Corvil » Solutions

Unified Communications

1. Solution Overview

Unified Communications (UC) integrates multiple types of communications and applications across the network infrastructure with the goal of allowing people, teams, and organizations to communicate more effectively. This goal can only be achieved if the complete UC deployment is meeting user requirements for all types of communications. This requires the network infrastructure to be managed, provisioned and optimized to deliver the diverse set of requirements demanded by the UC environment.

A complete UC deployment consists of a number of modes of communications and applications each with unique networking challenges due to the varying traffic characteristics and user expectations. For example, the following UC applications all have different traffic characteristics and different performance requirements:

• VoIP and Video must be delivered within strict latency and jitter requirements to meet user expectations.
• Presence status can contain large amounts of data (ie: calendar and contact information) and updates must happen in near real time. This volume of data needs to be managed to mitigate network issues.
• Instant Messaging users are accustomed to quick response times that the network must be provisioned to deliver.
• Web-Based Conferencing and Collaboration demands near real time interactivity and strict latency and jitter targets for any corresponding audio traffic.

CorvilNet's real-time approach to latency, jitter and loss measurements, and the delivery of all network and application analytics at highly granular timescales provides the visibility and control you need to guarantee application delivery in a UC environment. CorvilNet appliances deployed at strategic points continuously track the performance of your live systems, verify compliance to pre-specified service level targets, and enable advanced troubleshooting and optimization capabilities.

Applications of CorvilNet in a UC environment include:

Network Application Performance Monitoring

• Real-time UC applications VoIP and Video have strict latency, jitter and loss targets that must be achieved to ensure acceptable end-user performance. Presence, Instant Messaging and Web-Based Conferencing/Collaboration require fast network and server response-times to be used effectively. CorvilNet tracks both network and application performance with unsurpassed granularity, allowing you to quickly determine whether requirements are being met and to determine the root cause of any divergence from expectations.

Full Visibility and Reporting of Network Usage

• All of CorvilNet measurements are based on monitoring every single application packet and reporting utilization and latency at microsecond timescales. Combined with CorvilNet layer-7 DPI application recognition engine, this provides complete visibility of all traffic and users of the network.

Network Optimization

• Deployment of UC applications require quality of service policies to be deployed throughout the network infrastructure. These are required to ensure the network delivers the diverse set of requirements demanded by the UC environment. CorvilNet delivers concrete recommendations to ensure each quality of service policy is properly provisioned to deliver the required application service levels.

2. Key Functionality

• Monitor one-way end-to-end latency, jitter and loss for all packets of every application in the UC environment including VoIP and Video
• Report all usage of the network with real-time microsecond granularity and historical usage for the past year
• Measure network service quality to report against service level objectives for every class of service in the network. Highlight all service level violations
• Quickly determine the cause of poorly performing UC applications using programmable event-triggered smart packet capture, analysis, decode and export
• Determine the required quality of service policy settings based on programmed service level targets. CorvilNet directly computes how much bandwidth your traffic needs to achieve your stated service level objectives
• Monitor application response times versus network response times to determine the cause of end-user perceived performance issues

3. Diagram

4. Key Benefits

• All UC applications are delivered to the remote users with the required service levels to meet the business needs
• A complete historical record of service level compliance is retained and network managers are alerted whenever targets are violated
• Comprehensive views are provided from a single platform for all UC applications, their usage, and their end-to-end performance
• Quality of service policies are easily configured without any specialized expertise or offline modelling required
• The root cause of any breaches in service level objectives can be quickly determined
• UC service level problems can be located, analyzed and resolved faster and more reliably using CorvilNet's advanced event troubleshooting features