Paradyne's Premises-Based Quality of Service Gains Industry Acceptance
Frame relay is a wide-area networking technology of choice for interconnecting local area networks of a corporation that maintains branch offices nationwide or even worldwide. CPE vendor Paradyne, working with NetScout Systems and Ascend Communications, offers a new approach to measuring network quality of service that in turn makes it easier for service providers to offer guarantees. If you are an IT manager that has critical sales information, or even payroll data riding on these wide-area links, these latest developments should be of interest.
By: John Spofford
Contents
Between the clouds
Understanding frame relay's popularity
Enter the SLA
Backing up the SLA
Strength through partnerships
Ascend deal adds credibility
SLAs are driving the frame relay market
Service guarantees should be expected
Paradyne Corp., one of the largest privately held manufacturers of network access products, has developed a way to use customer premises equipment (CPE) to verify the quality of network services. The company's approach has gained a number of adherents as evidenced by a series of announcements at last week's ComNet/DC trade show in Washington, D.C.
Four major network service providers—MCI WorldCom, Intermedia Communications, IXC Communications, and Ameritech—will resell Paradyne's FrameSaver service level verifier (SLV) system and/or its network-to-network interface (NNI) product to manage the delivery of their respective frame relay services.
The FrameSaver SLV is a special-purpose frame relay access device. These customer premises endpoints are intelligent, digital service units that use embedded frame relay microswitch technology to extend the carrier's network monitoring capability all the way to the customer premise.
The product conforms to the simple network management protocol (SNMP)—a protocol that allows management of different devices under a single standards based platform such as Hewlett-Packards' OpenView—and uses RMON (remote monitoring) agent technology licensed from NetScout Systems. Each FrameSaver SLV collects and stores physical, frame, and networking protocol data in RMON "buckets" for periodic retrieval by the network service provider.
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Between the clouds
The other half of the Paradyne puzzle is the FrameSaver NNI. (Figure 1, above) It provides much of the same functionality as the SLV products at the customer premises but it is placed inside the frame relay cloud as gateways between areas of the public network that belong to different carriers.
"The NNI box is a version of the FrameSaver SLV product that sits at the demarc points between the networks inside the frame relay cloud," explains Jim DesRosiers, Paradyne's director of frame relay business development.
The local exchange carriers, such as the regional Bell companies, commonly use NNIs, as they offer services outside the geographic region established by federal regulations.
"For example, if a local exchange carrier wants to provision a nationwide customer, it needs to contract with an intermediary—either AT&T or another LEC —to complete all of the circuits. With the NNI it has the ability to position these boxes at the [network] egress and ingress points to essentially bookend the various segments of the networks. In this way [the LEC] can segment a network and verify where trouble is happening inside the network, whether the problem is in its cloud or in a partners cloud."
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Understanding frame relay's popularity
Public frame relay services are often used by IT managers to interconnect the separate local-area networks of a far-flung corporation. Computer data and even intra-corporation voice traffic can use these lines. Managers find that frame relay allows them to build a virtual wide-area network (WAN) using packet-switching technology instead of using dedicated end-to-end circuits.
Instead of implementing a spider's web mesh of T-1 links or leased-line circuits between each site, a network manager can use frame relay to build a hub-and-spoke network to the different facilities. In this case, the carrier's frame relay cloud at the center of the network serves as the hub and the spokes are a single local-area connection to each office.
Frame relay is popular because it saves money at both the LAN and the WAN. It requires less CPE investment because many virtual network connections share a single physical network interface. And since only a single physical port is used, there is only one local loop charge per site.
In the WAN, frame relay providers almost always charge a flat monthly rates that are not distance sensitive. Savings of 40% to 60% compared to the cost of leased lines are typical. In short, IT managers like frame relay because it is relatively cheap and it is reliable.
Frame relay services are ubiquitous and have become a bit of a commodity. With very little difference between the services, network service providers need ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. One popular option is the service level agreement.
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Enter the SLA
A service level agreement, or SLA, is a guarantee the network service provider gives its customer. SLAs traditionally have been negotiated by carriers on a per customer basis. But with increased competition, service providers are likely publish standard SLAs that are available to every customer, explains Ellen Carney, director of integration and support services at Dataquest, a research and analysis unit of the Gartner Group Inc.
"In many cases, especially with managed network services, the service level agreements or guarantees are very influential deal closers," she says. "With services becoming more commodity-like, dropping the price is attractive to end users, but the other thing that is attractive is to give a service level guarantee with a little bit of meat behind it."
A simple SLA might cover little more than network service availability. For example, a vendor might guarantee that a frame relay service will be running 99.9 % of the time. If the network is down for more than four hours in a particular month, that month's service fee is rebated.
But with the heat of competition, SLAs usually add guarantees for network performance parameters such data throughout or network latency—the delay between the time a device receives a frame of data and when the frame is forwarded out of the destination port.
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Backing up the SLA
The customer's demand for more robust SLAs is where Paradyne fits in. Using the FrameSaver SLV system, a service provider can deliver a frame relay service that includes network management all way out to the customer premises, making it possible to report network statistics to the customer on a monthly basis, for example. In the case of a problem, the FrameSaver allows troubleshooting in real-time allowing quicker resolution.
Coupled with the NNI, the FrameSaver products also allow a carrier to keep its partners honest. This is a real concern when the SLA is enforced by rebates of revenue to the customer(s).
"The NNI gives service providers two advantages," DesRosiers says. "They can very rapidly isolate the problem and tell the partner where to go to fix [the problem] instead of going through the normal finger pointing. The second issue: if there in fact is an outage that impacts the SLA, then the penalty can be assigned to the appropriate partner."
"A carrier can offer a tighter SLA than its competition because it has more tools to quickly diagnose [a problem]. There is no need to have a four-hour mean time to repair."
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Strength through partnerships
Two industry partnerships are giving the FrameSaver SLV traction in the carrier community. One of these is a technology exchange and resale deal with NetScout Systems, a manufacturer of enterprise network monitoring gear and network management software. In addition to licensing RMON technology, Paradyne resells NetScout's 6000 and 7500 series network monitoring probes, and OpenLane SLV network management software.
Together the companies have had measurable success. Their network monitoring efforts have been targeted squarely at market leader Visual Networks, a company that has enjoyed significant success selling its Visual Uptime product to AT&T, Sprint, and MCI WorldCom in the long-distance carrier services market, as well as with Bell Atlantic and BellSouth for the local exchange carrier access space.
Of the carrier announcements at ComNet, the MCI WorldCom engineering certification and inclusion of the FrameSaver SLV system in its Web-based MCI WorldCom CPE Catalog, represents the best evidence that Paradyne is successfully breaking into Visual Networks' carrier stronghold.
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Ascend deal adds credibility
A second recently announced partnership with Ascend Communications will undoubtedly open a lot of service provider doors for Paradyne. The two companies are integrating support for the FrameSaver SLV and NNI into the Ascend's NavisCore operating system. NavisCore is the management umbrella for the entire Ascend product line.
The partnership benefits Paradyne because the majority of frame relay services currently run on Ascend switches. It is doubly good when the Ascend merger with Lucent Technologies, announced last month, is considered. This places the influence of a true industry giant behind FrameSaver.
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SLAs are driving the frame relay market
The deal also brings something to Ascend. "In the past six months service level management and service level agreements have really become key in the industry," says Joe Frandi, senior product marketing manager at Ascend Communications. "We've had inquiries from our customers, which are mostly service providers and carriers, in the area of what we intend to do with service level agreements."
"With NavisCore and the intelligence within the Ascend switches, we have the capability today to do edge-to-edge service level management, but we were missing that last mile. And that is quite obviously the most important piece when a carrier is providing a service level agreement to the customer."
"[With the Framesaver SLV] we can integrate the CPE equipment at the customer premises, incorporate its functions, and most of the information gathering of statistics into NavisCore so a carrier can ... actually monitor individual customer networks."
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Service guarantees should be expected
The bottom line to IT managers is clear: the technology to guarantee wide-area connections that might carry sales or payroll data continues to improve. It is clear that networks are the heart of every corporation with business managers relying on applications working all the time.
Consumers of LAN interconnect services should expect, or even demand, a robust guarantee for network service availability, data throughout, and network latency. And the customer should be able to hold the carrier to the guarantee.
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About the author:
John Spofford is the managing editor of Premises Networks Online. He can be contacted at jspofford@verticalnet.com.