Service Provider Saves $200K and Delivers Regulatory Compliance

Service Provider Improves Lawful Intercept and QoS Solution While Lowering Monitoring Tool Costs

This company is a European service provider for mobile telecommunications. It was looking for a visibility solution to help make its applications stronger, improve customer quality of service (QoS), and enable it to deliver lawful intercept information, as required, for regulatory compliance. A successful implementation of the latter operation would help prevent heavy fines and possible suspension of its telecommunications license.

For the solution to work, it needed to capture and manipulate data at rates of up to 100GE. In addition, the high speed data needed to be segmented and delivered to existing lower rate 10GE tools. This included lawful intercept tools, as well as NetScout™ and other tools used for network and application performance monitoring. Since the company had just upgraded the core network to 100GE, the capital expenditure (CAPEX) budget was limited. 

First, the Keysight Flex Tap solution was inserted into the network to provide access points to capture data. This included remote and core data links that ran at speeds of 10GE, 40GE, and 100GE. The Flex Tap supported all of the required data rates.

Next, the company inserted the Vision 7300 network packet broker (NPB) into the network to filter out-of band monitoring data. The relevant data was then parsed and sent to specific tools. The NPB also provided data aggregation and load balancing functions to make the company’s monitoring tools much more efficient. 

For the lawful intercept use case, network taps fed the core data from the Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch to the Vision 7300. Once the target traffic was identified by IP address, the Vision removed the appropriate data from the rest of the data and sent the required information out a secure VPN tunnel to the law enforcement agency. This saved the company potential fines of up to $10,000 per day for non-compliance.

Organization

• Mobile telecommunications service provider 

• Industry: Telecommunications 

Challenges

• Needed to provide lawful intercept information for regulatory compliance 

• Needed QoS monitoring capabilities for network performance analysis 

• Needed to control capital expenditure 

Solutions

• Vision 7300 NPB with 10, 40, and 100GE interfaces 

• Over 100 Flex Tap ports 

Results

• Implemented load balancing to extend monitoring tool lifespans 

• Saved $200K on tool costs

• Implemented filtering to easily deliver lawful intercept information

• Used NPB manipulate to capture relevant data for QoS and NPM tools

Load Balancing Saves $200k

A secondary requirement that the IT Director had been given was to control costs. He had no immediate budget for 100GE tools and only a small budget for 40GE tools. This meant that he needed to reuse as many 10GE tools as possible, even though the average speed in the core network was over 40GE with bursts commonly up to 60GE. The company ended up buying a single 40GE network monitoring tool. Overflow traffic was then pushed to the two existing 10GE network performance tools. With new 40GE tools costing $100,000 or more, the company immediately saved $100,000 by purchasing only one new npm tool. Proper tapping, data manipulation, and load balancing allowed the company to save another $100,000 for its QoS and APM solution, as well, by reusing these existing tools. 

According to the Director of Operations, “The Keysight visibility solution satisfied our regulatory compliance needs in a quick and simple way. I was also able to extend the life of my current tools for at least another year. Buying Keysight was an easy purchase decision.”