Jim Seymour: Company Line

Yes, this industry loves its acronyms and spins them out by the dozen. But these two are really important and destined to be defining terms in computers and communications this decade: QoS (Quality of Service) and its enforcer, the SLA (service-level agreement). Doing a good job in IT today demands that you be familiar with both.

QoS crept out of the ATM (yeah, I know, here we go again) or asynchronous transfer mode world. ATM is a communications protocol full of structure and rules, and for a while, it looked as if ATM—the protocol, not the cash machine at your bank—was going to be the dominant method for sending data between and among computers.

Then came Internet Protocol, or IP. (I promise: That's the last one.) Actually, IP came along much earlier, but it didn't become important until the Web explosion in the early 1990s. IP describes an incredibly casual, catch-as-catch-can method for shipping data around a network. By breaking data into many small packets and then hurling them into the virtual space of the Net, IP became a "best efforts" way of getting information from here to there. Packets get routed and routed and rerouted; they get lost or endlessly re-sent. The packets your e-mail message may be broken into, at the point where it enters the Net "cloud," could be sent by a dozen or a hundred different routes to your recipient. Finally, at the receiving end, the packets get sorted out, put in sequence, and reassembled.

In a sense, it's magic—very sloppy magic—but it works. Moreover, that very casualness, the ability of the Net to find new routes on the fly and avoid problems, is the secret of its robustness. That was intentional: The Net, remember, was built by the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and that apparent randomness was designed to help the network survive even nuclear attacks. As long as there's some way to get the message there, it almost always does get there.

But in today's business world, that sloppy randomness—regardless of its reliability—is not acceptable. And with businesses committing more and more critical processes to the Net, they're demanding control over their data as it zips around.

  1. Businesses want absolute—or at least predictable—reliability.

  2. Businesses want to be able to set priorities for data transmissions. "My ASPed accounting system running fast is more important than my employees' e-mails, and both are a heck of a lot more important than your silly pawing around on eBay, sending electronic greeting cards, or, yes, viewing porn," says Corporate America.

  3. Businesses want security. Are you really who you say you are? (Am I who I say I am?)

  4. And businesses want a mechanism for billing and payment of prioritized service in this newly hierarchical world. Nothing makes us feel as though we're really getting better service than being charged more than other people are for that service.

Whoa! What is all this Orwellian "some are more equal than others" stuff? Isn't the Net the epitome of democracy, a cyberegalitarian Utopia? Today, maybe. Tomorrow, absolutely not.

As usual in computing, there are several ways of arranging for these superior connections. One way resides in the aging world of private (dedicated) telephone lines, each devoted full-time to one customer's needs. But the economies of packet-switched transmissions have dealt dedicated lines what most think will be a fatal blow. Another way would be to build a second, separate, parallel-universe Net, which is happening now with the speedy Internet2.

A merely faster Net, however, isn't enough: To tweak C. Northcote Parkinson's great line, "data expands to fill the bandwidth available." If someone builds it, we will come. So we need—as we're getting from Internet2, and then backward in some ways into "our" Internet—controls to identify and prioritize data types (voice, data, video) and to parcel out the available bandwidth moment to moment, differentially, among users, according to predefined rules.

So be alert to the rise of QoS demands and tools and to the use of SLAs by major users to assure they get what they want. Joe Bupke? He gets what's left. More next time on the brave new worlds of QoS and SLAs.

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