OPNET Technologies,Inc.

OPN ET

OPN ET

"For service providers large and small, the stubborn riddle remains: how to leverage fast-moving technology into long-lasting profitable business models." - McQuillan Ventures

Intelligent Network Management for Service Providers

Todays service providers are faced with a host of business challenges. How to accelerate deployment of new services, attract and retain high-end customers, reduce operating costs, and maintain superior service quality in a world of exponential growth and shifting technologies? ServiceProvider Guru (SP Guru) was created to address these issues. SP Guru is a software product unique in its ability to understand the entire network, including routers, switches, protocols, servers, and individual applications. The intelligence embedded in SP Guru represents the newest, most advanced technology available for troubleshooting, operational validation, planning, and design of service provider networks.

Why ServiceProvider Guru is Essential for Service Providers

OPNETs extensive, diverse customer base includes the leading providers of communications services around the world. They realize significant, strategic return on investment from their use of OPNET software.

Revenue Generation: The key to winning new strategic accounts while retaining existing customers is consistently delivering high quality services. SP Guru accurately predicts the effect of growth and network changes, enabling you to maintain service levels while accelerating provisioning and deployment of new services. Operating Cost Reduction: Your bottom line is dependent on how you manage bandwidth and equipment. Realize better return from your most costly operating assets. SP Guru provides powerful, automated network design capabilities to optimize the use of network resources. Operational Efficiency Improvement: Service providers are dependent on highly skilled individuals to identify and resolve technical problems. SP Guru provides structured, repeatable diagnostic and validation capabilities that accelerate problem resolution, alleviating pressure to grow operations staff. Risk Reduction: Your business is exposed when your networks are exposed. By simulating failures and overload conditions before they happen, you can deploy more resilient networks. By validating configuration changes before deployment, you can avoid costly mistakes and speed deployments with confidence.

ServiceProvider Gurus Virtual Network Environment

SP Gurus Virtual Network Environment replicates the behavior of your entire network. By working in the Virtual Network Environment, your network planners, architects, designers, network engineers, and operations staff can more effectively troubleshoot existing problems, validate changes before deployment, plan for future growth, ensure network resiliency, and optimize network designs for superior service quality.

VIRTUAL NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

Troubleshooting Validation Planning Design Optimization

Operational Network Environment Topology Devices Configurations Traffic

SP Guru leverages existing information to understand your entire network

Troubleshoot Performance Problems

Visualize your network and traffic flows Debug network configuration errors Pinpoint bottlenecks Diagnose problems with hosted applications

Validate Changes Prior to Implementation

Test network configuration changes before committing Right-size capacity adjustments before provisioning Tune protocols with confidence Validate QoS policies prior to deployment

Plan Ahead for Growth and Resiliency

Plan for traffic growth and new services Demonstrate benefits to prospective customers Define achievable SLAs Ensure readiness for equipment or link failures Study the impact of deploying new technologies

Optimize Current and Future Network Designs

Choose from a library of powerful design algorithms Perform traffic engineering to optimize use of network resources Accurately predict service levels Automatically generate configuration changes

The Intelligence to Understand

SP Guru provides powerful, flexible mechanisms to automatically build a realistic, detailed model of your network. It includes facilities to capture topology and configuration information, as well as traffic and link utilization data. SP Guru can recreate the behavior of an existing service provider network, or predict link utilization and service levels for a wide range of what-if scenarios. Leverage discovery capability from network management platforms by importing topology data. Create your virtual network from router configuration files, automatically setting configurations on each device. Load your network with traffic matrix information and link utilization data directly from a variety of traffic data collection tools. Flexible import capability allows you to import virtually any network data from standard formats (XML, ASCII).

Native device configuration files are imported to populate a network model with fully configured objects.

The Intelligence to Troubleshoot Problems

Troubleshoot the causes of problem behavior occurring in both operational and planned networks. Recreate problem scenarios and visualize traffic distributions. SP Gurus NetDoctor feature tests the entire network model against established rule suites in order to identify problems that may result from misconfigurations or protocol conflicts. Define custom rules, using an open scripting interface, to systematically check configurations using your organizations policies. Use OPNETs Application Characterization Environment to diagnose the source of hosted application performance problems.

The Intelligence To Validate Changes Prior to Implementation

"Networks have become extraordinarily complex and user demands seem to grow everyday; the result is that simple, old-school routing procedures are insufficient for today's carrier-class networks. OPNET and the MPLS Model Development Consortium have gone to great lengths to create a highly accurate MPLS model that we believe will be a key enabler of next-generation networks. Traffic engineers will have a very powerful tool to structure traffic flow and manage end-to-end network performance." -

SP Gurus Virtual Network Environment provides a buffer between your network management staff and the operational network by validating tactical changes prior to implementation. Test changes to network configurations to ensure validity and to minimize the risk of introducing new errors. SP Guru predicts link utilizations and detailed end-to-end QoS measures after routing changes or capacity upgrades. Tune protocols with confidence by checking that desired effects on routing and performance are achieved. Modify QoS policies with a precise understanding of how different classes of service will be affected in a variety of traffic scenarios.

OPNET Customer

SP Guru validates changes to configurations, capacity, protocols, and QoS policies.

Leverage NetDoctors library of pre-defined rules or author your own.

The Intelligence To Plan Ahead for Growth and Network Resiliency

SP Guru combines best-in-class discrete-event simulation, and analytical modeling, to deliver accurate predictions for any what-if scenario. This empowers service providers to maximize ROI in the planning process. Accurately simulate traffic growth based on demand profiles and a detailed understanding of both routing and queuing in a multi-technology, multi-vendor environment. Determine which architecture and costs are required to successfully deliver specific service-levels measured by delay, delay variation, and loss. Perform exhaustive failure analyses to determine which traffic flows will be most affected by outages, and where the most likely resulting bottlenecks will be. Understand the impact of deploying new technologies, protocols, or hosted applications. Leverage SP Gurus comprehensive Model Library of protocols and technologies (includes TCP/IP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP4, ATM, PNNI, MPLS, UMTS, Gigabit Ethernet, vendorspecific device models, and more)

"The magnitude of the 3G migration will drive wireless providers to look to more structured and exact methods of determining the network and financial resources required to successfully bring 3G to market. Predictive network analysis and planning software will provide wireless operators with key competitive advantages, enabling them to eliminate the guesswork and more accurately manage the cost and performance of an operational 3G network." - RHK

The Intelligence To Optimize Current and Future Network Designs

SP Guru incorporates powerful decision support for network designers and engineers. Perform load balancing, link dimensioning, and traffic engineering. Automate physical and logical topology design and optimization for IP, Frame Relay, ATM, and MPLS networks. Choose from standard algorithms or use OPNETproprietary techniques to design efficient architectures that are resilient to traffic fluctuations. Customize design parameters to reflect local policies for balancing service levels and network cost. Export router configuration data automatically from your design, to facilitate network provisioning.
Draw from an extensive library of design algorithms to create a customized design strategy.

Case Study: Plan for MPLS in the Core Network

"MPLS is the technology that enables us to provide premium VPN services defined by explicit SLAs. OPNET software is indispensable for network design, enabling service providers to optimize network resource utilization and performance, and satisfy reliability requirements." - OPNET Customer

Problem
An ISP planned to implement MPLS to improve bandwidth efficiency and performance. They considered several possible deployment scenarios and approaches to traffic engineering. These could be implemented in their lab to test for product functionality and compatibility, but they could not reproduce the scale of the live network and its traffic loads.

Solution
SP Guru was used to build a detailed model of the providers actual IP backbone network, by importing configuration files. Traffic matrix data was imported to provide a view of the current, actual traffic demands. Several possible MPLS deployment scenarios were defined, building on the scope of the initial deployment, considering whether a full (single level) mesh or two-level mesh of LSPs should be deployed. SP Gurus automated design features were used to create custom strategies reflecting each of the deployment scenarios. MPLS was implemented on the appropriate routers in the Virtual Network Environment, making them LSRs. Explicit primary and secondary routes were created, automatically ensuring that the secondary routes were node disjoint from the primary routes for optimum resiliency. Traffic was introduced and the LSPs were automatically sized to meet service level objectives for the demands being routed over them. The ISP tested their preferred scenario under different rates of projected traffic growth to assess the longevity of their design. Finally, an exhaustive survivability study was performed to ensure SLA compliance if traffic were to be re-routed following single node or link failures.

Results
The service provider was able to accelerate deployment plans of their core MPLS network by approximately six months, having achieved higher confidence in their design and the ability of their network to deliver competitive service levels.

Experiment with different approaches to traffic engineering and deployment scenarios.

OPNET Technologies, Inc.

OPN ET

Only ServiceProvider Guru

Only SP Guru has the intelligence to understand your entire network. SP Guru leverages the power of the Virtual Network Environment to troubleshoot problems, validate changes, plan for growth and network resiliency, and optimize network designs. Enabling technologies for SP Guru include:

Winner of NetworkWorlds

Note: SP Guru functionality described in this brochure can be achieved through a combination of the SP Guru base product, and optional modules. Contact OPNET for more information on the recommended product

Best of the Tests Award

Automated Import/Model Generation NetDoctor Configuration Validation Extensible Rule Library Flow Analysis Failure Analysis (includes nodes, links, and underlying facilities) SLA Compliance Analysis Discrete-event Simulation Hybrid Simulation QoS Simulation Open API XML Interfaces Extensive Library of Customizable Design Algorithms Automated Configuration Data Export Comprehensive Model Library (includes TCP/IP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP4, ATM, PNNI, MPLS, UMTS, Gigabit Ethernet, vendorspecific device models, and more) at SUPERCOMM
Winner of the Finalist at
configurations that suit your unique requirements.

Networld+Interop
Atlanta and Las Vegas

SUPERQuest Award

About OPNET
Founded in 1986, OPNET Technologies, Inc. is the leading provider of intelligent network management software. The OPNET product suite combines predictive modeling and a comprehensive understanding of networking technologies to enable its customers to more effectively design and deploy networks, provision services, diagnose problems, optimize traffic flows and resource utilization, and predict the impact of network changes. For more information about OPNET and its products, visit www.opnet.com.

OPNET Technologies, Inc.

7255 Woodmont Avenue Bethesda, Maryland 20814 phone: (240) 497-3000 fax: (240) 497-3001

www.opnet.com
2001 OPNET Technologies, Inc. OPNET is a registered trademark and ServiceProvider Guru is a trademark of OPNET Technologies, Inc.