Client: Major Cable Operator

Client Challenge

Providing a full range of advanced broadband services to the business and the home, this major cable operator had been managing its infrastructure through an existing network management system. However, the system’s capabilities had been outpaced by the technical advances in the operator’s product offerings. Its most pertinent need was support of its profitable business network through better management of its growing optical and IP networks. Moreover, the company was vulnerable because it lacked redundancy and failover in its management systems. If a server outage, network outage, or power outage occurred, their national operations center would have been unable to respond to network events.

IT Solution

To make more information available about the connectivity, availability and performance of the operator’s emerging communications network, Windward deployed a leading optical network management solution. This system automated network resource discovery and gave the operator advanced event correlation and root-cause analysis capabilities. Additionally, to allow support for various device versions, Windward successfully brokered the vendor’s development of application support for all optical network devices in the environment.

Improving the operators’ overall continuity of operations situation, Windward developed a failover architecture to prevent catastrophic failures of its infrastructure management systems. As part of this implementation, Windward also upgraded all management applications and probes furthering system reliability and security.

Guaranteed Result

The upgraded and expanded management solution not only gave the cable operator enhanced monitoring and management capabilities overall, but allowed it for the first time to discover its optical business network and automatically collect inventory, facility, connectivity and fault data. Additionally, as a result of this project, the operator had a comprehensive, real-time view of the status of its optical network and the security of management system redundancy.