Challenge
High phone bills were eating up CI Travel's profits. Because reducing call volume wasn’t an option, CI Travel's IT Director, Paul Ingram, decided to take advantage of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to reduce per-call expenses. The new VoIP phones, while dramatically reducing per-call costs, came with new problems. To make the investment pay off, Ingram required tools to monitor and troubleshoot the VoIP exchange.
Currently, there are 175 VoIP phones deployed at CI Travel’s offices around the world. Next year, Ingram expects there to be one VoIP phone per employee. Since much of the company’s business is conducted over phone lines, Ingram has to be certain VoIP users are getting the best quality of service.
“Bad voice quality makes people turn to the standard phone system, which could quickly eliminate any savings we were intending to realize with VoIP,” Ingram said. “The company depends heavily on phone communication to service customers; calls are going to be made with the most reliable phone, no matter the cost.”
Solution
Ingram researched three products: Sniffer®, Ethereal, and Observer® Suite. “Sniffer is really behind on VoIP features,” he said. “It can’t even record voice packets for audio playback. Ethereal [an open-source product] is actually more advanced than Sniffer when it comes to VoIP, but I am not comfortable using a product without any guarantee of technical or service support. Observer, on the other hand, was even better than Ethereal and includes a higher level of support than either of them. Overall, I found Observer to be the best value.”
Ingram purchased Observer, including a probe he placed on the WAN backbone to troubleshoot VoIP. In one case, Ingram used Observer to troubleshoot erratic jitter that was occurring between his and another office. The problem wasn’t audible on his end, so he ran a packet capture and played it back to hear the problem. Not only did Observer help him verify there was a problem, it also led him to the solution. The capture identified a misconfigured application hogging bandwidth and causing general network slowdown.
“Armed with the information provided by Observer, I was able to reconfigure the misbehaving application,” Ingram said. “I also defined a QoS policy on the switch to give VoIP traffic the highest priority, thereby preventing other applications from compromising VoIP reliability.”
|
|
Finding a Low-Cost Carrier
Observer shows application and system activity on the network: what resources are being used, when, and at what rate. Intelligent re-allocation of network resources has saved CI Travel a substantial amount of money. As long as VoIP traffic has priority, communication problems are minimized, allowing CI Travel to maintain independence from traditional phone systems.
“So far, Observer’s VoIP capabilities have helped cut CI Travel's phone bill by 25 to 30 percent,” Ingram said.
Screening for Security Threats
Ingram has also found value in Observer’s ability to detect viruses and other malware.
“Previously, I depended on a security product that took two to three hours to diagnose and resolve each viral infestation,” Ingram said. “I can usually diagnose a problem with Observer within minutes and then I can resolve it in under an hour.”
Using Observer to detect malware activity on the network showed the problem was worse than thought. Using evidence provided by Observer, Ingram convinced management to purchase a product to stop malware before it affected the entire network.
Traveling Light
Sniffer was strictly hardware-based when Ingram used it to monitor his network. When a Sniffer appliance would fail, it would take weeks to get a replacement. Because Observer can be delivered in a software-only version that runs on Windows, hardware failures are not an issue.
“My version of Observer is software. So if for any reason my hardware fails, I can install Observer on another machine, obtain another license code, and be up and running on the same day,” Ingram said. “That service from Network Instruments keeps me on top of the network.”
Download the .pdf version |
About CI Travel |
CI Travel, a division of Cruise International, is a $150 million company which, according to Travel Weekly, is the 36th largest travel agency in the United States and provides travel management services for government and corporate accounts. Located in Norfolk, Virginia, CI Travel operates 49 locations, including 25 agencies in Hampton Roads, with offices in Alabama, California, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin and Washington, DC. CI Travel is the only employee-owned travel company in the nation.
CI Travel has 300 employees at 49 locations across the globe. The core of their network is a high-capacity gigabit copper backbone located at corporate headquarters. From there, a MPLS WAN connects the sites. Each LAN is a switched gigabit copper network. The entire infrastructure is based on Cisco equipment.
|
 |
|
