How governments can solve layer 3 network complexity
What if government agencies could monitor and analyze their IP networks to ensure peak efficiency and service continuity—all while trying to modernize the network, balance cost, performance, and resiliency? Jim Westdorp, Ciena Government Solutions’ Chief Technologist, explains how this is possible.
By Jim Westdorp – The dynamic nature of IP networking makes it virtually impossible to know at any point in time how traffic is traversing your networks. Troubleshooting problems by issuing pings and router CLI commands, scanning log files, and manually correlating the results is imprecise and inefficient. Many government networks disable services like Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), which makes these inefficient tasks impossible. The results can impact service delivery, the agility of the network, and mission.
Traditional management tools have several limitations. For example, they can’t:
- Provide real-time visibility into routing paths across the network
- Provide unique alerts for Layer 3 technologies related to: state changes, pathing, performance, and the availability of the network elements to route packets
- Show and model how routing errors and changes impact service delivery
- Understand the resiliency of the network
- Correlate routing events with performance metrics of network services to assure service performance
- Compute and provision transport paths to deploy new services
- Provide unified visibility and analysis for multi-vendor, multi-layer networks
Think about all the things you’d like to be able to do with your network, and ask yourself a few questions:
- What if you could get a graphical view of all the IP flows in your network and gain deeper insights into traffic patterns, flows, and congestion?
- What if you could drill deep into specific flows to understand the detailed route and particular pieces of network equipment those flows traversed?
- What if you could troubleshoot your network using DVR-like functionality to see the exact state of the network at the time of an event, even if it was days in the past?
- What if you had automated analytics to help identify the best paths to route traffic through your network?
- What if your cyber team could utilize the same platform to be alerted to conditions indicative of external interference with a government?
Often, “what-ifs” are hypotheticals. Not in this case, with Blue Planet’s Route Optimization and Analysis (ROA). This technology has been field-proven for more than a decade with government entities that have strategic imperatives to monitor and analyze their IP Networks to ensure peak efficiency and service continuity—all while trying to modernize the network, balance cost, performance, and resiliency. more>
Related>
- How to get TDM migration going for your government network, Jim Westdorp
- No network modernization job is too big or too small, Wayne Hickey
- The Ciena Insights Podcast – Episode 32: The Digital Economy – What Does It Take to Survive and Thrive? [AUDIO]
- Ciena’s 2020 TDM-to-Packet Network Modernization Contractor Series Bundle
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