Ethernet Backhaul Performance | Monitoring LTE and IMS at Scale

Telecommunications service providers and cable companies or MSOs face a unique set of challenges, including how to continuously scale their networking infrastructure and implement new and converged services while maintaining required performance and availability levels. Additionally, quick time-to-value and a low-touch deployment and management model are required. SevOne solutions are deployed with global telecommunications providers and MSOs, and we can help you meet your business objectives.

Ensuring Carrier Ethernet and Wireless Backhaul Performance

Bandwidth demands for MSOs and wireless carriers continue to increase at phenomenal rates. Where legacy technologies struggle to cope with consumer data demands, operators have turned to cost-efficient, scalable, and future proof Carrier and Metro Ethernet to address the explosive growth in traffic. Monitoring the performance of this IP/Ethernet based backhaul infrastructure is critical to successfully delivering the levels of service your customers demand. With the increase in new technologies, the number of possible backhaul failure points and bottlenecks requires new levels of scalability and end-to-end performance visibility.

SevOne’s scalable and comprehensive performance management solution allows cable MSOs and wireless carriers to effectively manage and optimize network capacity while reducing backhaul expenditure and customer churn. With the SevOne network performance management solution, operators can:

proactively monitor network performance to ensure the infrastructure meets service levels and addresses future demands;
optimize Ethernet backhaul infrastructure to support increased multi-media traffic levels, and new markets and geographies; and
isolate, determine, and alert on performance issues ahead of service impact to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Monitoring 4G LTE and IMS Networks

4G LTE and IMS deliver the next-generation of broadband mobile services. The use of multiple vendor technologies and an exponential rise in network elements creates new challenges in gaining end-to-end visibility of performance and availability in networks and services. Additionally, the network elements can be highly distributed given regional variations in subscriber numbers, traffic volumes, and cell-site loading. These challenges of scale and distribution become even more pronounced because the IMS and LTE architecture collapses what were previously two separate networks (voice and data) into a single all-IP system, that includes five core, multi-vendor systems: radio access network, aggregation and backhaul, Ethernet packet core, MPLS transport/backbone, and the IMS core. A next-generation performance management solution is required that supports the order of magnitude increase in scale with real-time visibility and rapid response demanded by wireless carriers to transition to commercial LTE services. Traditional performance management solutions rely on a centralized PMDB (performance management database) surrounded by collection, aggregation, and reporting components, which become major bottleneck as networks grow and evolve, slowing deployments and crippling the ongoing operations.

How SevOne Meets Your Challenges

The solution to the new challenges is a distributed peer-to-peer appliance architecture where each appliance is both a distributed collector and a centralized reporter. A web-based interface provides reporting and alerting on the data collected by all of the appliances, using the distributed process power of all the appliances for report generation. As the Carrier Ethernet, Wireless Backhaul and 4G LTE and IMS networks and services grow, additional appliances can be added to the distributed cluster to linearly scale the monitoring solution. The SevOne performance appliance solution collects data from many sources and monitors millions of key performance indicators, providing operations teams with the most accurate and timely reporting available to ensure infrastructure performance and availability. Further, the SevOne xStats plug-in enables any integration with probes and element management systems or EMS from network equipment vendors.

Linear Scalability and Speed at Scale

Not only is the SevOne platform proven to scale on some of the largest service provider networks, it scales in a linear fashion. The traditional hierarchical-based performance platforms inevitably experience growth limitations as your environment expands – often they require complex initial sizing and database upgrades which lead to monitoring outages. SevOne’s peer-to-peer-based architecture enables service providers to simply add peered appliances when additional capacity is required.

Collect-to-report and collect-to-alert are two key means of assessing the effectiveness of a network performance solution. Legacy multi-tier solutions struggle to gather the latest polled data into dashboards, reports, and threshold alerts with the speed required by demanding managed contracts and users. SevOne’s non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer-based approach means collected data is available for alerts and reports in seconds, not many minutes.

All-in-One Appliance

SevOne’s unique peer-to-peer appliance solution include storage that is sufficient for one year of raw performance data without requiring aggregation. Each SevOne appliance includes the database, server administration, and provides a streamlined upgrade process which dramatically reduces your Total Cost of Ownership. Every SevOne PAS supports all monitoring technologies; SNMP, xStats, IP SLA, NetFlow, NBAR, VoIP, ICMP, XML, WMI, VMware, JMX amongst others, and are included by default – with no additional licensing. This reduces your datacenter footprint and reduces overall costs to monitor customer environments. It even allows you to consolidate your legacy performance management tools into a single, scalable platform.

OSS Platform Integration

SevOne participates in the full workflow of problem identification through to resolution. SevOne’s bi-directional SOAP API allows ease of integration with other network operations products including fault products, service desk and CMDBs. SevOne sends and receives trap notifications and supports launching reports in conjunction with other products for a quick drill-down into device performance reports.

Telecommunications and MSOs