A Guide to Decision Making in Challenging Economic Times

Virtualization is currently one of the hottest topics in the information technology (IT) feld and it is likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. While virtualization is important to virtually all IT organizations, it certainly isn’t new.

This paper discusses the concept of a Performance Assurance Layer (PAL), built in an ITIL best practice framework, which can meet the demands of managing a modern IP network while allowing IT organizations to meet their business goals. The NetScout nGenius platform utilizes a PAL approach to provide an integrated operations team with necessary real- time granular visibility, high-productivity/function- specifc workfow processes, and services-oriented performance management. These integrated capabilities minimize Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and enable high quality of service (QoS) for the most complex IP network-based services.

Today’s modern IP network is fraught with increasing complexities. In some ways, virtualization in the data world is creating a new and special set of network challenges, and yet, on a basic business level the challenges remain essentially the same: organizations rely on today’s modern IP network to not only support, but drive the business to meet its goals. Unfortunately, service-delivery slowdowns and outages are still all too common and frequently have a monumental impact on the ability of an organization to meet its goals.
In order to ensure that the business is operating at peak effciency, IT professionals have turned to high-level service dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs) and advanced analytical capabilities to preemptively recognize changes in service-delivery behavior. By recognizing these changes early, IT professionals are frequently able to prevent business-impacting problems before end users are affected and maximize service delivery performance and availability.

As a result of both the operations and competitive changes that are occurring, application management products, regardless of whether they are hardware- or software-based, will increasingly be evaluated based upon their ability to make IT more project-focused and support-automated. However , achieving these two objectives must be in addition to, versus instead of, maintaining day-to-day service level quality. Given the rapidly increasing complexity of today's IT infrastructure, address- ing this latter requirement is a formidable undertaking. This is especially true given the increasing number and complexity of infrastructure components required to support end-to-end service delivery. The result has been an increasingly strong need for management systems that can synergistically coordinate and orchestrate component management in order to facilitate a more efficient and effective support organization.

Service providers today are facing signifcant challenges compelling them to take a fresh look at their traditional business model as consumers’ demand and expectation for personalized, innovative and differentiated services increases. These new business models are also having a direct effect on how operators architect, implement, manage and monetize their networks and deliver services to the consumer. Explosive growth in demand for bandwidth and services on both mobile and wireline networks is accelerating the business case for operators to migrate from their traditional legacy infrastructure to modern, next generation all IP networks. This transition to all-IP networks will eventually help them realize ongoing opex and capex reductions, and will also enable more rapid service creation and delivery for their customers. At the same time these modern IP networks will require new operational methods and tools to ensure that the services offered to customers are delivered in a manner that maximizes user experience, helps reduce churn and optimizes operational costs.