industrial process which allows the business applications to be provisioned and consumed immediately.

As far as IPv6 is concerned, it has a direct link to the hybrid cloud delivery model. Whenever a new application workload is being deployed in the hybrid cloud, the preparation of the virtual footprint requires release parameters — IP address, name and other network settings — that match with the specific VLANs used by the enterprise end-user for whom the cloud application is being set up. In practice, this makes manual assignments and technologies such as DHCP impractical, because neither has been designed for the elasticity of the hybrid cloud.

With this in mind, I think there are three reasons why wide-scale adaptation of the hybrid cloud will positively impact the IPv6 adaptation.

First, as enterprises migrate to hybrid clouds, they cease to be the bottle-neck for IPv6 adaptation. Insofar, the enterprises have been reluctant to move to IPv6 due to lack of business case. But once they hand over the keys to their business infrastructure and applications to managed service providers running the hybrid clouds, they no longer look after the network layer themselves.

Second, as managed service providers automate the release parameter provisioning process, the complex syntax of IPv6 addresses and vast size of the IPv6 space becomes irrelevant. When IP address allocation is carried out as part of an automated workflow, IPv6 is no more difficult to cope with than IPv4. The system doesn't care about the complexity of a syntax, so long as it is programmed correctly.

Third, the easier it becomes to consume applications, the more they are used. The more they are used, the cheaper they become, making them again that much easier to consume. And since all these cloud application workloads require their own IP address, the scalability and the economies of scale associated with the hybrid cloud business model will ultimately depend on whether or not there is sufficient address space to go around.

So the way things are looking to play out right now, I would put my money on the hybrid cloud as far as IPv6 adaptation in the enterprise is concerned. Assuming it takes off briskly, who knows how far along we will be in IPv6 adaptation by 2015.

Written by Juha Holkkola, Managing Director of Nixu Software

As managed service providers (MSPs) experiment with hybrid cloud business models to reduce costs and increase scalability, they have become painfully aware of the lack of automations for release parameter provisioning, causing prolonged delivery times for cloud applications.

Optimizing the delivery of the cloud applications involves network-level techniques such as subscriber messaging, network traffic management and blocking botnets. By leveraging Nixu Cloud IP Suite and the Nominum N2 Platform, MSPs are now able to address all these considerations, creating dramatic improvements in the scalability and the quality of their hybrid cloud offerings.

"With the out-of-the-box support and the release parameter provisioning automations provided by Nixu Software, managed service providers operating on the N2 platform can deliver and deploy their applications in less time and with much lower total cost of ownership", said Brian McElroy, vice president of business development at Nominum.

"The main value proposition of Nixu Cloud IP Suite is slashing the operating expenses and eliminating the scalability issues related to the manual release parameter provisioning process in application deployment workflows," said Juha Holkkola, managing director of Nixu Software. "This was something that resonated very strongly with the MSPs developing applications on the Nominum N2 platform and thus expanding Nixu Cloud IP Suite's umbrella of support to the IDEAL ecosystem was a natural next move for us."

For more information about the integration between Nixu Cloud IP Suite and the Nominum N2 Platform, visit the Nixu Software Application Delivery page, Integrating with the Nominum™ N2 Platform.

About Nominum
Nominum™ is the worldwide leading provider of integrated subscriber, network and security solutions for network operators. Nominum is the provider of the N2 Platform that leverages over a trillion DNS queries daily and enables the rapid development and seamless integration of applications that leverage DNS data. These applications are generated by the Nominum IDEAL™ ecosystem, an open ecosystem of application providers. The combined value of the N2 Platform and the IDEAL ecosystem provides network operators with the ability to deliver a differentiated subscriber experience with cost efficiency and agility. Nominum is a global organization headquartered in Redwood City, CA. Visit www.nominum.com.