Press Releases
| COMPANY CONTACT Jeff Raice Packet Design, Inc 408.490.1034 jeff@packetdesign.com |
AGENCY CONTACT Janis Ulevich Ulevich & Orrange, Inc. 650.329.1590 info@u-o.com |
Packet Design's Traffic Explorer Helps Viawest
Manage Upgrade Costs, Make Better Peering Decisions
Knowing Where to Locate One Customer's Servers
Saved Managed Service Provider $2 Million
Santa Clara , Calif. , Aug. 11, 2008 – Managed service provider ViaWest has deployed a Traffic Explorer network management system from Packet Design, Inc., to do faster and more accurate network planning that helps ensure the company can meet the 100 percent uptime guarantee promised to its more than 1,000 business customers.
The Denver-based "super-regional" provider, which maintains enterprise-class data centers in five states to deliver co-location, managed hosting and other business services, installed Traffic Explorer in 2007 and has since used the system to:
- determine the cost of upgrading the network to support new customers
- assess the potential impact of network changes and newly-added customers on existing customers' service delivery; and
- figure out the most cost-effective ways to set up peering arrangements with other service providers.
According to Barry Dykes, ViaWest's vice president of engineering and operations, while the SNMP-based management tools the company had previously used on its Cisco-based backbone could monitor the status of individual devices and links, they provided no information about the movement of traffic over the end-to-end network topology. As a result, to determine what it would take to support a new customer's request for a large amount of bandwidth – under both ideal and failure conditions – Dykes's team had to go through a tedious process of manually collecting routing tables, protocol metrics and traffic flows, then evaluating the failure of every link and device to understand what the impact would be on the rest of the network.
"It could take two weeks before we got back to sales with a definitive answer on what upgrades would be needed to support the new customer with an acceptable level of redundancy," Dykes said. " My group was the slowest to respond in the RFP process because we had to be absolutely sure we weren't making a mistake that would cost us money later."
Dykes was looking for a way to expedite the analysis of various growth and failure scenarios and determine their impact on the network – before actually implementing them. At a Cisco Networkers conference he learned about Traffic Explorer, the first product to map traffic flows onto the network routes over which they traveled, showing traffic moving across the entire network both in real time and historically. A service provider could use Traffic Explorer to simulate specific changes (e.g., adding a router, failing a link, increasing traffic loads) on the actual, as-running network, and immediately see the impact of those changes on traffic flows network-wide.
"We realized Traffic Explorer could actually show us what failures would mean in the network," Dykes said. "I could go through and virtually 'break' different links and devices and know immediately the ramifications for customer traffic."
Traffic Explorer also shortened the time required to answer questions about growth and expansion. Once it was installed, Dykes said, when a new customer came along "we simply took an existing customer in the same geographic area and 'multiplied' their traffic to what the new customer wanted. That told us when we'd have to upgrade pieces of the backbone based on their bandwidth demands. Traffic Explorer even showed us where that customer's servers should reside. If we had put them at one data center, we would have had to upgrade both the backbone and the peering. At a different data center we could upgrade only the peering – a cost difference of about $2 million."
In addition, Traffic Explorer has helped ViaWest determine how best to design its peering arrangements. When bandwidth demand was rising in Utah, then-current policy dictated that peering be added at ViaWest's central location in Denver. "I had the sense it would be more efficient to disperse some of the peering strategically in other locations," Dykes said. "So with Traffic Explorer we virtually placed the peering and transit connections in different locations, ran various scaling and failure scenarios, saw the impact on traffic, and calculated the cost. In a couple of days our assumptions were validated, and we added the peering in Utah."
Traffic Explorer's History Navigator, an animated historical playback and analysis feature that lets users "rewind" the network topology map to the point in time when a problem occurred, has been useful to ViaWest in diagnosing inconsistent and hard-to-detect problems, such as intermittent router failures known as "route flaps," which can severely degrade network performance.
"Each day I get an email telling me what route flaps and route prefix changes occurred on the previous day," Dykes said. "If there was a lot of activity outside the norm, we want to know the reason: Was it a circuit issue? Did a specific customer cause it? Traffic Explorer can tell us."
About Viawest
Headquartered in Denver, ViaWest provides a unique set of colocation, managed hosting solutions and comprehensive services to mid-sized businesses. The super-regional service provider maintains enterprise-class data centers in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Texas and Nevada, and offers broad and deep expertise to furnish its customers with leading technology infrastructure solutions and the critical resources to support their business needs. ViaWest currently serves thousands of customers nationwide including Frontier Airlines, the Denver Broncos, Exclusive Resorts and Chipotle. Winner of the Colorado Technology Association's "Technology Company of the Year" award for 2008, ViaWest has also been named one of the Top Private Companies in Colorado and one of Colorado's Top 10 Mid-Size Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.ViaWest.com or call 1-877-448-9378.
About Packet Design, Inc.
Packet Design, Inc., pioneered the field of route analytics and is the leading supplier of network appliances that provide routing-layer visibility into IP networks. The company's products create an accurate layer 3 topology map, analyze routing events, and provide a unique end-to-end, "path-aware" view of network traffic (including MPLS-VPN customer traffic), letting network engineers quickly pinpoint network problems and accurately model changes. Packet Design solutions help manage networks in hundreds of organizations, including many of the world's largest service providers, global enterprises (financial, retail pharmaceutical and other firms), government agencies and educational institutions.
Packet Design was founded in March 2003 by serial entrepreneur and former Cisco Chief Technology Officer Judy Estrin and former Cisco Chief Scientist Van Jacobson. For more information, visit www.packetdesign.com.
Learn more about Packet Design products
© 2008. Packet Design Inc.
