The Performance Zone

Service Assurance, IMS, and Network Performance

It used to be that DSL was the most popular three-letter acronym in the telecom universe. No more... that title now belongs to IMS, or IP Multimedia Subsystem.

IMS is a global, access-independent and standard-based IP connectivity and service control architecture that enables various types of multimedia services to end users using common Internet- based protocols.

This definition comes from a book I highly recommend for those wanting to techniclly dive deeper into IMS.  "The IMS IP Multimedia Concepts and Services (Second Edition) by Mikka Poikselka, Georg Mayer, Hisham Khartabil and Aki Niemi (Wiley Publishing).

The goal of IMS is to drive revenue by delivering converged, multimedia services and reducing costs through a converged, IP based network architecture. 

Big service providers such as Cingular, BellSouth and AT&T are all rolling out IMS-based networks and ABI Research expects service providers to invest $10.1 billion in IMS during the next five years, which will drive $49.6 billion in service revenue from IMS-enabled applications in 2011. I listened to Cingular's 'director of network transformation' deliver a great presentation at the last IMS Summit in February that drove home how much of a reality IMS is becoming. These types of investments in IMS are in fact happening globally around the world.

The IMS standards continue to evolve and it is undeniable that carriers are moving rapidly from a circuit world to a packet world using IP in their core. Broadband speed is now extended to the edge. Using wireless broadband services, customers can use their handset devices to play interactive games and access streaming content and do instant multimedia messaging among other services.

All these services have added more complexity to the network and more stress on the core and access layers. In order to attract and retain customers, carriers need a comprehensive network performance management solution to gain visibility into the entire network, particularly the core and links at regional and national data centers to have network and in turn service assurance. Such assurance is essential to their bottom-line—customer satisfaction and incremental revenue.

Taming the Wild Corporate Video

Of course, we don't really need industry experts to remind us that video on the corporate web is red-hot, pervasive, and dangerous.  You can't review the news these days without seeing filler stories on YouTube and Google video alongside the critical news on wars and terrorism. Video sites are all the rage for creating user-created content on an unprecedented scale, which means millions of users are viewing it, too.  If your company has yet to come to grips with a personal viewing and download policy, it might be time to do so. Before, we were focused on whether it was appropriate, legal, and how much impact it had on network bandwidth. Hopefully, these inappropriate, unwelcome downloads were the exception rather than the rule.

But how much time can you really devote to this type of monitoring without bringing your entire operation to its knees? You now need to regularly monitor for exceptions, rather than waiting for a crisis to erupt. NetScout provides visibility into how much this is occuring, when it is ocurring, and with whom.

I say, be informed to be forwarned.  Network Computing takes a look at the five most popular video sites: AOL, Blip.tv, Google Video, Yahoo Video and YouTube.

AFPM Explained (Video)

NetScout has recently announced it's Application Fabric Performance Management (AFPM) strategy.

Here is a pointer to a short AFPM Explained video clip that you may find helpful.