About Kate Brew

Kate Brew manages product marketing activities for the Anue Systems Net Tool Optimizer™ (NTO) product line. She is an industry expert in security, virtualization and green data centers. Prior to Anue Systems, Kate held security product management positions with Tivoli/IBM, Citrix, GE-Interlogix and e-Security. In addition, Kate participated as a Computer Security Institute panelist and presented at industry events including the Enterprise Management Summit, Managing Enterprise Networks, ServerTech, Citrix Summit, Citrix Synergy and Planet Tivoli.

Kate has a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech, and is a member of the Capital of Texas ISSA chapter. She recently attained VMware’s VTSP 5 certification.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is Pure Evil

September 20, 2012 By Kate Brew 10 Comments

I spent a few days at ConSec ’12 this week and heard a lot about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). It is a rapidly growing phenomenon that enterprise security experts are grappling with. BYOD is becoming accepted by many companies of all sizes. Interestingly, it often begins when a senior executive pops by IT with an iPad or a Mac and insists on using that device instead of a corporate standard. Then the floodgates open. People tend to like the freedom of choice and the convenience of BYOD.

Security risk with BYOD

Did you know that when you access corporate email on the mobile device you own, there are countless security risks? For example, if your phone is stolen, it is surprisingly easy to gain access to all the data on the device. If you have the email password stored, well, all of your email is available to the hacker. They can steal anything and even worse yet, – impersonate you. In fact, a good hacker in possession of your device, can decrypt your stored passwords in a matter of minutes.

If you think that a remote wipe will take care of this – think again. A remote wipe requires that the device is powered on. So, if the bad guy powers it off and removes the SIM card –remote wipe won’t be wiping anything.

If you use your device for personal purposes, you might download some fun apps and games. There is nothing that guarantees these applications are not malware. And it’s possible they behave well for 6 months and then become malware.

Employee-owned devices are extremely difficult to control or trust. The key seems to be to develop a strategy where the device is known and expected to be EVIL. Enterprise IT needs to focus on protecting what really matters – the corporate network, applications, and most of all, business-critical data.

Monitor for anomalies

Enterprises need to focus on monitoring for anomalies that can strike its key assets:

The corporate network
Business-critical applications
Business-critical data

With BYOD, the risk of network contamination and information leakage significantly increases due to poorly developed or malicious apps, the increased attack surface of all of these devices and fun-loving human nature. Ixia is in the business of providing network visibility with products such as the Anue NTO, which can really help secure production networks.

In the past, IT managed users with a work-owned device, which was most likely configured and locked down. Today, IT is faced with users with as many as three devices- laptops, iPads and Phones/smartphones- all out of their control. That is triple the devices, and all present a tasty attack surfaces plus an increase in in network bandwidth requirements. Oh dear.

So, you might develop a policy that IT must control and monitor all devices that are used for business purposes. Good luck on that – the privacy and legal issues in the US get sticky. In EMEA and other regions with stricter privacy policies for their citizens, forget about it. Scenario: you have a security incident and you need to force wipe out an employee’s iPhone – and you wipe out the last picture of grandpa before he died. The jury would tear up right there.

And do you really want to deal with the drama around confiscating an employee’s personal device and invading his privacy and finding scantily-clad pictures of his fiancée? Oh dear.

The answer is to focus on securing what really matters: enterprise data, network and applications. Lock down and monitor what really counts to your business. Expect employee-owned devices to be Evil, and you will not be disappointed.

Having said all that, there is a new category of products called Mobile Device Management (MDM) that can enforce device policy, encrypt local data and secure contained partitions. It is a nascent category, but there are already over 40 companies moving in to solve mobile device security concerns. In addition, at ConSec ’12 AT&T was talking about a new technology to provide a “toggle” feature, where there are two settings – one for work purposes and one for personal purposes. With this, you might be able to effectively carry out information security practices for the device.

More to come soon…

Filed Under: Anue Systems, ConSec12, Data Center, Mobile Carriers, Network Monitoring, network visibility, Security Tagged With: anue nto, bring your own device, byod, consec12, Data center, Ixia, kate brew, mdm, mobile device management, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, network security, network visibility, Security

VMworld – Surprise! Network and Security Professionals are Getting Included!

September 6, 2012 By Kate Brew Leave a Comment

We did a survey at the Ixia booth at VMworld ’12 to find out more about what VMware practitioners want and need from vendors like us. We surveyed over 150 people, and some of our findings were surprising given the audience: people clearly drinking the virtualization Koolaid. Have to admit, I expected far more right wing VMware practitioners, viewing anything physical as a complete waste of time. In fact, about 20-25% of the people I spoke with were network engineers! I had several great conversations about the abyss that used to exist between network and security pros and the “VMware guys.”

The abyss is disappearing. Surprise! Not really, considering that enterprises are moving from the old days where the virtualization team was off “doing their own thing” to the new reality where networking and security pros have to be brought into the fold, because mission critical apps are being virtualized now. Gone are the days where virtualization teams held network engineers in contempt and network engineers responded by dropping a big trunk for the virtualization team and walking away from the whole situation.

Here are our survey results from VMworld 2012:

98% of all respondents thought visibility into VMware environments is critical to their success. This was not that much of a surprise.
Moving forward, 82.4% of respondents plan on using a mix of physical and virtual monitoring tools, which was a surprise to me at this event – I expected a far greater number to answer purely virtual.
A whopping 32.4% were already using the vSphere Distributed Switch, which was only introduced last year with vSphere 5.0. Only 9.4% never plan to use it, and only 23.6% were unfamiliar with it. This was a bit of a surprise, since VDS is only available with Enterprise Plus licensing, and it’s still pretty new.
When asked if they would use a virtual TAP from a third party versus the capabilities provided by VMware and Cisco to acquire information from a virtual environment for analysis with physical tools like IDS, another surprise!, only 13.5% would use a third party vTap. In conversation, the only reason people gave for using a third party was better support.
84.6% saw a network monitoring switch as a critical infrastructure component for virtualization.
Our theory was the issue in moving packets from the VMware environment to the physical environment would hinge on the host physical NIC. 31.7% were concerned with utilization of the limited pNICs on a host. 41.2% were concerned with bandwidth. From conversations with practitioners, it appears that the density of VMs on hosts drove the response – if they had higher VM density they were more concerned with bandwidth. Only 8.1% of respondents didn’t plan to move packets from VMware to physical tools.

Good event for us, and I love Surprises like this!

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Ixia, Network Monitoring, network visibility, virtual TAP, Virtualization, VMworld Tagged With: anue nto, Anue NTO 5293, anue systems, cisco, Ixia, kate brew, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, network security, network visibility, Security, virtual TAP, VMware, VMware environment, vSphere 5.0, vSphere Distributed Switch

The Importance of Optimism (and Visibility)

September 4, 2012 By Kate Brew Leave a Comment

I just got back from a Mediterranean cruise, where I went to both Greece (Athens, Corfu, Santorini and Mykonos) and Croatia (Dubrovnik), among other places. The difference between the Greek cities and Dubrovnik was remarkable. The Greek people I met seemed, defeated while the Croatians struck me as the most enterprising and optimistic people that I have encountered, which shows the importance of optimism and visibility.

It seemed everyone in Dubrovnik “had a shingle out” to make money. If they had a boat, they were looking for tourists to take on a tour. If they had a house, they were looking for a boarder. If they had neither, they were looking to sell handmade crafts for a profit. Remarkable, it was their resilience in a tough economy, and their willingness to just work hard.

Contrast this with people in the Greek cities. They seemed defeated and despondent. There were very few entrepreneurs actively vying for the tourist dollars. The desperation and hopelessness was palpable, which is striking, given the tours we were taking highlighted the grandeur of ancient Greek cultures. Greece’s per capita income is impressive, but it appears that the statistic may be deceptive. A climate with limited visibility and a perception of deception – a lack of visibility – can’t be a good long-term strategy.

So why am I blogging about this? From my perspective, the Greek people have lost visibility and corruption has ensued.

A couple of months ago Ixia acquired Anue Systems for the express purpose of adding production network visibility into their portfolio of products. While we can’t solve Greece’s problems, I sure wish we could. Visibility could get rid of that “deceptive image.”

The Croatians are painfully aware of political dispute, and have had their share of suffering. While they have been through significant negativity and political dispute, what is remarkable is their response. It seems they choose to view the glass as half full, and to endeavor to get that glass full.

Unfortunately, for global politics, a network visibility vendor like us can’t offer the technology to give the Greeks the visibility they need. It is admittedly an oversimplification of a very complex political situation, but visibility and clarity into any situation – be it network performance or a national economy – has extreme value. Deception and lack of visibility is a poor long-term strategy.

When there is a lack of visibility, it appears corruption follows – according to Wikipedia, “Greece has the EU’s second worst Corruption Perceptions Index after Bulgaria, ranking 80th in the world, and lowest Index of Economic Freedom and Global Competitiveness Index, ranking 119th and 90th respectively. Corruption, together with the associated issue of poor standards of tax collection, is widely regarded as both a key cause of the current troubles in the economy and a key hurdle in terms of overcoming the country’s debt problem.”

As a technology vendor, we bring value to our customers by providing improved network visibility. Increased network visibility is beneficial in reducing internal enterprise politics, which can become a sort of internal corruption.

In looking at this situation and the contrast between Croatia and Greece, simply put the way to defeat useless politics and corruption is to see the facts clearly. Ixia’s network visibility solutions help network engineers and security professionals see the true facts and avoid “internal corruption.” Hopefully the Greeks will find a way to do likewise and regain some of their ancient grandeur.

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Ixia, Network Monitoring, network visibility, Security Tagged With: anue nto, anue systems, Ixia, ixias network visibility solutions, kate brew, lack of network visibility, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, Network Packet Broker, network security, network visibility

The Yin and Yang of Security and Performance

July 19, 2012 By Kate Brew Leave a Comment

Most people in business focus on application performance, results, bottom line stuff. Security people, while they truly want to be business enablers, have to the Yang to the performance Yin to balance the equation. White hat (good guy) security people are a unique breed – smart enough to be the bad guy and make a lot of money, but compelled by morals, ethics, something in their makeup, to instead choose to foil the bad guys. Sadly, in many cases they are perceived as bad guys by users with their efforts to maintain security. Put that one in the life is unfair category.

I attended SANS cloud security training in Austin a few weeks ago. It was taught by Vern Williams (all- around great security guy), and attended by the likes of Northrop Grumman, Veterans Affairs, and Electronic Arts, plus some consultants, and even a CPA and an attorney. However, knowing security guys, and having presented to NSA in the past, it would not surprise me if some of the attendees were not from where they said, or if they did not use their real names. Read on to understand why this is actually a good thing.

There is not an IT security soul out there who is not frustrated and appalled by the behavior of some IT users. Users do really bad things. They write down passwords, or cleverly put them in a text file named “passwords,” and, worst of all, are susceptible to social engineering, in addition to being gullible and willing to click on “OK” or a link in an email, no matter what the offer is, in order to get their jobs done. Business users are the yin. They need performance and results, stat.

While sometimes unpleasant, somebody has to put a stop to users inflicting damage on themselves and the business. Enter the security guys. Security people have a native Deny All perspective. They are the yang to the “busy bee” user.

Looking for What’s Wrong

So, to illustrate this point I’ll use a class exercise we did to evaluate a prospective cloud provider’s contract. The amazing thing was that one of the teams remarked on the fact that our team had a slide on what was positive about the proposed contract. The thought of a positive aspect of a contract never entered their minds.

The reason is simple: Perspective. Security guys are trained to look for what is wrong or suspicious. The only reason our team had that slide is that I’m a product management type, looking for a balanced view. Security guys should not have a balanced view. They need to relentlessly hunt for vulnerabilities, flaws, loopholes, badly written code, suspicious behavior, anomalous events, human error, cyber terrorism, exploits, evil intentions – I think you get the picture. Somebody has to do this, as the bad guys are getting more and more evil, and it’s not for kicks anymore – the bad guys are after your money and reputation.

The class reinforced my assumption that the Cloud is a Very Good thing for SMBs from a security perspective. SMBs typically view security as a part time job for the poor guy who is maintaining the network and applications. Security needs to be a fulltime job, and cloud service providers (CSPs) typically have legions of dedicated security professionals. They know what they are doing, and it’s their reputation on the line.

As a side note, Ixia is acquiring BreakingPoint, also right here in Austin, Texas. Welcome to Ixia, security pros!!

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Featured, Ixia, Ixia Acquisition, Network Monitoring, network visibility, SANS, Security, Virtualization Tagged With: anue nto, anue systems, BreakingPoint, BreakingPoint Austin, BreakingPoint Austin Texas, Customer benefits Ixia acquisition, Ixia, Ixia acquisition, kate brew, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, network visibility, sans, SANS cloud security training, Security, Vern Williams

Ixia to Sponsor Austin ISSA Chapter Meeting July 19

July 16, 2012 By Kate Brew Leave a Comment

Thayne Coffman, CTO 21CT, Inc. will be presenting Perspectives on mixed initiative processing for computer network defense. The presentation will be 11:30 – 1PM, July 19 at the Microsoft Technology Center. Lunch will be provided, free of charge, and both ISSA members and nonmembers are welcome to attend. I’ve been to about a dozen of these events, and the Austin ISSA chapter consistently delivers high-quality, educational presentations to help keep you current on new security practices and innovations. Here is the link to the event: http://www.austinissa.org/events/

Ixia will make a brief presentation about the Anue NTO network monitoring switch technology, and how important of an innovation it can be for security professionals. With a network monitoring switch in place, network security monitoring can be more accurate and cost effective. The technology allows security professionals to change monitoring configuration on-the-fly without change board approval, since connections to the production network are “pre-wired” and changes can be done with a simple software management interface. Network visibility increases, and the contention for SPANs and TAPs to access network information is eliminated. No sacrifices on security monitoring need to be made!

As part of Ixia’s sponsorship of the event, gift cards will be raffled off at the end of Thayne’s presentation. I strongly encourage you to come to this event – you are sure to get many useful insights to help you with your job. It’s also a great way to network with other security pros.

In addition, Ixia will be sponsoring a Happy Hour on August 2 at Jasper’s in the Domain. At that event, we will be giving away an iPad!! RSVP by contacting Adam at 512-600-7113 or register here.

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Featured, ISSA, Ixia, Network Monitoring, network visibility, Security, Virtualization Tagged With: 21ct, anue, anue systems, austin issa, ISSA, Ixia, kate brew, microsoft technology center, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, network visibility, Security, security monitoring, Thayne Coffman

ISSA North Texas Chapter and Security Tools

June 28, 2012 By Kate Brew Leave a Comment

Henry Morgan of Ixia presented at the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) ISSA North Texas Chapter meeting in Plano on June 21. The session was attended by about 60 – with a mix of C level execs, security engineers and managers. Top companies in attendance included American Airlines, McAfee and Brinker, as well as many VARs and security consultants.

His presentation, entitled “Garbage In, Garbage Out: Getting Your Security Tools the Right Data” was well-received. Interestingly, many attendees were unaware of network monitoring switch technology and unaware of how this technology can make the job of ensuring network security easier.

Packet de-duplication was of particular interest. While many security practitioners are aware that SPANs and TAPs can cause duplicate packets, they were unaware there is an alternative to having their security analysis tools do the “heavy lifting” of figuring out which packets are duplicates and eliminating them before the security analysis is performed on the packet stream. The network monitoring switch provides packet de-duplication as one of the many value-add functions.

There was also keen interest in virtualization. Several attendees were interested in the practical how-to of connecting in to get visibility into their VM infrastructure. We actually have a blog that details how to do that, with references to a VMware blog on the topic. It’s called “Monitoring Virtualized Environments: It’s Business as Usual Now”.

Load balancing across security analysis tools was of interest. It does make sense, security technologies are notoriously expensive, so being able to use the same 1G tools to monitor a 10G network by using a network monitoring switch with load-balancing capabilities makes for a good ROI.

It was a great event for Ixia – good attendance and good interest in what we had to say. We felt that we educated some security practitioners on how they can be more effective in ensuring network security with our technology.

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Featured, ISSA, Ixia, network visibility, Security, Virtualization Tagged With: anue nto, Dynamic Filtering, information security, ISSA, Ixia, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network visibility, Security, virtualization

What Network Engineers Really Care About: Mean Time to Innocence MTTI

June 14, 2012 By Kate Brew 5 Comments

I participated in Cisco Live! San Diego via the online option – quite nice, and free to boot! One standout concept, MTTI, was featured in Jim Metzler’s presentation, and it really hit home. Jim is an industry analyst and vice president at Ashton, Metzler and Associates. He gave a great presentation, and his deep understanding of the industry, plus a nice sense of humor, really made it interesting.

It seems, especially in large organizations, silos of blame form. Large organizations tend to become highly political, with constituent groups vying for power and glory.

So what happens is that network engineering groups can end up being guilty until proven innocent, making MTTI and fast issue resolution critically important. While internal politics are prone to force odd and very negative things to occur, in this case the blame game is forcing out the need for network visibility, which is a very useful thing.

Ixia, with Anue, is in the production network visibility business. The Anue NTO is a best of breed portfolio of products that provide deep and comprehensive visibility into the bowels of the network. Network engineers spend their lives trying to solve problems – this technology helps.

Longtime Anue customers consistently tell me what they like best about our technology is that they can pinpoint problems even before end users are able to pick up the phone and initiate the blame game. Network engineers are much more in control of the network and all of its intricacies. The phone, with an agitated user on the other end, is no longer the most prominent network monitoring device.

Time is money in business. Quickly finding the root cause for network security incidents and performance problems is making network visibility a necessity.

The true evil of internal politics in organizations is that certain constituents can become very powerful, and become able to place blame where it does not belong. This is obviously counterproductive. Network visibility technologies provide the salient facts to dispute and factually correct even the wiliest of internal politicians. Responsiveness to issues gets faster, blame gets placed faster and whatever is wrong gets fixed faster.

The MTTI metric is driving useful things to happen – with network visibility technology business runs more smoothly. Nothing will eradicate internal politics, but technology sure can help quell some of it for network engineers.

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Ixia, Mobile Carriers, Network Monitoring, network visibility, Telecom Network Tagged With: and Ashton, anue, anue systems, Cisco Live!, Data center, Jim Metzler, kate brew, Mean Time to Innocence, Metzler and Associates, MTTI, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, network visibility

Cisco Plus Beijing – Math, Golf and Network Monitoring Switches Don’t Require Translation

June 7, 2012 By Kate Brew Leave a Comment

I just got back from Beijing, where I participated in the Anue Systems booth at Cisco Plus. The event was held at the China National Convention Center, which is right by where the 2008 Olympics were held.

It was an amazing trip in so many ways. The main thing is, never take the word of media – the only way to understand China is to go there and experience it. The Chinese culture is deep and sophisticated, and hard for us in the USA to comprehend.

I started to notice that sometimes the only thing I could read on signs and documents was the numbers. I came to realize that there are many alphabets worldwide, but only one mathematics system in use. It seems we can all agree on numbers.

We had a lot of traffic and enthusiasm at our booth, and people really liked our golf putting contest.

The Chinese folks I met reminded me a lot of Texans, they were friendly, quick with a smile, and they loved the golf game. Before the event, I was concerned about the language barrier but it was not a problem – a great many of the people I met spoke excellent English.

The Chinese engineers and managers I met quickly “got” what a network monitoring switch can do for them.It was generally new information for them, as this product category is emerging. Since it was a Cisco event, SPAN limitations for access are something they could readily grasp. Network monitoring and analysis requirements, like in the USA, are a growing point of focus. Duplicate packets for their analysis tools are a concern.The need to be able to modify network monitoring on-the-fly is clearly relevant.

It was an enlightening and educational trip for me, and it felt like we were bringing new information of value for engineers and managers to take back to their offices. With their desire to improve network performance being the same as ours – math and measurement by IT management being the same worldwide – the long trip to China for Cisco Plus was well worth it.

Filed Under: Anue Systems, Cisco Plus China, Network Monitoring, Virtualization Tagged With: anue, anue systems, cisco, cisco plus china 2012, kate brew, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, Network Packet Broker, network performance, network visibility, rudy millian

High Speed Ethernet (40G Networks) and You

April 26, 2012 By Kate Brew 1 Comment

We hear from customers that the transition to 40G/100G networks is driven purely from cost savings and ease of management. It seems no one really wants to run x8 10G connections (especially fiber) in an ether channel when you can simply run x2 40G connections – the idea is to get away from 8 port link aggregation groups and to a more manageable number. In addition, 40G networks have reduced physical space requirements, less cable to run, less transceivers to buy and maintain, and less power to operate the data center versus their predecessors.

But moving from 1G or 10G to 40G introduces all kinds of interesting nuances people haven’t really thought through yet.

40G is more than just a bigger pipe when it comes to monitoring network data. The luxury of dumping a whole bunch of network data on security and performance monitoring tools and letting them sort it out goes away. There’s just too much data.

In this brave new world, network data must be delivered to tools to suit their specific needs in order to get the best results. Strike that, to get the tools to work at all, never mind good performance, they have specific data dietary requirements.

There really aren’t security and performance monitoring tools that exist for 40G networks. They haven’t been built yet. This makes life pretty tricky if you are implementing 40G, or plan to do so in the next couple of years.

Another issue is that security and monitoring tools are often implemented in appliances that simply don’t have the processing power to handle 40G bandwidth. So even if the software is modified to handle 40G, the box isn’t ready. In addition, monitoring tools are typically processor and disk bound, which raises an interesting point: Processing capacity improvement follows Moore’s law, doubling every 24 months. Bandwidth consumption has been doubling every 12 to 18 months, according to the Ethernet Alliance.

What you need to do is deliver just the data that your network tools need. The first step is being able to filter out the data the tools do not need.

In Anue terms, this includes ingress filtering, which filters at the input of the network monitoring switch (Anue’s NTO) and discard packets that are not of interest to any monitoring tool.

Then you need to need center stage filters, which Anue calls Dynamic Filtering. Dynamic Filtering addresses problems that occur when some packets meet the filter criteria of multiple tools and must be sorted out properly for each tool to do its job.

Finally, you need egress filtering, which filters at the output of the network monitoring switch. For example, the egress filter could drop HTTP traffic for a particular tool and have no impact on other tool ports. Filtering is going to solve a lot of your problems, but not all.

You’ll also need to do some load balancing to spread the analysis work across your tools, since they are not capable of “drinking from the 40G firehose.” In Anue vernacular, load balancing is not the traditional splitting of network traffic into equal loads across multiple tool ports. That approach can hinder data packet analysis by session-level: for example with VOIP monitoring, you need to analyze data collectively based on session.

Anue’s approach to load balancing is achieved by using layer 2, 3 and 4 packet header information to identify and deliver related traffic to the same physical tool port, maintaining the integrity of the sessions.

Here’s how load balancing might work. Say I have four 10G Computer Associates Web Monitors that I need to use to monitor a 40G network. I set up a load balancing port group of the four 10G web monitors as below.

Now I’m set up to monitor 40G, using my 10G tools. And, instead of simplistically dividing the network traffic across the four web monitors, I can set up criteria, such as dividing up IP addresses across the monitors, or setting VLAN address ranges for each tool, as required to keep the session integrity as discussed above.

Filed Under: Data Center, High Speed Ethernet, Network Monitoring, Network Testing, Security Tagged With: 40G bandwidth, 40G network, 40GbE, 40GbE network, 5288, anue, anue nto, anue systems, CA, Computer Associates, Dynamic Filtering, Ethernet Alliance, High Speed Ethernet, Higher Speed Ethernet, HSE, Monitoring HSE, Network monitoring, network monitoring switch, network monitoring switches, network visibility, Patented dynamic filtering, Span and tap shortages

Telecom NEBS Certification

April 13, 2012 By Kate Brew 2 Comments

For this blog I interviewed Shardendu Pandey, Anue’s Hardware Engineering Manager. He manages all of the NEBS certification activities for Anue. Shardendu has been with Anue since 2004, and has worked on hardware design and compliance of Ethernet-based products, which includes the NTO product family.

NEBS Level 3 has strict specifications for fire suppression, thermal margin testing, vibration resistance (earthquakes), airflow patterns, acoustic limits, failover and partial operational requirements (such as chassis fan failures), RF emissions and tolerances, among others.

This is Shardendu holding the binder that contains the NEBS test reports for the Anue 5273 NTO. For comparison, the small binder on top represents the non NEBS compliance reports. This puts into perspective the amount of effort and testing required for a product to be certified as NEBS Level 3 – the highest NEBS certification.

Shardendu explains that NEBS (Network Equipment Building Systems) is a self imposed requirement defined by the US telecom industry and isn’t a legal requirement like the safety standard for IT equipment, UL60950. However, it is a common set of safety, spatial and environmental design guidelines applied to telecommunications equipment in the United States. The standards covering NEBS are maintained by Telcordia and include, but are not limited to, GR1089-CORE and GR63-CORE.

Having run through the gamut of NEBS testing, Shardendu strongly believes, “no one passes NEBS Level 3 certification by chance. It requires a lot of upfront effort and planning to jump over the NEBS barrier. If you take four decades of performance and reliability issues seen in an extremely demanding central office environment and brew it into a requirements document – you have NEBS!!! On the flip side, once you are certified, you are a part of the elite NEBS club and that is a good feeling.”

From the perspective of the telecom carriers, reliability is one of the keys to excellent customer service. The intent of NEBS is to provide crisp reliability requirements that make it easier for vendors to design compatible equipment for RBOC central offices. This reduces costs as multiple vendors can now make equipment certified to NEBS and introduce new equipment into the network easier. However, the reality is the cost and complexity of this testing prevents many vendors from venturing into NEBS certification.

While the NEBS certification is most familiar to those in the US telecom industry, the fact that products meet the strict requirements of the certification can be significant to telecom providers anywhere in the world.

NEBS Level 3 certified equipment meets stringent specifications, which is reassuring as telecom providers worldwide are rolling out Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile networks.

In order to help our customers with their LTE migration, the Anue 5273 was NEBS Level 3 certified in mid-2011, and the Advanced Feature Module (AFM) was NEBS Level 3 certified in late-2011. Shardendu and his team worked with the third party MET Labs to achieve the certification. MET is a pioneer in NEBS testing, and is one of the world’s leading NEBS certification laboratories. You can read more about MET Labs and NEBS here.

Filed Under: Data Center, LTE, Mobile Carriers, Telecom Network, Wireless Networks Tagged With: 4g networks, Anue 5273 NTO, anue nto, anue systems, lte, LTE Advanced, mobile carriers, NEBS, NEBS Level 3 Certification, safety