By Peter Christensen, Product Marketing Manager, APM, Infovista
The capacity crunch has been a hot topic in the telco space over the past few years due to the rapid uptake of mobile devices and phenomenal traffic growth. To avoid overprovisioning networks or constantly playing catch up to traffic levels, many service providers are leveraging network data and historical trends to predict traffic levels in a few days, weeks and even months.
While capacity planning has certainly contributed to improving network services that can accommodate rising traffic levels, this process remains incomplete. For example, bit torrent, or P2P, traffic is predicted to grow to more than seven petabytes by 2014. We often hear from communications service providers (CSPs) that they do not know how this will affect their network. Similarly, video traffic is threatening to swamp network capacity, causing congestion without generating any revenue for operators. Is the average network equipped to handle more growth in this area? Finally, new services can often impact other services hosted over the same network. Are CSPs going to be able to predict how the introduction of new services will affect an already crowded network?
In response to these gaps in the traditional capacity planning process, InfoVista hosted a webinar last week to help CSPs and enterprises increase the reliability and accuracy of their trend-based network capacity planning by incorporating flow-based analytics and a metric-driven CAPEX investment strategy.
As I explained on the webinar, flow-based capacity planning enables CSPs and enterprises to apply multi-dimensional analytics and reveal deeper and more relevant information about the state of network infrastructures. Flow and application performance data is collected directly from the operational network, enabling capacity planners and network architects to extract the key information needed to support infrastructure investment decisions, accurately assess the impact of new services or applications and increase operational efficiency by focusing resources on measurement and analysis rather than data gathering.
If you weren't able to attend, I recommend listening to the webinar recording to learn more about how to effectively plan future network capacity needs while simultaneously reducing the operational resources and tools required to conduct monthly and annual network usage analysis and capacity planning. You can also find more information about the benefits of flow-based capacity planning on our website.
