With the move to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), providing users with secure data transfer over a shared or public network, companies want the assurance that their mission critical applications will get the same priority treatment as they would on a WAN.
Says UUNET SA`s Rob Lith: "The more intelligent the physical network, in terms of Cisco routers, switches and other transmission technology, the easier it is to deliver that sort of priority treatment. For instance, routers can be set up to provide Quality of Service (QoS) and Committed Information Rate (CIR) exactly as promised to customers in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, monitoring, measuring and reporting on the hardware`s actual performance is a management information function and falls into the domain of software. That software, though, is vital in giving the customer confidence that his mission critical applications are being treated as such."
Lith points out that intelligent network hardware produces huge volumes of statistics on data transmitted and on network functionality. Additional tools are needed to analyse and consolidate those statistics into reports which facilitate executive decision-making.
"At UUNET we use Netcool, for instance, to consolidate events on the network into a format which enables our network managers to take specific and relevant action. One may know, for instance, that a router is down, but not which clients are affected or in what way specific SLAs may be compromised. Netcool gives us an overview which enables us to prioritise the action we take. In other words, we don`t stop at just getting a technician to fix the router, we can also establish repair times, move high priority clients to alternative routers and notify all affected clients, giving them information about how and for how long they will be affected."
A different tool, Network Health, analyses networks on a range of performance related issues, from the rate of packet loss on a particular router to congestion on CIR services.
The ability to create accurate and meaningful reports is a vital part of monitoring SLAs.
"In the very near future, we will be able to give customers self-service access to generic and customer-specific reports which will give them details on their network utilisation and the performance of their network. With this kind of reporting both customers and network providers will be able to accurately assess delivery on SLAs."
Another evolution in the field of network management is the trend towards hosting by network providers. There are two options here. A network provider rents to a customer cabinet space for his servers on the provider`s premises (known as co-location) and the servers are linked directly to the provider`s backbone. Or, the network provider rents space on his own servers, also linked directly to the backbone.
An extension of this concept is applications hosting, in which the network provider hosts a customer`s applications programmes on the provider`s servers. Customers would merely have links to a network provider who would host the applications directly on to the network`s backbone. Using the client/server concept as an analogy, the network would be the "server" and the customer the "client". This effectively eliminates network management and maintenance considerations - as well as most other IT concerns - for a customer.
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