NetQuest Launches Access Platform for POS Monitoring

Network and performance intelligence tools ─ from service assurance to revenue assurance ─ all have a common requirement: access to network data. As network traffic converges, access to particular data becomes a challenge. NetQuest launched an access platform last week to answer that challenge.

The various probes designed to extract data from the network must compete for access to network data. At the same time, escalating data rates strain the limits of their processing power. NetQuest’s new P-Series OptiCop 10G Converger ─ an out-of-band access tool for Packet over Sonet/SDH (POS) networks ─ optimizes the usage of monitoring tools in the network by providing non-intrusive access to multiple tools. It also separates traffic types and delivers only the traffic individual probes require.

This allows service providers to leverage their existing investment in network monitoring tools despite the convergence and emergence of different traffic types.

“We have created in this portfolio a place not only to get monitoring access but to optimized converged traffic,” said Jesse Price, vice president of sales and marketing of NetQuest.

The platform allows legacy monitoring tools to continue doing their job, even in a converged environment, by translating 10G POS traffic into Ethernet traffic. It supports physical and logical network access for both POS test tools and IP tools. Using NetQuest’s own Hybrid Inspection Technology (HIT), the OptiCop 10G Converger provides powerful packet inspection and filtering capabilities that can separate the traffic at the service level and distribute it to the appropriate network monitoring tools from a single network tap or span port.

Olga Yashkova, industry analyst for measurement & instrumentation at Frost & Sullivan, said that as network convergence continues to gain momentum and IP-based services evolve, service providers require new types of test access and monitoring systems as well as greater visibility into various IP, Cell/Packet and TDM network environments. That would ensure availability and responsiveness across all aspects of service and content delivery.

“NetQuest helps service providers meet the challenge of non-intrusive monitoring for networks that contain both Packet over SONET and IP topologies even at 10 Gig line rates,” Yashkova said.

The system can be configured to monitor SONET/SDH POS circuits ranging from OC3/STM-1 to OC192/STM-64. It can monitor multiple circuits in either half or full duplex scenarios and will operate in conjunction with Automatic Protection Switching.

Known primarily as a custom developer of test tools for other probe and equipment vendors, NetQuest is stepping out on its own, but not in competition with its customers. The platform supports the efforts of its customers and other probe makers to become more efficient by streamlining the type of traffic they have to process.

“If you are monitoring an OC192 network and only 10 percent of that traffic is of interest, it is much more efficient to put a 1GB interface on your probe and not to burn all your resources sifting through a bunch of data that means absolutely nothing to what you are monitoring for,” Price said.

The Mount Laurel, NJ-based company was founded in 1987 and still operates under the same management team. Price joined in February to help promote the company’s new platform approach. He said that in traditional management models consisting of element management, network management, service management and business management, tools are typically specialized to address either one or the other.

“We try to become the access overlay to any or all of them and provide optimization to all,” he said. “From a single point in the network, we can provide access and separate traffic based on Layers 1 through 5 and make decisions about how to direct that traffic.”

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