Network Analysis Module

Our industry leading Flexible NetFlow support includes Medianet and NAM (Network Analysis Module) support for voice and video latency, Jitter, ToS and DSCP, advanced application recognition via NBAR integration, and what we call Deep Flow Inspection capabilities for MPLS, QoS, ToS, and DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) fields. Vess staked the claim that the SevOne NetFlow solution is not just the fastest in the industry providing support for 250,000 flows per second (and going to 1M) in a single 2U appliance, but it is the only NetFlow solution today that provides both IPv4 and IPv6 flows in the same report.



The point of the customer panel was not to toot our horn, but rather to have a couple of our leading customers talk about their real-world use of NetFlow. Blair Sanders of ACS, a Xerox Company, led off the next segment of the panel by reviewing their key NetFlow use cases:

• Enhanced Troubleshooting
• Investigation of spikes in bandwidth on client networks
• Traffic Management
• Understand and optimize network usage for clients’ key applications
• Usage Based Accounting
• Cost allocation/accounting for client networks and ACS remote site locations
• Collection from key border and tunnel access points, not internal to site or client

The benefits that ACS receives from the SevOne NetFlow solution include:

• Identification of rogue traffic which leads to faster resolutions times
• Improved performance of customers’ key business applications
• Identifying remote site and client bandwidth consumption which drives better capacity planning and cost projections
• Highlighting routing anomalies (transit traffic from unintended sources) to enable faster remediation and lowers bandwidth requirements
• Understand and control costs of Internet connectivity

Blair’s presentation was well received since his use cases are for both their own company network and for their cloud and managed services provider business that has over 200 clients, so this includes collection points within their MPLS network and between the ACS and client networks.
Dave Gougen of Hawaiian Telcom (HT) then reviewed his key use cases. Here are some examples:

• Monitoring - HT network source, destination, and rates of traffic flow from the Internet to HT customers
• Planning - when and where to provide growth to HSI service (border routers and edge/access shelves)
• Customer reporting - provide border router to customer line market reporting data, regarding traffic usage trends, source of content, types of content, and
• Troubleshooting - use flow data to correlate load and flow data usage, and reduce time to isolate indicants

The key benefits Hawaiian Telcom gets from their SevOne NetFlow implementation include:

• Increased revenue by customer usage tracking allowing sales to up sell or prioritize customer migrations;
• Reduced troubleshooting time by presenting relevant end customer traffic and DSLAM data on an integrated network performance management system; and
• Better cost control by understanding where and how much traffic sources from top ASNs/CDNs traverses to HT customers.

Dave’s uses cases were especially interesting since they involved new revenue opportunities from tracking and understanding their client traffic.
We’d like to thanks Blair and Dave for their presentations and insight. Their presence made for a very informative and interactive panel that left the audience very engaged.
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