Feb 3

Written by: admin
2/3/2008 11:01 AM

By Steve Hateley
Senior Product Marketing Manager

Over the last few years there’s been an undeniable growth in demand for Next Generation business services, but what do we mean by “Next Generation” in this context and more importantly what do end users expect from them?

Traditionally these services were provided by Frame Relay and ATM technology in the WAN (complete with guarantees of delivery) and Ethernet in the LAN. IPVPNs over MPLS evolved as the WAN alternative to these legacy technologies increasing speed and scalability and in recent times we’ve seen the continued rise of Carrier Ethernet pitched as the REAL replacement for ATM and Frame Relay. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has done a fantastic job in ensuring the global acceptance of Carrier Ethernet through standardization of business services, and InfoVista are proud to proclaim our commitment to their cause.

So we now see that both layer 3 VPNs (IPVPN) and layer 2 VPNs (Carrier Ethernet) sit alongside each other in service provider business service portfolios and we can start to look at the ways to differentiate them from each other.

A primary driver of these “replacement” technologies and services has been the depth and range of applications that the modern day enterprise business now uses to deliver IT to their users. The earlier requirement to deliver a data connection between two or more sites, using a network-based service level agreement (SLA) is now superseded with a need to look at the delivery of individual service types that are extending to the Enterprise site, coupled with a real-time service-focused SLA.

It will be interesting to see how far SLAs develop in the coming year as I am expecting to see the inclusion of application-centric performance commitments. Thankfully, our acquisition of Accellent and the 5View appliances has placed us on the leading edge of any move toward Application-centric SLAs.

Both IPVPN and Carrier Ethernet based business services carry OAM mechanisms than can assist in the verification of their delivery – defined by levels of QoS that individual voice; video; critical and best-effort data-streams require. The trick however is capturing the results of these OAM tests and verifications to not only provide assurance that the WAN is adequately carrying the traffic but also to give confidence to IT managers that they are getting what they paid for.

The business services market is an interesting and constantly evolving challenge, one that in order to stay in touch with, needs a flexible and open proactive service assurance approach. This includes arming operations teams with the knowledge they need to provide service assurance and also the information needed to create an informative but practical end user web portal, which gives a high level of perceived service control.

In order to ensure business objective efficiency and competitiveness, providers have to deploy assurance solutions that are scalable, reliable and open. Any pre-integrations or pre-deployment verifications of interoperability with network vendor equipment can prove to be cost and labour efficient, so will certainly help in time to market for the business portfolio.

Converged network and IT resources, managed services and application-centric networking are driving InfoVista to stay ahead of the game and diversity of our “one foundation does all” platform infrastructure is giving us the correct tools for the job.

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