IPC

Growth demands improved scalability and resilience

IPC provides specialized communications solutions that help the financial trading community meet regulatory compliance and governance-mandates. As a managed services provider, IPC used a legacy solution for network fault and performance management. The company went through rapid growth, and then settled on a 15 percent annual network growth rate, with over 9,000 managed devices.

There are challenges associated with growth, according to Michael Sabatella, OSS Engineering Manager for IPC: “Our legacy network management software segregated performance monitoring across our global environment. Servers in North America, Europe, and other regions did not communicate with one another, and when capacity limits were reached in a region, new servers had to be deployed. It became clear that our legacy solution was not scalable or fault-tolerant enough to manage the continued business expansion. We needed a different solution to manage our growing customer numbers. Integration with 3rd party tools, scalability, and support for a multi-device global architecture were key to us. We use a wide range of network devices and we don’t want multiple systems to manage them all.”

IPC turned to OpenText™ Platinum partner Melillo Consulting for a better solution. Melillo provides IT solutions to complex business problems, focused on producing cost savings and high return on investment, while mitigating risk and ensuring compliance.

The combination of OpenText Network Automation (NA) and OpenText Network Node Manager i (NNMi) appeared to tick all the boxes and this was confirmed when Melillo set up a quick pilot environment to test this concept. “We wanted to prove that NNMi’s three-tier architecture is not only scalable, but also lends itself to high availability and disaster recovery deployment,” says Keith Wilson, Director of Business Development at Melillo Consulting. “IPC’s level 1 support analysts also work with many third party tools, and Micro Focus (now part of OpenText) integration capabilities were a key advantage in making the purchase decision.”

NA and NNMi form the engine to our device monitoring and management efforts and we have created a centralized device inventory database. Proactive configuration management and automation features mean that we can roll out new customer circuits on average 15 percent faster than before, often even up to 30 percent faster.

NA and NNMi drive regulatory compliance and support rapid troubleshooting

NA was introduced to automate configuration management and archiving, giving full transparency on who makes what changes to network equipment during change windows. “NA has proved invaluable in our ISO certification as we are regularly audited to ensure that certain key network components remain unchanged. New devices are activated with the right engineering templates and standards that cannot be adapted regionally, which is reassuring for our InfoSec team. All basic device management is now automated through NA which saves approximately 35 man hours each month, many more when we take training, maintenance, and administration into account which used to be part of our workload,” says Sabatella.

NNMi enables IPC to model and monitor its thousands of devices out-of-the-box without any need for custom development, vastly improving time to value. Within the IPC voice network, used on the trading platform, some of the devices could have thousands of interfaces. “NNMi gives us a strategy to apply particular sensitivity to the most critical interfaces and set appropriate filters for certain logical interfaces,” comments Sabatella. “We were also able to integrate our IBM Netcool Network Management solution into NNMi. When NNMi now sends alerts to Netcool, it automatically updates the rules file and includes a description field to provide additional context for rapid troubleshooting. This identifies the network context and customer affected by a device failure, saving our level 1 support analysts countless hours in identifying this information so that customers can be kept up-to-date and issues are verified as soon as possible, reducing downtime.”

Network Automation has proved invaluable in our ISO certification as we are regularly audited to ensure that certain key network components remain unchanged. New devices are activated with the right engineering templates and standards that cannot be adapted regionally, which is reassuring for our InfoSec team.

Faster time to market through streamlined and automated process

IPC regional teams worldwide can now log into their local servers and manage their devices locally, while those who need a global view can see all devices from all regions. “We protect our environment by standardization and consistency for maximum stability”, says Sabatella. He concludes: “NA and NNMi form the engine to our device monitoring and management efforts and we have created a centralized device inventory database. Proactive configuration management and automation features mean that we can roll out new customer circuits on average 15 percent faster than before, often even up to 30 percent faster. The great reporting features ensure compliance with our engineering standards, which are defined in NA. With NA and NNMi, and Melillo by our side as trusted partner, we feel confident we have an enterprise-grade solution which will serve us well into the future.”