Integrated management for ISPs: Livingston boosts remote access security server management

A new family of remote access management servers offers competitive carriers and Internet service providers a solution that tackles operational and business issues simultaneously.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Livingston Enterprises this week will unveil the Radius Authentication Billing Manager (ABM), which includes components that cope with security and session accounting, traditional operations tasks, and business-oriented processes such as billing and trend analysis.

"A lot of our customers in the service provider industry are still struggling to get those business processes working well," said Alex Henthorn, security product manager for Livingston. "The goal is to provide them with better visibility and control of their management data."

To do this, Livingston merged its standard Radius authentication, authorization and administration server, a standard security product in the remote access space that generates data in much the same way as a switch.

"Each time a session is started or ended, a record is generated," he said. "In the case of past products, those records, along with data on everything that took place between that starting and ending point, were dumped into a database."

That data structure made analyzing data from the servers cumbersome, and it slowed service providers' attempts to use the data properly. "That has a lot of repercussions, especially in the ISP market," said Henthorn. "Without visibility into the data, it's impossible to bill correctly. We've found that as much as 15% of all ISP billing is inaccurate, and for many ISPs that can amount to the entire profit margin."

Even for ISPs that have solved the billing issue, poor visibility can affect the bottom line through poor network planning. "Service providers can easily overbuild or underspend on their networks," he said.

The ABM system uses an improved database architecture to index records generated by the Radius server, making it easier to export data into analysis and management applications. An important aspect to making this approach work on a large scale is Java, which enables the system to process multiple requests for data simultaneously.

"One of the keys to Java is its ability to perform asynchronous multi-threading processing," Henthorn said. "Through Java's ability to create copies of the same applet, we can create multiple threads into the database with a very low impact on system resources."

The use of Java also enables software to be updated and deployed throughout the network, cutting development and deployment costs.

While the carrier environment has been well-served by integrated management approaches, the ISP world has been slower to realize the benefits of such systems, said Stephen Pearson, an analyst at Mountain View, Calif.-based market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

"There's been a lot of confusion about network management in this space," said Pearson. "For functions like accounting and cost allocation, the ISPs have a long way to go compared with the traditional telecom providers."

Livingston has an edge over others because of its recent acquisition by Lucent, "which gives them instant access to a broad base of customers," said Pearson. "Livingston [products are already used by] around 2000 ISPs, but the connection to Lucent provides them with a view of a more mature environment, and this product indicates they're learning from that base of knowledge."

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