EMC has announced a new partnership with telecommunications giant
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) that will converge management of telephony
and mobility networks with data center and IP networking infrastructure.
As IP networks and telephony networks become more and more
intertwined, the need for a unified management solution becomes more
pressing for solution providers and their customers, says Kari Loukola,
the head of product and solution management for NSN’s operations
support systems business line.
“The challenge is to unify, gain better visibility into and ease
management of these newer, converged IP and telephony networks,”
Loukola says. A unified management solution like the one from EMC and
NSN not only addresses the complexity introduced by VoiP and Unified
Communications functions on the network, but also can enhance
visibility into mobile devices like smart phones and PDAs, says Tom
Griffin, business development manager for next-generation network
solutions at EMC.
“This will be very important to mobile customers, too, as they are
increasingly using smartphones and mobile devices to extend the data
center out to endpoint devices,” he says.
Leveraging the strength of EMC’s products and services in the data
center with NSN’s prominent market position in telecommunications will
make it simpler for solution providers to deliver converged network
management services to their customers, he says.
The co-developed solution will provide end-to-end visibility and
fault management for both MPLS VPN and IP routing protocol
configurations in heterogeneous and multi-vendor environments, says
Loukola. The solution is based on the mobile network management
capabilities of NSN’s NetAct, and is enhanced with IP domain visibility
provided by EMC’s Smarts automated IT management solution, which EMC
acquired in 2005, says Griffin.
While EMC has traditionally focused on managing data center
infrastructure like SANs, servers and virtualization deployments,
Griffin says the push to deliver IP network management services and the
increasing integration of telephony into those networks has made
managing telecom networks a new priority.
“Networks are highly instrumented, and management software provides
a lot of information generated by each component – hundreds of
thousands, even millions of alarms each day,” he says. Smarts network
management software not only monitors traffic and incidents, but
provides correlation and root cause identification tools, Griffin says.
“Using these tools, the Smarts software can tell solution providers
where any failures are occurring and how those impact the network,” he
says.
EMC’s IT management solutions, which include Smarts, conduct
comprehensive discovery, compliance, analysis, automation and allow
greater visibility into organizations’ IP and IT infrastructure,
Griffin says. Loukala adds that by leveraging these solutions in
conjunction with NSN’s existing NetAct solution, solution providers can
provide better reliability, make customers more efficient and ease
network management.
“Solution providers and network administrators can increase
efficiency and therefore lower capital and operating expenses,” says
Loukala. “We’re improving their ability to deliver higher-quality
services to market,” he says.