Cable & Wireless Communications Channel Islands, Isle of Man and Bermuda (CWC, CIIMB), an international service provider based in Guernsey, has selected and deployed Traffic Explorer, an integrated routing and traffic analysis system from Packet Design to manage their IP network, which provides its customers with retail broadband and mobile communications, as well as enterprise IP and data center services.  

Officials with Cable & Wireless (News - Alert) Communications said that since the company installed Traffic Explorer, it has helped network engineers to-Monitor and ensure the healthy operation of its backbone network along with peerings and transit connections to other ISPs; speed troubleshooting of service availability and performance issues for data center services and offer more detailed network service quality information to key data center clients.

Rik Toms, head of IP/IT for Cable & Wireless Communications CIIMB said that a key business challenge was the high diversity and volume of services that must be managed with a limited engineering and operations staff.  

“Our IP backbone network supports many diverse services across multiple islands, including residential and business broadband services, mobile phone and data services, an educational network, and a significant enterprise data center business,” said Toms.  

He said that the company’s data center business is very large compared to the size of the island.  

“Even though Guernsey is only nine miles long, because we diverted transatlantic fiber to Guernsey, we have more Internet bandwidth than some entire countries, for example South Africa.  As a result, our data center business has grown from 20 racks of online hosting space in 2003 to over 500 racks of hosting space today,” said Toms.

He said that with all of these services, the company’s limited staff really needed better management visibility to be able to keep up with the demands of the customers.

In May of 2010, Cable and Wireless Communications CIIMB deployed Traffic Explorer, which provides an integrated view of network-wide IP routing and traffic flow operations, both internally, as well as to and from the Internet.  

Service providers gain an end-to-end, "topology-aware" view of network traffic that helps them find hidden network problems, speed troubleshooting and plan network capacity more accurately.

Company officials said that Traffic Explorer has made a significant impact on the time it takes to resolve problems, particularly with sensitive data center services.  

"Before Traffic Explorer, we had a limited view of how the network was operating at the present time, but had no way to troubleshoot historical or intermittent issues,” said Toms.  

He said that often, a customer would report a service fault where their hosted servers weren’t reachable from somewhere on the Internet, such as New York City, and by the time the company staff looked at the problem it would have resumed normal behavior.

“We’d have no clue what had happened,” said Toms. He added, “As a result, not only could we not identify the customer’s problem, but any underlying root cause for that problem was still lurking in the network and likely to happen again,” he said.  

Toms said that with Traffic Explorer, the company can rewind the routing and traffic history, examine the exact customer traffic that was affected and find the root cause.  

Toms and his engineering team were also attracted to Traffic Explorer’s modeling and capacity planning capabilities.  

“With Traffic Explorer, you can model network changes in advance of implementing them to verify that the network will behave the way you expect, and ensure that you don’t run into any problems that you didn’t anticipate,” said Toms.  

He said that the company plans to use this capability in the routine maintenance processes.