Page 10 - NewsLync Winter 2014

Winter 2014
10
NewsLync by Telecom Reseller

NewsLync®
have remained predominantly unchanged.
STARK
HEYN
Leveraging the high-availability func- A Report on Microsoft’ s Communication Platforms From
tions included in Lync along with third-par-
Continued from page 1
Cotinued from page 9
ty load balancing provide the most avail-
is a production of
interface and capabilities are lots and lots service FQDNs and directing them to the able and resilient solution possible. % Telecom Reseller:
of networking protocols. Folks who spend appropriate data center location. While TM
any time with the deployment, configura- GSLB appliances direct DNS requests to For more information: www.kemptechnolo-
Microsoft® Lync
tion, or operations of Lync certainly realize the appropriate datacenter, local application gies.com
this – there’s a lot going on with the “wire,” load balancers provide reverse proxy and Subscriptions
whether that’s over the air or on copper.
Networking is very much in the DNA high availability of http/https services.
CRAY
of Lync, so when the industry started rally- An example of load balance is Or change address, unsubscribe
ing around Software-Defined Networking Mobility service. In Lync 2010 a Layer Continued from page 4
Call 360 260-9708 Fax 360 260-9726
(SDN), we were excited to participate. SDN 7 VIP or Virtual Service was the mini- in real-time by sharing media and working Email publisher@usernews.com
has been defined in a bunch of ways and I mum requirement to support this. Active simultaneously on a single document, Lync
encourage you to explore the topic, but Cookie Persistence was the preferred meth- can multiply the communication power of a Advertising
generally you can think of two things. First, od for session affinity or stickiness and small business. As it scales to support any Marie-France Belisle
separating the low-level network functions MS-WSMAN the cookie of choice. In level of business communication, Lync can Call 514-397-9338
into commodity hardware controlled by a 2013 these requirements have been reduced accommodate growing SMBs to empower a marie-france@usernews.com
software-based platform. Second, having allowing for either a Layer 4 or Layer consistent customer experience – like you’d 60 260-9708
applications inform the software control- 7 VIP depending upon the deployment. expect from a huge, tech-savvy enterprise. %
Toll Free 3
ler of their requirements of the network. This concept started with cloud-scale data Beyond this, load balancing requirements
For more visit www.zeacom.com
Fax 360 260-9726
centers and has been moving down-market Email publisher@usernews.com
as enterprise network architects realize the
power of this model.
SDN’s primary use case has been around
ensuring that virtual machines can be man-
aged independently of the underlying net-
work fabric. Here in the Lync organization,
we think that unified communications can
be a major beneficiary as well. In any UC
implementation there are dozens of net- work elements – from routers to reverse
proxies, intrusion detection systems to
application delivery controllers, firewalls to
session border controllers – that all need to
be provisioned and configured correctly for
optimal media flow. Instead of having all of
these elements configured discretely, SDN
provides a model for a single policy-based
method of operations, where the applica-
tion tells the network what needs to happen.
This is a big paradigm shift, and we have jumped in with both feet. Today,
we’re releasing the Lync SDN API for free
to anyone with a Lync Server deployment.
The API provides a REST-ful data stream
of information about media flows as they
get started. This data can then be fed into
an SDN controller to enlighten the network
about what needs to happen and where.
We have outlined three primary use
cases for this:
Diagnostics. By using the data from the API, network monitoring systems can then
correlate between media flows in Lync and
activities in the network that may have an
impact on quality.
Automatically provisioning Quality of
Service (QoS). When the controller gets
information about a media flow starting up, it
can instruct the network to assign the appro-
priate marking to those packets in real time.
Orchestration. Just like it sounds, imag-
ine all the different instruments of the network from layer one to layer seven all
singing along in harmony.
In the coming weeks, we will go into
more depth around each of these scenarios
along with the partners we have been work-
ing with deeply through the last year to
bring these concepts to a reality. Nectar
has a great diagnostics application that
consumes the Lync SDN API, and Aruba
Networks with their latest release uses the
API to inform wireless access and priority.
We have a lot to talk about on the industry standards work as well, with both the UCI
Forum and Open Networking Foundation
working diligently to understand how any
application can operate within the SDN
framework, and we’ve been leading the
discussions on the applicability with UC.
To our customers, we pledge to continue
to look to the latest technology and capabil-
ities to advance Lync. This is still the early
days of SDN, but we think the opportunity
and potential here is undeniable. Finally, please join us at Lync Conference, where
we will be talking more about SDN with
Lync and how partners and customers are
using the SDN API today in their deploy-
ments. %

For more visit The Lync Team - http://social.
technet.microsoft.com/profile/the lync team