Real-Time Network Visibility Saves the Day

By Greg Gum, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, ANDA Networks

With real-time Ethernet service monitoring of network traffic and bandwidth utilization, service providers can detect and take proactive steps as network degradation occurs, rather than simply react to outages. Today’s new packet-based Carrier Ethernet networks must be able to respond in real time to any issues for several reasons related to new applications requirements, new network usage patterns, capex and opex impacts:

• Growing need for Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Losses due to outages equal lost revenue. Customers are increasingly demanding more granular SLAs. For example, carriers are now levied with million dollar SLA penalties on a per-minute basis due to lost financial transactions from some of the larger banking, brokerage, and financial service firms.
• Opex is the new capex: While heavy SLA users or “preemies” garner much of the network operator resources given their premium service subscriptions, most network services are best effort and are only reactively monitored, e.g. alarms are sent after a failure occurs. Opex to continuously monitor circuits is prohibitively expensive as ongoing headcount and operational time per trouble ticket can be one of the largest budget items for carriers today versus one-time capex spends.
• The world is increasingly mobile and wirelessly connected: Ethernet traffic is inherently bursty and is increasingly transmitted wirelessly at the home, office or over mobile networks. Thus, network problems can frequently move or be difficult to replicate and isolate when carriers are only reactively monitoring their Carrier Ethernet networks.
• Bandwidth “hogging” applications generate unpredictable traffic patterns: Internet Web traffic continues to grow with new rich content and multimedia applications, such as streaming and P2P video sharing consuming the majority of traffic. These new bandwidth-intensive, delay-sensitive applications can generate unpredictably large spikes in bandwidth which requires dynamic optimization, on-the-fly prioritization and Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement in real time. This is particularly true at the backhaul access link level where available bandwidth is typically the most expensive per bit cost for mobile operators.

Greg Gum is vice president of marketing and business development at ANDA Networks, a provider of carrier-class Ethernet solutions to service providers.