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Is your data network ready to carry packetized voice traffic on top of all your current applications? For most enterprise network managers, the likeliest answer would be: I don't know.
Network management vendor NetIQ claims it's got a way to answer the question a bit more definitively. Last month, the company announced two products, one that aims to give enterprises information before they deploy voice over IP (VOIP), the other to help manage VOIP systems as they go into pilot and, ultimately, full deployment.
Assessing The Network
The first product is called VOIP Assessor. It's a software package designed to let enterprises generate traffic loads that will imitate a full VOIP system's traffic across the network. Such measurements provide information that can't be gleaned from a pilot that simply uses an IP PBX and a few dozen IP phones, according to Steve Joyce, director of network technologies at NetIQ.
Users deploy a VOIP Assessor software agent or two at every site where VOIP would go. "You could emulate 20 simultaneous phone calls running across a network between, for example, San Jose and Houston," he said.
A small location would get one agent to measure WAN links; a larger site might have two agents-one at the edge to measure the WAN link, and another across the campus or large building, to measure traffic internal to the site. "It's any endpoint to any other endpoint-I could go from the 22nd floor of my building to the third floor of a...