New Orleans - Northern Telecom, Inc. is offering a new twist on a growing trend: enabling users to monitor carriers' frame relay and ATM network performance.
At the recent SuperComm '97 show here, Nortel introduced two network management tools called the Magellan ServiceMonitor and Service Management Reporter. Designed to be installed at user sites by carriers that offer managed fast-packet services, the two software packages give users a peek at the traffic passing through their carrier's Magellan Passport switches.
The goal is to enable users to see if the carrier is meeting agreed-upon performance standards incorporated into service-level agreements, according to Nortel officials. Such performance standards include the percentage of dropped frames in frame relay and the maintenance of various ATM quality-of-service standards.
Both ServiceMonitor and Service Management Reporter are Hewlett-Packard Co. OpenView net management-based applications that reside on the customer premises. ServiceMonitor provides a real-time status check of traffic levels, and Service Management Reporter provides network usage and performance reports over specified time periods, such as a week or a month.
Because the carrier installs the tools at the user's site, the carrier is responsible for paying Nortel for the software. Some carriers are planning to turn around and charge users separately for the capability, said Mark Tharby, Nortel's manager of enterprise marketing for Magellan networks. Other carriers intend to incorporate the charge into their monthly managed services prices, he said.
Tharby conceded a limitation of Nortel's new products compared with other carrier network management offerings: They only work if the carrier has standardized its frame relay or ATM service on Magellan switches.
This limitation is likely to give initial implementations of Magellan ServiceMonitor and Service Management Reporter an international spin. The most prominent carriers that have standardized on Magellan in-clude Cable & Wireless plc Mercury Communications unit in the U.K., the Pan-European consortium AT&T Unisource and the global value-added network Equant, an outgrowth of the long-standing SITA airline data network.
Still, carriers that install Magellan switches may find that Nortel's management scheme is more efficient than offering users a third-party vendor's network monitoring tool, Tharby said.
Each Passport switch in a carrier's network has a local storage capability that allows it to retain performance data for a period of time, then upload it to the main network operations center on a set schedule, he explained. That eliminates the need for continuous polling by the network management module at the main site.
Future targets for Nortel's management packages are likely to include Sprint Corp. and MCI Communications Corp., both of which recently began offering third-party frame relay monitoring tools as a service option.
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