AUTOMOTIVE

"The University of Pennsylvania is renowned as one of the nation's leading research and teaching institutions," said Kristina Victoreen, ISC Networking Project Leader in the University of Pennsylvania's ISC Networking and Telecommunications department. "We're able to offer the highest quality education by investing in our faculty and staff, as well as the IT infrastructure that supports them. We always seek out the best solutions, and we found that Aprisma provided the best fault isolation and root cause analysis for our heterogeneous network environment. SPECTRUM enables us to quickly isolate a network or server component that is adversely affecting the infrastructure's performance, and helps us resolve the issue promptly." SPECTRUM manages 1,800 devices across 200 subnets spanning 300 university buildings. In addition to monitoring the Gigabit Ethernet backbone (built with core routers from Cisco and Juniper, edge routers from Foundry, and high-speed switches from Extreme and 3Com), SPECTRUM helps ensure the availability and performance of critical Juniper routers that support the University of Pennsylvania's Mid Atlantic Giga-POP Initiative or "MAGPI" (http://www.magpi.net/). Conceived in 1997 by research and educational institutions in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware -- and managed by UPenn -- MAGPI provides regional and Internet2 connectivity to members through strategic points of presence (POPs) connected at Gigabit speeds throughout the tri-state region. "SPECTRUM is critical to the MAGPI project," Victoreen explained. "MAGPI supports extremely important advances in the research, education and medical fields, and the network infrastructure must perform without fail around the clock. SPECTRUM ensures that our Juniper routers are operating at peak performance to support such bandwidth-intensive applications as high-speed video broadcasting across the globe, medical simulation models, and real-time collaboration." Victoreen has high praise for SPECTRUM's Modeling Gateway which enables her network management team to quickly and automatically synchronize SPECTRUM with the university's database of managed devices. "The Modeling Gateway is a tremendous time-saver for us," she explained. "In our environment, we're always performing moves, adds and changes. We needed a way to get the data from our inventory database into SPECTRUM automatically." The University of Pennsylvania customized the integration solution using industry-standard XML. The Modeling Gateway updates the SPECTRUM database and supports SNMPv3, which is a necessity for them. SPECTRUM SNMPv3 support provides critical authentication and encryption capabilities, allowing Victoreen and her team to securely manage remote devices throughout the expansive network. "All of our core and building entrance equipment now uses SNMPv3. We would not consider a management platform that did not support it," Victoreen added. SPECTRUM Alarm Notification Manager (SANM) helps the team save valuable time and money by enabling them to set policies to escalate trouble calls appropriately. "Aprisma's solution enables us to tailor our support and escalation policies to the needs of diverse user communities who may have different SLAs with us. We can also define the role of each network component and perform different escalations depending on how a particular component outage may affect service. By combining SPECTRUM's root cause analysis with SANM's granular notification filters, we almost always notify the right person at the right time to get the problem solved quickly." The University of Pennsylvania plans to send one of its network engineers through ACE certification training with Aprisma in the near future to give them direct access to Aprisma's product support engineers and developers in the Aprisma Technical Assistance Center (ATAC). "We expect that Aprisma will be a valuable partner for many years to come," Victoreen concluded. "Their 'try before you buy' approach lets me feel comfortable with how the product will perform before we invest in it. I think it's the perfect partnership approach to working with a technology vendor in today's economy, where every investment needs to demonstrate a rapid return."