Vendors up WAN management ante

The pulse of the market for wide area network circuit management solutions is picking up rapidly, with two new product announcements planned this week.

ADC Kentrox, Portland, Ore., and Digital Link, Sunnyvale, Calif., will launch solutions aimed at answering a growing need for more exact circuit management and monitoring, driven largely by a frame relay boom that shows no signs of abating.

"The issue now is that users want quality service but don't know if they're really getting it, and carriers are aiming for quality service but don't know how to measure it," said Olaf Nielsen, senior product manager at ADC Kentrox.

ADC Kentrox's new FrameVision product line is based on its DataSMART T-1 CSU/DSU. It is designed especially for frame relay circuit management and is based on an open network architecture in which it is closely integrated with enterprise reporting tools. To that end, ADC Kentrox has established partnerships with Concord Communications, DeskTalk Systems and Kaspia, three leading reporting systems developers (see figure).

Digital Link's WANview Unix network management system represents the company's step away from proprietary strategies and into a standardized HP OpenView-based product. It manages and monitors access to Internet, frame relay, private line, switched multimegabit data service and asynchronous transfer mode at speeds up to T-3, said Jack Quinell, director of global product line management at Digital Link.

Because the solutions are centralized in DSUs, FrameVision and WANview can monitor both the user and the carrier end of the frame relay network, resulting in quick and more accurate troubleshooting. However, the solutions also have missions beyond just performance monitoring. Both products use in-band monitoring capabilities, which let management information be transmitted in frame relay packets, to help carriers and users more accurately gauge bandwidth usage.

This issue has proved elusive because most usage reports provide data only on usage volume. "If you look at a frame relay circuit at some point, you might only see 4% volume, but if you see a more detailed view, you can see how it's being used, where it's being used and who's using the most," said Quinell.

"You can bring usage on par with bandwidth availability so users that want a lot of bandwidth don't have to end up paying too much for it," added Nielsen.

FrameVision and WANview are indicative of the building trend in DSU-based end-to-end circuit management for broadband services. Visual Networks, Germantown, Md., also has made headlines with its Visual UpTime frame relay circuit management product (Telephony, Feb. 3, page 12). With a market consisting of nearly 30 DSU vendors, it probably will not be long before such management solutions become the norm, said Nielsen.