Challenges
As organizations across the United States prepare to deploy and manage VoIP, NEC Unified Solutions provides pre-deployment network assessments to troubleshoot potential obstacles that could impede VoIP performance. When Ivan McDuffie, area engineering manager for NEC Unified, took over management of the network assessment program for NEC, he found the existing analysis tools to be bulky, inflexible, and lacking sufficient memory to adequately perform an assessment.

Because VoIP is extremely sensitive to overall network performance and delay, it is critical to constantly monitor VoIP along side other applications. As a result McDuffie needed a single solution capable of presenting and analyzing everything running on a network.

NEC’s existing setup required lugging and installing three to four boxes to monitor all the topologies and technologies on a given network. The existing setup also lacked enough storage space to adequately record traffic during pre-deployment assessments.

Solution
NEC Unified purchased several GigaStor Portable and GOSS (GigaStor Observer Suite System) appliances to serve as the backbone of their VoIP and network assessment practice around the United States.

The GOSS is a portable device that contains all the hardware and software required to troubleshoot and manage the most-advanced wire-speed gigabit and 10 Gb networks in real time. GOSS provides immediate analysis and reporting on performance across full-duplex networks. GigaStor Portable contains all the hardware and software necessary to store terabytes of network traffic for later playback and review. Engineers can use the GigaStor interface to scroll to a point of interest and perform Expert Analysis.

“After looking at three other vendors, I determined that the Network Instruments® GigaStor Portable and GOSS appliances were the best solutions for NEC,” said McDuffie. “From a single appliance I can connect to and monitor multiple interfaces and I can monitor traffic remotely. The GigaStor Portable unit gives us the storage capacity we need. We can now capture between one and two weeks of traffic. Its flexibility and storage capacity made GigaStor Portable the logical choice on which to standardize our network practice.”

Managing VoIP and Reconstructing Conversations
McDuffie chose Network Instruments because their solutions provide both extensive VoIP capabilities and overall network traffic monitoring, which is critical in the pre-deployment phases of VoIP. Before a VoIP roll-out, McDuffie uses Network Instruments tools to identify bottlenecks and points of contention on the network.

McDuffie uses the same Network Instruments portable units in his daily troubleshooting of VoIP issues. Network Instruments portable units monitor and provide Expert Analysis on network, application, and security events across multiple network topologies including LAN, WAN, and gigabit. Expert Analysis speeds the time to resolution by automatically diagnosing network problems and suggesting resolutions. The units decode over 590 primary protocols, and provide over 570 Experts and over 70 VoIP-specific metrics.

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