Posts Tagged ‘Network Intelligence’
Lessons from Mobile World Congress: Monitoring and More
MWC this year was crowded. Judging by the activity in and around the event, those attending had an excellent experience. We certainly did!
It’s always good to reflect on what’s new at MWC and, for the benefit of our readers, we thought we would share some of our own observations.
- Network monitoring is something that’s fundamental. Full stop. You need to be able to monitor your network in real-time and at wire-speeds. It enables a wide range of applications, but without the basic capability to see what’s happening on your network, you can’t be sure it’s working properly.
- So much flows from network monitoring that it’s worth expanding on this. One of the major themes of MWC was the delivery of a rich customer experience and the emerging topic of CEM (customer experience management). If you can’t see what’s happening on your network, you can’t deliver CEM. To manage your customers more effectively, you need to be able to perform packet processing at Gb/s rates, which requires specialist hardware.
- Customers are demanding better and more predictable performance. They are using increasingly demanding applications on their mobile devices. MNOs need to be able to think about delivering Quality of Service to meet these expectations. But QoS demands the ability to process packets and determine if there are any issues or problems - and that means monitoring your network.
- MNOs want to exploit an over-arching framework to manage and co-ordinate customer experience. Policy control is the answer to this and it’s big. But network policies need the equipment that can implement them, which takes us back to monitoring and packet processing.
- Finally, network visualisation and self-discovery is a topic we think is going to develop in the coming months. The ability to create pictures of data routing, data sources and performance will supplement the need to monitor network traffic and help ensure complex MVNO and roaming agreements are consistently and fairly applied. With the dramatic growth in data demand, this is sure to be an interesting area.
So that’s it for another year. Network monitoring is going to be huge, although that might not be apparent when discussing high-level applications. But these applications depend on certain key capabilities and monitoring is fundamental to this process.
We’ll be reporting on new developments and themes in our regular news, but for those who attended MWC, we hope you are able to capitalize on the experience.
If you didn’t attend, or if you want to chat about any of the themes we have identified, why not give us a call? We would be happy to share our expert perspective and show you how you can meet the challenges ahead!
The Future of Cyber Security
Telesoft Technologies is a Gold sponsor of the forthcoming “Future of Cyber Security” event, to be held in London at Canary Wharf on the 19th of March.
Product expert Steve Patton will be delivering a seminar on “A hybrid hardware/software approach to cyber security”. As transmission rates on networks accelerate from 10G, through 40G to 100Gb/s, software only implementations of DPI cannot process the packet throughput, and will miss vital signatures or identities.
Telesoft Technologies will discuss a hybrid approach, designed to ensure that no information is lost. By using a combination of intelligent hardware pre-filtering and “back in time” analysis on high speed interfaces it is possible to rapidly identify flows of specific interest, ensuring that later stages of host analysis only see packets of interest.
The Future of Cyber Security 2012 conference brings over 400 senior decision-makers face to face with leading cyber security specialists.
Designed exclusively for central and local government organisations, NGOs and major private sector enterprises, the event provides conference delegates with a unique opportunity to interact with thought leaders in the field.
Conference sessions and seminars will give senior IT, information and security officers unrivalled insight into the cyber threats of today and the potential threats of tomorrow.
To register for this important event, simply follow this link. If you would like to book a meeting with Telesoft during the conference or learn more about how we can help, please call Callum Rasmussen on +44 1258 486518.
Packet Extractor from Telesoft Technologies aids network intelligence in 10-100Gb/s telecom networks
Telesoft Technologies, a global provider of media, monitoring and signaling platforms, today announced availability of packet extraction hardware for core telecom networks.
The Packet Extractor allows operators and system integrators to monitor and filter the mixed traffic flowing in 1-100Gb/s packet networks, passing only the data of interest for onward processing. A survey function classifies data by type, such as VoIP, e-mail and GTP data, and multiplexes each traffic type to individual outputs. The Packet Extractor has multiple inputs to monitor 1-100G Ethernet or SDH/SONET networks traffic from which it multiplexes relevant traffic to lower speed 1Gb/s outputs.
“Understanding and manipulating the data found in optical networks at or above 10Gb/s, poses particular issues for network operators,” said Andy Evripides, VP Sales and Marketing. “Data is transported as mixed traffic in multiple data streams over a single optical fiber. The Packet Extractor is a key network intelligence tool allowing operators to avoid network overload by limiting data volumes, and to analyze the traffic flowing through their networks, by filtering and extracting individual data types for onward processing and analysis”.
Optical fiber based mobile backhaul networks are experiencing huge growth with operators installing 3G, LTE and Wimax to capture market share. Data is transported in multiple data streams over the single optical fiber. Analysis of this communication is an important factor to ensure premium customers have a premium service. The Packet Extractor provides the means to extract and analyze these data streams. It also filters out unwanted data to counteract these increasing data volumes, ensuring current infrastructure does not become flooded with data.
Commercial uses for the Packet Extractor include extracting data quality of service applications, detect fraud or intrusion, and to understand and manage traffic flows in operator networks and other network intelligence applications. The Packet Extractor can also provide an active traffic shaping function to route and filter particular data of interest in the network.
Initially the Packet Extractor will support multiple inputs at 1G and 10Gb Ethernet, extending to 40G and 100G Ethernet during 2011, with groomed data output via multiple 1G Ethernet ports.
