Packet Design's 'TE Explorer' Offers Industry's First Real-Time Visibility Into MPLS Traffic

"Existing traffic engineering management products have offered some insight into how traffic engineering works in normal circumstances," said Jeff Raice, Packet Design's executive vice president of marketing and business development, "but dynamic changes to tunnel paths, utilization, available bandwidth and fault tolerance go completely unseen. Without this essential management visibility, when problems occur, service providers have no way to find the root cause of issues that are impacting the health of their most sensitive traffic.

TE Explorer provides integrated IP routing and traffic engineering visibility across the service provider's entire network. All primary, secondary and FRR tunnels can be visualized and analyzed in the context of underlying OSPF and IS-IS routing. Service providers can view lists of all tunnels, assess their available bandwidth and traffic utilization, examine their protection, and investigate anomalous conditions. Operators can monitor real-time changes to tunnels due to link failures, shifts in link bandwidth availability, and periodic tunnel re-optimizations. Network engineers can view the tunnels on particular links, see how their traffic utilization contributes to overall link utilization, and drill-down into traffic on individual links or tunnels by CoS or other attributes. Service engineers can examine traffic engineering from a top-down perspective by viewing tunnels that carry specific MPLS VPN or Internet customer traffic. And troubleshooters can rewind the network's routing and TE tunnel state to a previous point in time when an intermittent problem may have been occurring, easily view all tunnel changes during a specific period of time and trace the historical path of a specific tunnel that was experiencing instabilities.

"TE Explorer is the missing link in traffic engineering management that service providers have been looking for," said George Carey, Managing Director of ISP Operations atBroadview Networks, a national integrated communications service provider based in New York. Broadview Networks was recently named to the InformationWeek 500 list of top technology companies for 2010. "With more than 50,000 hosted OfficeSuite™ VoIP stations in service across the country, we need to ensure that all of our customers' business-critical and highly sensitive traffic is delivered reliably and predictably. We've chosen TE Explorer to help us ensure that we can maintain top-notch operation of our core network traffic engineering and continue to deliver excellent end-user service quality."