Alcatel Internal Management Change Training

Life Cycle of a Converged Network: Ongoing Operations and Network ...

Whether you plan to use an MSP for ongoing operations, or you feel the IT staff is sufficiently trained to handle it in house, failure to have the proper management tools can evaporate your ROI through network outages and costly troubleshooting practices. Software patches and vendor upgrades can wreak havoc in a production environment, and should always be tested first on an isolated segment using all inclusive analysis software to assess their impact on the network.

Most companies have come to rely on their IP PBX vendors management software, and after a year or two into the deployment have found them sorely lacking. Today, IPT vendors and developers are seeing the need for a management application that takes a look at the whole network, including the traffic patterns of data and real time applications.

Analysis software packages are rapidly entering the market from such well known industry leaders as Alcatel-Lucent, as well as vendor independent software developers.

The converged network analysis solutions available to you should be assessed in the planning stage, and once decided upon, used extensively in the testing, implementation, and ongoing operations and optimization stages. Such features as capacity planning, network assessment and simulations, design and configuration are all crucial in the pre deployment stages Your analysis software should be hardware agnostic and compatible with a wide variety of PBXs to accurately measure voice use patterns both pre and post deployment.

Monitoring of ongoing operations such as real time QOS data, dropped calls and packet loss, policy based management features, and troubleshooting alerts with root cause analysis should all be included in the application, as well as the ability to interpret the data in a variety of reports.

IP address management should also be a consideration, as now that you have converged, every device – a laptop, an IP phone, even hand held mobile devices that connect to your network will be competing within your address space. IPAM tools are also becoming available from many vendors to help streamline and simplify administration.

It is the ongoing operations responsibility to assure that the benchmarks that were set in the planning phase are being met, and that the SLAs agreed upon, either in house or with a carrier, are being adhered to. With the help of the right analysis solution IT can quickly determine both, and in the case of an SLA not being met, can help find where the responsibility lies.

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