ozzyjohnson
commented
5 years ago Is it a fair distillation to say...
Modern, high-bandwidth, resilient network connectivity for agencies is an essential property of successful cloud adoption.
Cloud Smart is explicitly "long-term, high-level strategy" which puts Layer 1 transport implementation details well out of scope.
A solution to the major roadblock of effective Cloud computing is the use of very high speed fiber optic systems to replace the embedded copper plant in a majority of federal facilities. Federal customers cannot use the Cloud effectively if there is no timely way to move the data to and from the Cloud. While there is growing amounts of fiber in metro areas there are few fiber loops to the actual federal buildings. Current communications circuits to the building are segregated leaving no integrated bandwidth to the facility (Note 1). While a single service provider will normally fulfill the circuit/service orders to a single building, the POs and budget are spread across all of the sub-components of the Agency in the building. It is {suggested | recommended} that any future facilities have fiber capability, DWDM systems for example, (Note 2) between buildings meet me points, collocation hotels, or communications vaults (usually underground) to allow rapid and timely (fiber) interconnection to the widest number of Cloud providers. In addition, federal facilities that will continue be used for (N) years will be retrofitted with new (single mode) fiber drops to the nearest collocation facility that are compatible with current DWDM systems. If copper based TDM services cannot be transitioned to EIS in a timely fashion than consolidate them on fiber based SONET services or G.709 fiber based links for the foreseeable future. All federal Agencies are transitioning communication circuits from the GSA Networx contract to EIS and fiber access to buildings {should be} a top priority. Background and Commentary: Note 1: The most common communications circuits to federal buildings is/was a T1 carrier circuit at 1.544 Mbps (Note 3) or 24 DS0s at 64 kbps per channel. (Because of the EIS contact preparation, GSA has current numbers of circuits and speeds to different Federal buildings.) When a threshold number of T1 circuits are going to the same building they will be transported on a T3 ~ 45 Mbps which contains 24 T1s in the channelized configuration or a single 44 Mbps clear channel connection. Analogy on channelized services: a DS0 is a one way foot path a thin person can walk through. A T1 allows a motorcycle or a Mini-cooper. A T3 allows larger cars and smaller trucks and a DWDM system is an 100 - 300 lanes of all types of regular and oversized vehicles.
While an Agency may have 10s of Gigabits of bandwidth it is not in a single pipe that can be used to interconnect to the Cloud. My suspicion is that a home with a 60 Mbps Xfinity Internet connection has more bandwidth than a majority of Federal buildings in CONUS. Note 2: Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) systems are used to transport a number of different colors of light on a single fiber or pair of fibers. Each color of light, a Wave, or lambda, carries a separate communications signal that can be combined if required. Current production DWDM systems support 100 Gbps lambdas which can be combined into a coherent super channel of 12 colors to give a "link" capacity of 1.2 Tbps. Multiple super channels can again be combined into a single fiber (pair) with an overall capacity of between 27 and 54 Tbps. Note 3: 64 kbps = 64,000 bits per second ( 1 voice phone call); 1.544 Mbps = 1,544,000 bps (24 phone calls); 100 Gbps = 100,000,000,000 bps, 1.2 Tbps = 1,200,000,000,000 bps