Concord Communications Inc. next week will launch a re-architected version of its eHealth performance reporting software that promises seamless reporting across large, geographically dispersed networks.
The latest release of eHealth, which the company is targeting large network service providers and large enterprises with global networks, was redesigned to provide distributed analysis and scale well beyond the bounds of the current version.
“It can run a report to determine the busiest frame circuit across 440,000 [network] elements in the time it used to take to run [the same] report on 20,000 elements,” claimed Brian Burba, vice president of telco and service provider marketing at Concord, in Marlboro, Mass.
The new release also provides performance improvements thanks to the use of an underlying Oracle Corp. database. The existing version of eHealth uses the Ingres database.
The new distributed capability in eHealth allows performance reports to be generated on geographically dispersed network elements so that a customer can view reports that encompass the whole service, rather than the service delivered by individual network operations centers run by the service provider.
“When the [service providers] customer buys the service, they dont care that its all around the world – that is why they signed up with a service provider. When they get a service level report, they want a seamless view across all the resources – not just the regions,” said Burba.
Today about 15 to 20 percent of Concord users run multiple eHealth servers that provide reporting on the domains the servers manage. The new architecture will allow multiple servers to poll the resources in their domain, and then the data from each can be aggregated into a single eHealth server for the combined view. For large reports that span hundreds of thousands of elements, the analysis task can be split up among multiple servers to shorten the amount of time it takes to run the reports.
That capability is unique compared to competitors such as Hewlett-Packard Co.s Trinagy, Infovista and others, according to Burba. “Its fairly expensive to build. It requires a lot of replicating configurations of the different systems,” he said. “You have to keep them in sync in communicating with each other, then you have to develop the process of splitting jobs up then merging them together and making sure the content looks seamless to the customer.”
The distributed version of eHealth is capable of managing up to 1 million network elements, Concord believes. It is due out early next month and pricing starts at $10,000.