NXTcomm08: Accedian offers real-time SLAs

LAS VEGAS -- Accedian Networks on Tuesday announced the availability of an element management system (EMS) promising to enable what the company calls “real-time service level agreements (SLAs)” for Ethernet and IP services.

The Echovault EMS, generally available now after having been in beta trials since last year, ties together the network interface devices (NIDs) that Accedian has been selling for four years. Echovault not only measures and reports service performance end-to-end as well as customer usage but also creates and maps the services themselves, Accedian said. It sends data to local NIDs throughout the network, collecting the information in an Oracle database on Solaris servers, feeding it through XML to the carrier’s operations support system (OSS) in the field. The system’s automation is meant to save carriers from having to manually configure large numbers of NIDs in the field.

“[Echovault] automatically looks for all the sites [receiving a given service], defines all the policies and automates the configuration of all the units that would establish services, whether point-to-point or point-to-multipoint,” said Scott Sumner, Accedian’s vice president of marketing. “It’s basically a full automation from creation to assurance, monitoring, maintenance and even billing.”

In addition to reporting service performance to carrier OSS, the Echovault has a “West-side” interface that can collect network performance statistics and push them onto a customer Web portal every second as opposed to the 15-minute intervals in some of today’s SNMP systems.

“Say you’re a large service provider and you wanted your customer to know what kind of SLA performance they were getting,” Sumner said. “This tells them on a per-second basis exactly what’s happening in their SLA and all their links.”

The system also consumes low levels of bandwidth to do its reporting, Accedian said -- about 4,000 packets per minute for all the data uploading. As a result, the system can measure things like available capacity without diminishing available capacity in the process, the company said.

“We can measure the actual throughput of the pipe without bothering the customer’s traffic, so we can see if their 10-Mb/s link is actually available,” Sumner said. “We do that by adding traffic on top of their traffic and watching to see if the link can handle that capacity.”