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Managing hundreds of thousands of nodes on a daily basis is likely to make a network operator's head spin. In an attempt to ease some of the complexity associated with managing the elements of large service provider nets, Alcatel has announced upgrades to its remedy for the virtual vertigo.
The Paris-based network equipment manufacturer recently released version 5.0 and 5.1 of its 5620 Network Manager - acquired by Alcatel when the company purchased Kanata, Ont.-based Newbridge Networks Corp. in 2000. The 5620 acts as the cornerstone of the company's network management products for data networks, and is the element manager of both wireline and wireless broadband services originating on access devices and transported over edge and core switches.
The company said its new versions of the 5620 address the need for service providers to combine the management of their legacy services with new IP and MPLS (multi protocol label switching) services.
The 5620 version 5.1 features: statistics on network traffic, volume, congestion and error conditions; fault isolation across both Layer 2 and Layer 3; IP auto-discovery of routers, label switch paths and IP links; automatic rerouting functions activated on link or logical failures. It can manage over 500,000 nodes, the company said.
"What is happening is that we have this unified...