This is a multipart series on how companies are rising to meet the challenge posed by the Next Generation Network (NGN) via advanced management products and services. Unlike the circuit-switched PSTN of old, the new packet-based NGN consists of a multitude of converged services, multimedia and other forms of digital traffic. As traffic monitoring and control become more automatic, attention shifts from the network infrastructure exclusively to maintaining a high quality of service for customers and their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) via performance assurance, traffic prioritization, bandwidth shaping, and related technologies.

 

 

Another company involved in network and application performance management is NetScout Systems, founded in 1984. Headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts, NetScout is a major player in the field, with approximately 800 employees. In July, 2002, NetScout announced its strategy with its nGenius Solution which began to change the way IT organizations managed the delivery of network services. Based on their proprietary CDM (Common Data Model) Technology, NetScout’s solution reduces the number of tools needed to manage network performance, at the same time leveraging the extensive performance information. Since that time, NetScout has continued to expand through additional product solutions, most recently including the nGenius Analytics early warning system and the nGenius Application Fabric Monitor for combined real-time monitoring and streaming capture for deep forensics. In November 2007, NetScout doubled its business by acquiring Network General (News - Alert) and their Sniffer, Infinistream, and Network Intelligence product lines. By adding the analysis power of Sniffer technologies to the real-time monitoring edge of the nGenius System, NetScout has been able to substantially expand its ability to build and deliver top-notch network and application performance management solutions.

 

NetScout’s Vice President of Marketing, Steve Shalita, says, “NetScout clearly fits in the world of the service provider and the transformations that have taken place. When we mention service providers, we can think of a number of different ways to categorize or slice the term, but what’s been driving the telco environments has been fairly profound such as the need to stem the loss of customers — the erosion of their installed base of wireline or traditional telephone service resulting from such things as the threats from cable operators, which are also viewed as service providers, however. Also, there have been significant revenue shifts into the wireless realm. Some of the biggest challenges service providers face is the absolute transformation of their infrastructure environment and what exactly is service delivery and what will be service delivery in the next five to ten years. Then there’s the evolution of services themselves. It’s all driven by economic issues, not just the one we find ourselves in today, but just in terms of what customers are expecting and how you drive revenue per subscriber, how you build an infrastructure to be efficient and be able to deliver this range of services. What’s delivered to a customer today is vastly different than what was delivered to them a couple of years ago, and it will continue to transform over the next few years in very profound ways. What that translates into is some really tough management challenges that service providers must face. Bandwidth is growing. Application footprints are growing. No matter whether we’re delivering business services or residential services or wireless service, the challenges tend to cross all these different types of networks.”

 

“Traditionally, service providers have focused on multiple networks and overlay networks as they adapt and deliver these new services,” says Shalita, “and I think the biggest thing they’ll face in the next few years relates to convergence, which is happening now in the sense of voice and video and data service over these infrastructures. But they’re still building parallel overlay infrastructures and what’s going to be the imperative to drive opex and efficiency and this whole notion of transformation is that these networks are going to have to converge so that an additional convergence takes place into single infrastructures. That increases the challenges from a management perspective. The industry is certainly moving in a unified, standards-based direction in what carriers are settling on. IP over MPLS is a major phenomenon, as is MPLS over Ethernet, and just the evolution of how IP is being deployed in the service provider realm does represent a pretty significant transformation point in those networks. There’s some discussion around how do you evolve into a SONET-like environment with things like PBB-TE [Orovider Backbone Bridging Traffic Engineering] and PBT [Provider Backbone Transport]. For the most part, however, this is some standardization with Ethernet being delivered to the premise in different forms. Certainly at a residential level you’ve got some operators in North America, Europe and Asia delivering raw Ethernet to the curb and to the premise. Other providers are at least delivering Ethernet into the DSLAMs and bringing that out to the premise. But I think there is a transformation to an all-IP environment. And certainly if we translate that into what’s happening in mobile networks, we can see that mobile networks are moving to an all-IP environment as well.”

 

“Mobile is driven by different standards to some extent in that the radio gear and the generations of technology that are deployed are very standards-driven,” says Shalita. “So if I’m using 2G, 3.5G or GSM versus CDMA, the standard bodies that define the radio specifications pretty much define the interfaces. Most of your legacy technology out there is still TDM-based such as T1s, E1s or ATM connections out to the cell sites and back into the network core. But what mobile operators around the world have been doing is to transform into an all-IP environment ahead of the move to LTE (News - Alert) and WiMAX broadband wireless. So the cores have predominantly moved to IP for sometime in the more modern networks, and as they move out into the RAN [Radio Access Network], they’re still dealing with legacy technologies and grappling with the opex costs of running these really high-cost facilities out there. But of all the carriers I’ve talked to — and that’s pretty much the top 200 operators across the world — most of them are either underway in their transformation to an all-Ethernet/all-IP environment, or they’re planning some significant shifts. In fact, it’s pretty safe to say that most of them have that in place. It certainly may not be end-to-end IP or Ethernet, even in North America AT&T, Verizon, Embarq, and Sprint (News - Alert) Nextel are moving in that direction, leveraging MPLS as the core technology. So there is some level of standardization. It makes it a little easier to manage things, but the complexity of what’s happening in those networks with so many different services translated to applications, and so many different subscribers and aspects to their network come into play, make it confusing for service providers to manage all of it.”

 

“Moreover, as the applications footprint and bandwidth demands grow, how do you more effectively manage the delivery of these services, both from the standpoint of meeting customer expectations and service level agreements, but optimizing the infrastructure to manage both the opex aspects of running the network as well as maintaining the ability to tune and optimize for really balanced leverage across the network infrastructure?” asks Shalita.

 

“SONET/SDH, ATM and other older technologies are still widely deployed,” says Shalita. “Certainly there are different statistics across the world, and there are different statistics within different segments of the carrier market. For example, if we look in the context of 2007 and 2008, ATM was expected to die an ugly death in 2007. By the end of 2007 the expectation was that the market would fundamentally be non-existent. Actually, in 2007, we saw record shipments of ATM technology, because once a technology has got ‘traction’ or ‘legs’ at a carrier, they continue to deploy it because of the investments that they have made. In 2008, ATM did taper off a bit, but still not as fast as would be expected if ATM were going to ultimately disappear. As it turns out, those legacy technologies, especially SONET, which is the predominant transport to the business edge, are still very widely deployed but we see, if you look at specific trends within ports and web routers, both new and the installed base, in 2007 and 2008 there were massive shifts to Ethernet, and Ethernet was ramping up in massive ways.”

 

“Compared to an enterprise switch and router deployment, where Gigabit Ethernet, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet have been taking off significantly, the service provider space has been a bit slower to adopt Ethernet,” says Shalita. “Still, we did see significant ramping in 2008 for both Gigabit and 10 Gigabit per second deployments. The bigger challenge is bringing it out to the premise. SONET is still very widely deployed. PBB-TE, an initiative driven by Nortel, was entirely intended to make Ethernet SONET-like and thus replace SONET links out to the premise, but it hasn’t gotten much traction out there. It was supposed to make Ethernet ‘carrier class’, but there are other things that are needed to make it carrier class. Stripping out fundamental features from Ethernet, which is the premise of PBB-TE, does really solve it. BT was onboard with this technology, but it never really took off. A lot of the Tier-2 vendors latched onto it, and it is relevant in the sense of where the technologies are going, but, stepping back, this all comes back to a common denominator, and that’s IP and Ethernet becoming the dominant and predominant transport within all of these networks and service integration, service delivery and service convergence are what the majority of carriers are grappling with today. Regardless of whether it’s IP and/or Ethernet-over-MPLS environments, providers want to know who they can effectively manage its delivery. We at NetScout have seen some significant traction and need in the carrier infrastructure for the capabilities that Netscout offers, because in the case of legacy technologies around SONET and TDM technologies, carriers were looking at monitoring these environments purely from a signaling and protocol perspective back in the core. That gave them some view into what was happening deeper in the network. In today’s modern IP network, intelligence and service management and related capabilities are much more widely distributed across the network. We’re not dealing with traditional point-to-point links that are engineered to carry a certain bandwidth. Instead, we’re now dealing with a dynamic network that’s using bandwidth management, quality of service and routing technologies to change traffic patterns based on traffic flows. So it really requires a much broader view and understanding of what’s going on in the network environment.”