As the world has become a global village, everyone and everything is interdependent! Hesitation to break geographical boundaries will give any business undesirable consequences. Fast, secure and reliable techniques to share information across the networks are vital for people across the globe to work together, share information and even learn.
In this use case, the schools in the City of Lodz, Poland, had a problem. The schools realized that a collaborative effort in sharing resources was needed to enhance the standard of education. That is the reason they wanted to establish a MPLS network and a management system to help monitor, provision and control the quality of service (QoS).
The main challenges faced were time and expertise. They needed a complete solution, yet flexible enough to match their specific networking needs. Comp, a leading system integrator, was assigned the task of establishing and rolling out the network within a short period of time, just 8 weeks.
Provisioning was a very critical feature needed by Comp. They provision features like creating new LSPs, provision services, modifying and decommissioning them in a point-and-click manner. Automated rollbacks in case of errors is essential.
Besides the expected automatic device detection, they render a graphical visualization of the topology for a quick analysis. Fault monitoring with instant notification and diagnostic capabilities allow users to view the alarms and outage/degradation root causes. Security is key and they would not compromise it. User security is enforced by a local authentication, authorization and auditing (AAA) database.
Implementing the MPLS management solution has resulted in benefits with a remarkable increase in the ability to control traffic and prevent congestion and has offered sophisticated traffic-engineering options. They are able to see bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-specific level. Keeping network downtime to a minimum, they increased the productivity considerably and reduced personnel and equipment costs.
