Application Optimization Assurance for Carrier-Grade Environments
Overview
For today’s enterprises, the management of global IP networks is no easy feat. The increasing use of hosted and shared business software—and the need to centrally manage applications, data, multiple branch offices and a growing mobile workforce—is making it harder for enterprise IT departments to deliver high-quality, highly available network services.
As a result, these enterprises are looking to their service provider to help them maximize bandwidth consumption of their VPN service and ensure optimal performance of their applications over the wide area network (WAN). This affords service providers the opportunity to offer application optimization as a managed service, furnishing them with new revenue streams and their enterprise customers with predictable monthly operational expenses and the ability to avoid the headaches and costs associated with its day-to-day management.
Service providers seeking to offer bandwidth, WAN and application optimization as part of their business services portfolios must include two primary components: 1) the networking technology and WAN optimization devices (WODs), such as those offered by Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) solution, and 2) visibility into the service and the assurance of its performance through detailed reporting and monitoring.
InfoVista’s 5View™ Application Optimization Manager supplies this necessary second component by providing out-of-the-box capabilities to collect, aggregate, and analyze data pertaining to WODs and measure, report, and document how the optimization service is performing. With these in-depth visibility, monitoring, and reporting capabilities, service providers and large enterprises can effectively launch WAN optimization services.
Key Benefits
5View™ Application Optimization Manager, InfoVista’s fully integrated application performance management solution for WAN services, delivers:
- The ability for service providers to generate new revenue streams by fortifying them with the reporting and monitoring capabilities they need to launch the WAN optimization services their enterprise customers demand
- Rapid delivery of WAN optimization services before the competition via out-of-the-box reporting and monitoring features
- Assistance in proving compliance with customer service level agreements through the documentation of how well the optimization service is performing
- High-level service performance by providing the pertinent, real-time information and monitoring capabilities needed for quick and efficient troubleshooting and resolution of issues
- A means to facilitate service growth while keeping total cost of ownership low via a multi-tenant and scalable architecture
- Operational efficiencies and maximum return on investment in performance tools by extending InfoVista’s IP-VPN solution (VistaInsight® for Networks) to application-based service solutions
- Contributes to tool consolidation efforts
- Leverages skill sets of existing personnel
- Helps break down traditional organizational barriers (network and application domains) that can inhibit efficient service management and assurance
Key Features
5View™ Application Optimization Manager equips service providers and enterprises with the monitoring and reporting capabilities needed to launch WAN optimization services. Reflecting a unique multi-dimensional approach to service assurance, Application Optimization Manager has been designed for deployment as either a stand-alone optimization assurance solution or as a complement to InfoVista’s flagship VistaInsight® for Networks product. This second manner of deployment allows service providers and enterprises to leverage InfoVista’s strengths in monitoring IP network infrastructure and VPN performance and manage network and application-based services from a common environment.
5View Application Optimization Manager provides:
- Predefined, out-of-the-box key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify and ensure the bandwidth savings expected from the optimization service deployment
- Out-of-the-box reports, hierarchical navigation and workflow drill-downs to view information from multiple dimensions, handle common scenarios and assist with troubleshooting issues
- A flexible reporting definition environment, allowing service providers to customize reports to suit their product offerings or various customer reporting requirements
- Role-based customer and operational dashboard views (with in-depth drill-down to detailed information)
- Support for Layer 4 and Layer 7 applications
- Capacity planning for interfaces, enabling forecasting of interface utilization on WAN optimization devices
- Carrier-grade scalability, enabling operational and cost-effective deployment for multi-tenant service environments
- Integration with Cisco Central Manager (CCM), providing auto-discovery for data consistency and integrity across the deployment, and enabling rapid rollout of customers and services
- Compatibility and common platform with InfoVista’s IP-VPN solution (VistaInsight for Networks), increasing return on investment, enabling a common and consistent view of network- and application-based services, and reducing time to resolution when performance issues occur
