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agility made possible™

Dean BrewsterSr. Advisor, Service Assurance

Steven GuthrieAdvisor, Service Assurance

Service Assurance for mobile, optical transport, packet core and radio access domains

TECHNOLOGY BRIEFCA Mediation Manager—Extending the Reach to Non-IP and Non-SNMP Infrastructure | June 2011

CA Mediation Manager

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3

SECTION 1: Challenge 4Unified solution for network availability and performance management

Questions to better understand your networks

Understand the challenges you face when expanding service offerings

SECTION 2: Opportunity 5Leverage CA Technologies to help address these needs

New solution designed to fill a critical gap within your networks

Proactive performance management to avoid issues before users are impacted

Model-based topology mapping and root cause analysis

Integration and operational management

SECTION 3: Benefits 9Integrated solution for availability and performance management

Partnering with CA Technologies for service operations management

SECTION 4: Conclusions 11

SECTION 5: About the authors 11

table of contents


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ChallengeTraditionally, network availability and performance management vendors have focused their solutions on the core IP network for major enterprises, government agencies and service providers. While these offerings have been very popular, the lack of ability to extend visibility into non-IP, non-SNMP environments has prohibited most organizations from creating a holistic solution for assuring end-to-end service delivery.

For Communications Service Providers (CSPs), many of which are attempting to converge management of their IP/MPLS network with the optical transmission, Metro Ethernet, packet core and radio access domains while adding backhaul, 3G/4G/LTE and transmission network extensions, achieving a unified solution poses a particular challenge in a time of increasing competition and financial pressures.

OpportunityCustomer satisfaction and loyalty is a simple matter of each customer’s quality of experience with the mobile voice and data services that are central to nearly every CSP’s success. To retain customers, CSPs need a solution for proactive availability and performance management across their entire service infrastructure, including the non-IP and non-SNMP devices and their respective element management system (EMS) tools.

CA Technologies is a provider in this solution space. The CA Mediation Manager software, based on the field-proven Torokina Integration Module solution acquired in early 2011, in combination with the popular CA Infrastructure Management solution—which leverages the CA eHealth® and CA Spectrum® technologies—provides a scalable and flexible solution to monitor and manage these environments.

BenefitsThe ability to implement an integrated availability and performance solution that spans the traditional IP/MPLS core network and the packet core, mobile transport, backhaul and radio access domains provides new insight into the services that drive revenue, improve the efficiency of their network and service management operations, and help maximize their capital and operating investments.

Based on a flexible and scalable architecture, and acting as a single integration layer, CA Mediation Manager is easily extended to support newly introduced devices and subtending EMS tools at the speed that CSPs need for Day 1 support.

By forwarding this information to the CA Infrastructure Management solution, the provider now has access to data and metrics previously not available within a single pane of glass.

executive summary

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Section 1: Challenge

Unified solution for network availability and performance managementAll availability and performance management vendors have traditionally focused on a particular segment of their enterprise, government agency and service provider customer networks. Typically, first and best management was focused on the core IP devices and those that could be managed via the industry’s SNMP standard. Today’s availability and performance tools vary greatly in capabilities.

For availability, the choices range from toolsets that provide vast flexibility through manually-scripted event recognition and rule application to out-of-the-box solutions with packaged knowledge of events, pre-defined rules, and automated root cause analysis. The market for event correlation and analysis tools is well established and features many vendors across the scope of capabilities described above.

Performance management tools have a similar range in scope. From performance reporting based on passive metric collection to solutions with pre-defined thresholds, dynamic thresholds based on historical data analysis, anomaly detection, performance-based alarming, and pre-defined reports with the ability to customize based on individual needs, organizations have a wide selection to choose from for performance management.

Further compounding the challenge, most organizations have multiple solutions to manage their availability and performance requirements. To make matters even more complex, most organizations have devices that are either non-IP or non-SNMP capable or element management systems (EMSs) that are proprietary to a particular vendor or device.

This is particularly true for Communication Service Providers, many of who are looking to achieve cost and efficiency gains by streamlining their management tools and vendors while also responding more quickly to new management requirements.

Most CSPs are making significant investments in technologies that support their 3G/4G network and require Day 1 and ‘future-proofing’ support for new equipment roll-outs. These organizations, which include network providers, cable and mobile operators and traditional telcos, have similar requirements in this new era of communications:

• Centralized performance and capacity management of the components that they use to provide their customer services

• Visualization of transport and optical networks in the service delivery path

• Understanding the health and performance of critical transport and edge delivery components

• Capability to bring non-IP and non-SNMP devices into the traditional availability and performance solution

• Effective way to integrate multiple subtending EMS systems

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The ideal solution would be a single integration layer for devices and subtending EMS systems that enables the service provider to implement new devices and technologies more quickly via a single integration point instead of connectivity to each device or EMS individually. Further, presenting the data and metrics within a single pane of glass would create a true, end-to-end view of the service delivery chain.

Questions to better understand your networksWith build-outs and competitive pressures facing every service provider, now is a good time to ask yourself some key questions about the management tools you use, the infrastructure you manage, and the data that’s important in helping you discern the impacts to production service, and how you deliver new customer services.

How are you managing your infrastructure today?

• How many infrastructure and operations management tools do you have?

• How many subtending element management systems do you have today?

• How many varying device types do you have that are not reachable today?

• What are the critical device metrics you are not reporting on?

• What type of integration is done, if any, to higher level Service Assurance tools?

• How much time is spent gathering and correlating data from your subtending EMS systems?

• How much time do you typically spend trying to integrate these systems?

Understand the challenges you face when expanding service offerings• What is the impact of new service implementations on each of the transmission methods—cellular

backhaul, DWDM optical distribution, packet core, Metro Ethernet, etc.?

• How do you operationalize the data from the devices that are not inherently SNMP capable?

• How do you measure and report on the performance of new architectures and the impacts to/on the current architectures?

• How do you translate impact to customer experience?

• What are the target audiences that would receive this data?

Section 2: Opportunity

Leverage CA Technologies to help address these needsNew solution designed to fill a critical gap within your networksCA Technologies has a significant footprint in the service provider market in their “enterprise IT” organizations for network availability and performance management and a smaller presence in the “service delivery” component of the CSP market, serving a select group of customers for their Metro/Carrier Ethernet and mobile wireless services.

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With its recent acquisition of Torokina Networks, CA Technologies now has software and professional services to rapidly integrate the CA Technologies availability and performance management solution with the Metro Ethernet, packet core, optical transport and radio access environments that CSPs are expanding to meet the demand for mobile voice and data services.

The new software, CA Mediation Manager, is the integration framework that enables the Service Assurance solution from CA Technologies to quickly support the specialized network devices for rapidly-growing 3G, 4G and LTE mobile voice and data environments from a single integration point.

Out-of-the-box vendor support includes the key network equipment vendors—Alcatel Lucent, Cisco Starent, Ericsson and Huawei—as well as many other vendors supplying media gateways, GGSNs, SGSN, radio access backhaul links, etc. Other network equipment providers that are supported include Adtran, ADVA, Anda, Ciena, SIAE Microwave and Tellabs.

At the core of the solution is CA Infrastructure Management, which incorporates the CA Spectrum and CA eHealth technologies for availability and performance management respectively. As a data source for CA Infrastructure Management or for legacy CA Spectrum or CA eHealth environments, CA Mediation Manager, is a single integration layer for the critical non-IP and non-SNMP devices and EMSs and introduces these environments to the extensive management capabilities of the Service Assurance portfolio from CA Technologies.

Figure 1CA Mediation Manager expands the coverage of Service Assurance from CA Technologies, and serves a critical role of providing access to a wider range of data sources into CA Infrastructure Management, CA Performance Center, CA eHealth and CA Spectrum, as well as other components in the Service Assurance portfolio.

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Proactive performance management to avoid issues before users are impactedThe CA eHealth technology, as incorporated in the CA Infrastructure Management solution or from a legacy CA eHealth implementation, identifies and alerts you about performance issues as they are developing, enabling you to become proactive in your repair, reconfiguration or capacity upgrades. The system collects performance data via SNMP from a wide variety of network, system (physical and virtual) and database infrastructure.

With predefined thresholds for each key performance indicator (KPI) based on best practices, the system’s Time over Threshold technology lets you know when an IT resource has persistent performance problems while also allowing you to avoid the transient spikes that don’t need your attention. Deviation from Normal technology uses historical data to establish a baseline for what is normal behavior for your infrastructure within each monitoring window (every hour of each day and every day of the week) and then assesses whether the current behavior deviates from that norm.

Reporting is at the heart of the solution. Combining historical and real-time metrics with intelligent analytics, the system produces out-of-the-box, role-based views and reports that can be used to investigate a particular IT resource, a group of IT components, the value of one or more performance variables, or resources and metrics that meet your defined criteria. In addition to these out-of-the-box, role-based reports, you can customize your reports using templates or you can create new report types completely from scratch.

Figure 2Many mobile operators have never had insight into the real-time performance of their transmission network, such as packet loss against overall bandwidth utilization The CA Infrastructure Management performance management reporting capability includes At-A-Glance reports, in this example a report on a pseudo- wire service.

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Model-based topology mapping and root cause analysisAt the core of the incorporated CA Spectrum technology, as provided with CA Infrastructure Management or CA Spectrum itself, is functionality to discover, model and monitor relationships between and availability of the infrastructure components. The ability to automatically and regularly discover the infrastructure—network devices as well as physical and virtual systems—and model the topology for fault isolation as well as provide an intuitive interface for the operator is the basis for our patented root cause analysis technology.

The model that is built and maintained, in combination with the recognition of pre-packaged events (more than 27,000) and pre-defined rules (more than 20,000), helps eliminate the manual rules-file creation that is common procedure to most other tools in this space.

Regular polling detects availability issues and the topology model allows the system to automatically correlate seemingly unrelated events, suppress symptomatic alarms, and automate root cause and impact analysis.

The solution also discovers and monitors a wide range of IP service technologies, such as MPLS traffic-engineered infrastructures, MPLS Layer 2 and 3 VPNs, Metro Ethernet, cable, QoS and IP multicast, to help ensure service delivery across multiple technologies in use by most CSPs.

Integration and operational managementCA Infrastructure Management is natively designed to support communications with the infrastructure components it monitors and manages using the SNMP management standard.

With CA Mediation Manager, you are equipped to address devices from the core transmission networks to the edge device delivery that are inherently not addressable via IP or SNMP. The solution has the capability to establish communication with the infrastructure through many different methods, including:

• SOAP, Telnet, SSH, Corba, command line (CLI), JDBC, TL1, HTTP/HTTPs, SFTP, etc.

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With the data imported into CA Mediation Manager, the solution’s processing engine converts the data to XML standard formatting, performs any calculation/filtering required, and then delivers data to a queue directory. On a regular basis, the solution’s Delivery Service reads the queue and transfers the XML file to the Presenter (Local or Remote) using the name service. At this point, the Presenter reads the XML file and outputs the data in the required format to CA Infrastructure Management.

The architecture further provides the ability to quickly develop any required vendor-specific API plug-ins to collect the data directly from the device or from a subtending EMS.

As service provider infrastructures expand and become more complex, their focus shifts to time-to-production. They often need to keep pace with the engineering and customers teams that are driving the necessity of leading edge technology. The opportunity is to leverage CA Mediation Manager within a new or existing CA Infrastructure Management implementation to assist with those goals.

Section 3: Benefits

Integrated solution for availability and performance managementThe combination of CA Infrastructure Management and CA Mediation Manager provides a true end-to-end view of the CSP’s service operations network and its wide range of devices, technologies and environments, including:

• Node B towers, base stations, radio network controllers

• Microwave links

• Optical transmission

Figure 3The CA Mediation Manager architecture collects data from a variety of devices and Element Management Systems via a wide range of communications methods and standards, processes the data to transform it into a standard format for presentation to the CA Infrastructure Management solution.

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• Transmission centers

• SGSN, GGSN and MCS packet core

• GSM/LTE/3G cellular networks

• WiMAX

• Metro Ethernet

• IP multimedia systems

• Storage area networks

• Smart metering technology

• Carrier-grade telephony switching equipment

By extending the reach of its Service Assurance solution for infrastructure, application performance and service operations management across both internal IT and service operations environments, CA Technologies enables CSPs to move from simple event management and reporting to proactively assuring their end-user experiences and controlling service delivery.

Partnering with CA Technologies for service operations managementOne large global service provider had recently outsourced management and operation of its multi-vendor network infrastructure and application management to a similarly large, global enabler of telecommunications services. The scope of the engagement included end-to-end monitoring of the provider’s radio access, transmission, microwave, and packet core networks.

After spending more than nine months attempting to build integrations to various disparate network devices and management tools, the provider selected the Service Assurance solution from CA Technologies, including CA eHealth, and what is now known as CA Mediation Manager (prior to the acquisition by CA Technologies, the integration product was known as Torokina Integration Module).

According to the service provider, the results of implementing this solution included:

• Established all-in-one performance monitoring platform across multiple domains

• Leveraged automatic baselines and alarms for degraded performance and proactive end-to-end management deployed across the infrastructure

• Gained new ability to alert on abnormal behavior across the entire monitored environment

• Integrated new equipment rapidly into monitoring and reporting environment

• Realigned staff as fewer resources were required based on new visibility and efficiencies

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Section 4:

ConclusionsCA Infrastructure Management and CA Mediation Manager are break-through management technologies for today’s fast-moving CSP. With its new, broad reach across both internal IT and service operations infrastructures, CA Technologies provides a management solution that is designed to allow CSPs to confidently expand into next-generation business models—often referred to as Telco 2.0, Quadruple Play or Cloud Services—where predictable and reliable self-service application and content delivery is a critical success factor.

The ability to implement an integrated availability and performance solution that spans both the traditional IP/MPLS core network and the mobile transport, packet core, backhaul, and radio access domains helps CSPs to gain new insight into the services that drive their revenue needs, improve the efficiency of their network and service management operations, and maximize their capital and operating investments.

Section 5:

About the authorsDean Brewster is a Senior Advisor, Solution Strategy, for the Service Assurance solution at CA Technologies. Dean works with product management, product marketing, development and sales to ensure CA Technologies solutions are strategically aligned to our customer’s current and future Service Assurance management requirements. His background gives him intimate knowledge of global LAN/WAN infrastructure design and implementations, telecommunications systems, OSS/BSS design and implementations, and performance metrics focused on continual business process improvement.

Dean joined CA Technologies in 2011 from Bright House Networks where he was responsible for Corporate OSS Strategy and Development. Dean has more than 15 years of demonstrated experience with implementing and developing assurance solutions in the service provider and healthcare markets. Prior to Bright House, he held similar roles at Stryker, Comcast and Motorola.

Steven Guthrie has spent the past dozen years in the IP network and unified communications management market as an active participant in the emergence of IP-based business services and IP service technologies as well as real-time IP communications such as voice and video over IP. More recently, he has been tracking the fast-moving developments in virtualization and cloud computing management, and the impact of new business and technology models these advancements bring to the market.

As an Advisor for the Service Assurance solution at CA Technologies, he is responsible for understanding how enterprises, government agencies and service providers use application performance, infrastructure and service operations management solutions to improve the efficiency and cost of managing their networks, systems, databases and applications as well as business services and transactions that IT supports.


Copyright © 2011 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document “as is” without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill, or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages.. CS1371_0611

CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments—from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 rely on CA Technologies to manage their evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at ca.com.

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