Networking

Visual Networks' Performance Management System

Visual UpTime 7.0 and Visual IP InSight are designed to improve network performance and increase the availability of of site-to-site public IP VPNs and dedicated IP services, such as T1 Internet connections.

by Wayne Kawamoto [January 25, 2001]

Visual Networks announced its new Visual UpTime 7.0 and Visual IP InSight Dedicated Suite that promise to give service providers and their enterprise customers improved capabilities to monitor network performance, decrease problem resolution time, increase the availability of networked services and reduce operational costs.

Visual UpTime 7.0 is a WAN performance management solution that's designed to provide visibility into private IP VPNs and report on them, as well as validate Class of Service (CoS) offerings for private IP networks. The Visual IP InSight Dedicated Suite, on the other hand, is designed to mange the performance of site-to-site public IP VPNs and dedicated IP services, such as T1 Internet connections.

According to the company, Visual IP InSight is the first performance management solution that provides troubleshooting and reporting on services from multiple providers across all IP access technologies, dial, broadband, and dedicated IP, from a single back-end system. Together, Visual Networks says that its new offerings create the most comprehensive suite of common performance management solutions for frame relay, ATM, private IP and public IP networking services.

The company claims that its Visual UpTime 7.0 addresses the newly emerging market for network-based private IP VPNs that use technology such as MPLS or virtual router mechanisms and a single service provider network as the backbone. These private IP VPNs should allow service providers and their enterprise customers to leverage their existing investment in frame relay and ATM while achieving the flexibility of an IP network, and provide an easy migration path for new, evolving technologies, such as Voice over IP.

According to Visual Networks, the enhancements to Visual UpTime 7.0 make it the only performance management system to monitor Layers 1 through 7 of private IP VPNs—and offer a solution for validating new CoS offerings, provided by many service providers today. CoS offerings may allow customers to set priorities on their network traffic to ensure that mission-critical data takes precedence over less critical information traveling over the network. Visual UpTime 7.0 is designed to let users determine how network utilization is affected when implementing a private IP VPN-or where additional bandwidth may be required or reduced to save network costs.

Visual UpTime is designed to track access line, port and end-to-end IP circuit statistics, identify most active users, and measure utilization by protocol type. In addition, Visual UpTime validates IP SLAs and CoS throughput at the service boundary. The product integrates monitoring capabilities with access equipment to automate the collection, interpretation and presentation of performance management data. A series of applications provide real-time and historical troubleshooting tests that may eliminate the need for remote dispatches, and provide performance monitoring, service level validation and performance reporting for IP, frame relay, ATM, and private line connections-or combinations of these technologies.

"The introduction of Visual UpTime 7.0 and the Visual IP InSight Dedicated Suite gives our customers the highest level of performance management visibility into public, private and hybrid networks that use a combination of these technologies," said Steve Hindman, Visual Networks' executive vice president of sales and marketing.

"While the demand for VPNs continues to grow, particularly with the introduction of new public and private IP services and access methods, there is still a critical issue at stake for customers—network performance," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Enterprise Management Associates. "Companies are willing to risk some degradation in performance quality to gain the cost savings of a VPN, as long as they do so with effective metrics to measure the trade-off. Visual Networks' solutions can be a critical enabler across the VPN market, allowing companies with public VPNs, private VPNs or a combination of both, to optimize performance and minimize costs. The breadth and flexibility of Visual Networks' common performance management suite to support both public and private IP networks and legacy frame relay and ATM networks is a key differentiator for Visual Networks."

Availability and pricing
Visual UpTime 7.0 and the Visual IP InSight Dedicated Suite are available immediately to service providers and enterprise customers. Pricing for the Visual UpTime 7.0 Transport ASE begins at $4,395, not including the back-end system for new users. The Visual IP InSight Dedicated Suite has a list price that begins at $2,000 including all software licenses.

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