Ottawa, Ont.-based LINMOR Technologies Inc. recently announced the release of a reporting module for Lucent’s Stinger DSL access concentrator as part of its Nebula Performance Monitor (PM) system. According to LINMOR, Nebula PM offers network service providers proactive, predictive and preventive performance management for its Internet core and access networks.
One of the main benefits of the Nebula PM, according to Bogdan Materna, LINMOR’s chief technical officer, is it enables network administrators to see a problem before it happens.
“Our system is proactive in the sense that instead of waiting for a problem to happen, it will notify the network manager so they can deal with the situation before it (affects) the customer,” Materna explained. “Once you are proactive, you can be preventive in managing the network.”
The reporting module was designed specifically for Lucent’s Stinger, Materna said, because Lucent is considered one of the leading vendors in the area.
Nebula PM offers existing vendor-specific reporting modules for leading manufacturers such as Cisco, Nortel, Alcatel/Newbridge, 3Com, General DataComm and PairGain.
“This is part of our plan to address all those vendors,” Materna said. “What we are trying to achieve is at least 80 per cent coverage in the different markets.”
Materna also noted there is a great demand for this type of system. “They are talking about deploying millions of lines of DSL next year so this is a very big market,” he said.
Reston, Va.-based XO Communications, formerly NEXTLINK Communications, has already ordered and is completing testing of LINMOR’s reporting module for Stinger.
According to Brad Glidewell, XO’s senior manager in the broadband data operations and engineering group, the reporting module meets XO’s requirements.
“From a performance management perspective, it is important that you have a tool like this to do both capacity planning and research when you’re running into problems in the network,” Glidewell said. “We are able to respond to problems before they happen.”
Glidewell explained that the LINMOR products were chosen because they are not designed for a specific platform. Using the ATM platform as an example, Glidewell said XO can use the data collection application in the Nebula to gather statistics from anything that is SNMP derivable.
Though Glidewell said the Nebula PM enhances the ability to provide effective, reliable network solutions, he added one improvement needed is for XO to be able to do its own vendor module development.
“In order for us to respond quickly, we’ve asked LINMOR to provide us with a tool kit that helps generate our own set of vendor modules without having LINMOR generate the vendor modules themselves,” Glidewell said. “There is not a tool (to do this). It’s very easy to do, but it could be done in a way that makes it a little more productive.”
A key feature of the Nebula PM, according to Glidewell, is the support of distributed collection and distributed discovery. “Everything is done at the distributed level and that reduces the amount of data you have to send across the network for reporting purposes and data collecting purposes,” he said.
LINMOR’s Materna said the Nebula has the ability to report on over one million network objects.
Pricing for the Nebula is module-based and cost depends on customer needs, including the size of the network, the number of network objects and the number of Nebula PM servers needed. For more information, visit www.linmor.com.