Virtela monitors, manages customer-owned devices

Virtela has announced a service for monitoring and managing customer-owned networking gear so businesses can offload some IT chores while keeping control of equipment.

Called Remote Monitoring & Management (RMM), the service covers LAN, wireless LAN and WAN gear, security equipment, VoIP devices and servers.

Under RMM, customers choose what devices they need help with and turn over monitoring, management or both to Virtela. This provides a potentially large savings by reducing staffing needs, the company says.

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Virtela has announced a service for monitoring and managing customer-owned networking gear so businesses can offload some IT chores while keeping control of equipment.

Called Remote Monitoring & Management (RMM), the service covers LAN, wireless LAN and WAN gear, security equipment, VoIP devices and servers.

Under RMM, customers choose what devices they need help with and turn over monitoring, management or both to Virtela. This provides a potentially large savings by reducing staffing needs, the company says.

Virtela's main line of business is providing VPNs over a redundant backbone network that is pieced together using bandwidth on networks owned by many wholesale providers. This gives the company an international staff in many countries, potentially giving RMM customers access to local help, says Daniel Golding, a senior analyst with Burton Group.

Because Virtela set out to manage VPNs, including the customer-site gear, it is prepared for monitoring and managing large numbers of customer devices. "It's non-trivial to do this well," Golding says. The platform the company developed to do this also is well suited to the RMM service, he adds.

This type of service is generally provided by systems integrators such as IBM that try to negotiate complete outsourcing deals with customers as opposed to farming out portions of the management, Golding says. Until RMM, Virtela was similar in this regard.

RMM is an outgrowth of Virtela's managed service offerings in which it supplies the hardware it manages, and uses the same network operations and security centers as the other service. Before, customers had to accept a fully managed service that included Virtela engineering and provisioning. "Unbundling the management and monitoring from the provisioning is long overdue," he says.

Customers can access data about their network via VirtelaView portal to a network operations center to see reports and to manage devices themselves if, for example, they want to change the configuration of a firewall. The service monitors the status of devices, and sends notifications of failures and violations of set thresholds.

Virtela will contact service providers that supply access lines if it determines network problems are with the provider. RMM also handles software updates, and has a process for authorizing configuration changes to devices that ensures only changes authorized by customers are carried out.

Pricing depends on the number, type and size of equipment, and whether it is just monitored or monitored and managed. Monitoring pricing, for example, ranges from $40 per month for a small LAN switch to $350 for a security device. Virtela also charges a $100 to $500 per-device start-up fee that varies depending on the complexity of the device.