THE CROSSING GUARDS HP probes step over edge to help carriers meet service-level goals >BY CHRIS BUCHOLTZ, Intelligence & Software Editor

A pair of new remote monitoring probes from Hewlett-Packard will improve carriers' ability to meet service-level agreements by enabling them to check for problems at the borders between their networks and their customers' private networks.

The products announced today-the 4986B Ethernet LanProbe and the J3458A Fast Ethernet LanProbe-are RMON2-compliant and can help carriers identify problems at the edges of their networks, where data crosses from public to private networks.

"What happens at the edge between customer and carrier is becoming more and more important as the distinctions between the two environments continue to blur," said Jeff Thiemann, general manager of the NetMetrix division at HP. "Whether the company is a traditional service provider, an [Internet service provider] or a private company reselling bandwidth, the issues are the same: You have a level of service to maintain, and you need to isolate and identify problems wherever they occur.

The probes let users access the underlying media type-IEEE 802.3 Ethernet segments for the LanProbe and 10BaseT and 100BaseT Ethernet for the Fast Ethernet LanProbe-and feed that information to mid-level management architecture, which consolidates the data for analysis by NetMetrix applications. To reduce network management overhead, consumption process-intensive tasks such as data management and analysis are moved from the probes to new RMON2-compliant mid-level management software so the probes can collect data at peak performance.

The probes also perform simultaneous data filtering. "If all you're doing is pulling data off the system, most products can keep up," Thiemann said. "But with most probe products, if you also want to do filtering, you're forced to make a choice. You can't do both. They don't have enough horsepower.

"Service providers are selling an increasing number of business-oriented products, and they're always trying to differentiate on quality," Thiemann said. "Because of that, we've designed this solution to scale to monitor hundreds of accounts.

One analyst said the probes are a first step toward adopting an "end-to-end" view of merged networks.

"There's a need to get an end-to-end look to understand how the applications are using and interacting with the network," said Kathrin Winkler, an analyst at the Registry, a Newton, Mass.-based consultancy.

HP may be in a better position to provide such solutions because it is "independent from the major network providers like Bay Networks or Cisco," said Winkler.