It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me at my day (and frequently evening) job with Aria Networks. First, there’s the seasonal increase in work-load for TMW Nice (next month!!!), and then there’s press and marketing stuff for our new product launch…
Yesterday, Aria announced their new Capacity Planner product. I’ll try to describe it in two sentences, one for technical folks and one for management:
Technically – It adds a rich resource model to the establish intelligent service routing capabilities, using a radical data-driven (rather than procedural) approach to mapping services to consumed network resources.
Businessy – It dramatically reduces long-term strategic planning cycles, makes tactical service planning more accurate, and optimises spend on equipment (CAPEX) and operations (OPEX).
Aria’s established intelligent Virtual Network Topologies (iVNT) product suite provides applications for abstract modelling of networks, detailed representation of services demands (in terms of bandwidth, QoS, etc.). iVNT then uses these models along with some very smart AI stuff to do bulk, optimum placement of forecast services on the network. Identify bandwidth thresholds, minimise cost, find alternative routes, evaluate worse case failure, that sort of thing.
Capacity Planner adds a model for consumption of other resources and assets, with an associated, more sophisticated, cost function. Resources might be, well, anything you need to assign to a service: Cards, ports, VLANs, and the knock-on dependencies on space, power, back-plane switching capacity… The data-driven capacity model can determine whether a requirement for a particular port at a site means a simple allocation, a new card, or even a whole new device, and assigns a cost accordingly.
Combine iVNT’s routing with Capacity Planner’s resource model and cost function and you get a system that can find the optimal route for services, balancing QoS with cost, and generate a list of materials needed to deliver the services. For tactical service placement this could be used to check that a service can be delivered in a cost effective way. For strategic planning, users can optimise their next 12 months service forecasts and get a detailed, justifiable, CAPEX budget.
Capacity Planner has already been shown to reduce many months of planning activities down to just a few hours.
More on Capacity Planner here.
We should have a demo ready to show you at Management World 2010 in May, so feel free to drop by the Expo booth to check it out.
