App-layer SLAs around the corner

During the next several months, your options for service-level agreements will expand.

The reason partly has to do with the competitive pressure that frame relay is receiving from emerging IP VPNs, a market climate forcing frame relay to find new ways to differentiate itself. Also contributing is the arrival of application service providers (ASP), which need to accurately distinguish among the traffic flows of many customers.

Either way you slice it, your ability to specify bandwidth, availability, latency and packet loss for your frame relay traffic on a per-application basis is imminent, according to some equipment vendors currently striking deals with frame relay carriers.

Vendor companies that got their start in helping enterprises monitor the performance of their frame relay circuits and manage or "shape" their bandwidth - such as NetReality and Packeteer - are now making a play for the service provider and ASP markets. The expected outcome is forthcoming services that will allow you to specify certain service levels on per-application basis across a single permanent virtual circuit (PVC). These services should help you manage the convergence of multiple traffic types on your frame relay service by getting much more granular in your contracts.

Bandwidth management equipment from these companies is beginning to examine information at high network layers. A service-provider release of NetReality's WiseWAN, originally created for enterprise use, for example, has just gone into testing. Announcements of application-layer SLAs from well-known frame relay carriers are expected this year with commercial availability in early 2001, according to the vendor. The beefier WiseWAN will fine-tune traditional weighted queuing schemes to assign committed information rates to multiple applications, all sharing a single PVC. Some application-specific frame relay SLAs are available currently, but they require you to purchase a PVC dedicated to carrying only that traffic.

Meanwhile, Packeteer is offering its AppVantage policy-based application subscriber management system specifically designed to enable ASPs to provision, monitor, measure and control application services. Earlier this year, AT&T said it would use AppVantage as an application service infrastructure platform for ASPs that wish to outsource their networks. There is no particular reason AT&T or other carriers couldn't apply the capabilities to their own frame relay or other network service offerings.

Steven Taylor, consultant and broadband packet evangelist, and Joanie Wexler, an independent networking technology editor and writer, team up to bring you this analysis and commentary. Taylor specializes in education and market analysis, and Wexler adds incisive reporting and research. For more detailed information on most of the topics discussed in this newsletter, connect to www.webtorials.com, the first Web site dedicated exclusively to market studies and technology tutorials in the Broadband Packet areas of Frame Relay, ATM, and IP.

Feedback and additional topic ideas are welcome. Please contact taylor@webtorials.com or joanie@jwexler.com.

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