Healthy VoIP Nets�Part LVIII�Network Management Architectures: InfoVista
This is a BIG, integrated network management system that includes a dedicated IP telephony module.
InfoVista—headquartered in Paris, and with U.S. operations in Herndon, Virginia—is a global technology company providing network management solutions to large enterprises, telecom operators and services providers worldwide.
InfoVista was founded in 1995, and since that time has developed a solid reputation as a provider of proactive service assurance solutions, solutions that are designed to ensure the optimal performance of network services, applications and infrastructure.
The company claims that over 80 percent of the world’s largest service providers, and more than 30 of the top 100 global corporations rely on InfoVista network management products. These include Bell Canada, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, CitiGroup, Fidelity Investments, JP Morgan Chase, and T-Mobile.
The company has 225 employees operating out of 13 offices worldwide, and customers from over 40 countries around the globe. In addition, they have developed partnerships and alliances with other technology firms that include: Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei, Nortel, Sun and VMWare. The firm posted revenues of approximately $55 million for their 2007 fiscal year.
InfoVista has developed a number of management solutions designed to support specific areas of networking infrastructures.
VistaInsight for Networks is a network performance management solution that enables service providers and enterprises to effectively meet and exceed performance expectations and service-level guarantees using a variety of resource monitoring, network capacity planning, and end-to-end performance measurement capabilities. The system includes QoS reporting capabilities, support for differentiated services on core MPLS networks, and integrated support for IP service level agreement probes, which provide end-to-end performance assessments for VPNs. This product comes in two editions: VistaInsight for Networks—Service Provider Edition, and VistaInsight for Networks—Enterprise Edition.
VistaInsight for Servers addresses the challenges of managing large server farms, and includes other capabilities to support data centers, including data collection throughout the environment, system administration tools, and performance management indicators to facilitate problem resolution and capacity planning efforts.
VistaTroubleshooter is a stand-alone, web-based tool designed to automate the analysis and identification of resource-level performance issues. This Solaris-based system allows the user to select a particular network resource to evaluate, monitors its performance with targeted high-frequency polling (as frequently as every 15 seconds), and then provides reports that detail the current operational performance. In addition, Troubleshooter integrates with IBM’s Tivoli Netcool and Hewlett Packard’s OpenView network management systems.
VistaInsight for IP Telephony is a service-centric performance management software tool that enables enterprises to manage IP telephony as a service by monitoring application, system and network infrastructure components for reliability, performance, and capacity. The product provides comprehensive modeling, monitoring, and management of the entire IPT delivery chain end to end, focusing on supporting all relevant infrastructure technologies and components.
With embedded best practices, it delivers and manages IP telephony service components and offers statistical models that correlate real-time performance measures with dynamic trend analysis. Operators can view in real time key performance indicators for both call signaling and voice connections, which can be isolated by the call domain, call source, or call destination.
VistaInsight for IP Telephony contains a flexible portal interface that features interactive dashboards and has also met the Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice and Video Integrated Data) Partner Program test criteria for interoperability.
Key benefits of VistaInsight for IP Telephony are its ability to view the whole service end-to-end; leveraging sources of data that already reside in the infrastructure, such as Cisco IPSLA metrics; gathering capacity requirements for ongoing right-sizing and planning of expansion activities; and providing service level reports and customized views. These reports can drill down into a number of specific areas, including a summary reports of call quality (see Figure 1) and network performance and capacity planning (see Figure 2), plus and analysis of servers, applications, voice quality, call quality, troubleshooting results, real time analytics, and inventory.
Further details on the InfoVista architecture and products can be found at http://infovista.com/. Our next tutorial will continue our examination of vendors’ network management architectures.
Copyright Acknowledgement: © 2009 DigiNet Corporation ®, All Rights Reserved
Author's Biography
Mark A. Miller, P.E., is President of DigiNet Corporation®, a Denver-based consulting engineering firm. He is the author of many books on networking technologies, including Voice over IP Technologies, and Internet Technologies Handbook, both published by John Wiley & Sons.
