Return on Investment

The High Cost of Network Downtime

Network availability is business critical to enterprises, since IP networks support the availability and performance of critical applications that drive automation, productivity and revenue. As a result, network downtime can be highly disruptive. According to Dataquest, the average cost per hour of network downtime can range from $90K per hour for retail operations, to nearly $6.5M for financial brokerage firms. According to Infonetics, the overall cost of downtime per hour for an enterprise is $96K, with on average three major network outages occurring per year, each lasting on average 1.5 hours. Network downtime at critical time junctures can be even more costly. For service providers, content providers and enterprises who utilize the Internet for commerce, network downtime can not only cause short-term productivity and revenue loss, but can also damage the organization's brand.

The Challenge of Transient and Unexplained IP Network Behavior

Reducing downtime isn't just about preventing and dealing with major incidents. The business of network managers is to provide a platform for seamless, high-performance services. Yet, IP networks' dynamic nature sometimes leads to transient failures and slow-downs that occur only intermittently and unpredictably. These subtle yet service-affecting disruptions can be difficult or impossible to find with existing tools. This can result in significant levels of wasted time and productivity spent trying to chase down the cause of the problem, while trying to pacify frustrated users who don't understand why their problems can't be found and fixed. Even when the network is not to blame, it is often the easiest to point to as the culprit. With a lack of forensic information and analysis, further time and productivity is wasted trying to assemble information to prove the network's "innocence" when the problem lies elsewhere.

Route Explorer: Minimizing Downtime and Maximizing Productivity

According to a study by the University of Michigan and Sprint, 59% of network downtime is caused by routing-related problems. Route Explorer provides the critical visibility and analysis capability to counteract these issues and achieve greater productivity returns on IP networks as follows:

Preventing Downtime: Route Explorer helps prevent downtime by enabling network engineers to see how the network is behaving and take proactive measures to ensure availability.

• Ensuring proper routing behavior in the network
• Performing what-if impact analysis to ensure that redundancy measures will perform as expected
• Quickly catching routing configuration errors that can lead to costly outages and frustrating transient disruptions

Reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) of IP Network Problems: Route Explorer dramatically reduces the MTTR of routing problems by providing an accurate, real-time and recorded history of network-wide routing along with powerful analysis tools for:

• Troubleshooting and automated analysis of Internet and inter-organizational connectivity via BGP
• Discovering and diagnosing problems with internal routing protocols (EIGRP, OSPF, and IS-IS)
• Baselining and analyzing per-customer MPLS VPNs

Improving IT and Network Engineering Productivity: Network managers can quickly get to the root of Layer 3 network issues, as well as show conclusively when the network has been behaving properly, speeding problem resolution for the entire organization and maximizing productivity.

Validating Maintenance Updates: Route Explorer helps network managers ensure the proper function of the network after maintenance windows by delivering intuitive tools for:

• Visually verifying production routing behavior through a real-time routing topology display
• Comparative analysis of changes by providing before-and-after comparison views of the Routing Information Base (RIB) and reports on changed metrics, prefixes and routers, so that engineers can ensure that the right changes were made

Helping Prevent Wasted Operational Costs: Without a logical view of IP networks, it is easy to miss costly waste such as underutilized links, rogue network elements, backdoor routes, and WAN circuits that should have been decommissioned but that are still utilized by routers. Route Explorer provides unprecedented Layer 3 visibility of IP networks that is unavailable from traditional network management products, helping network managers to contain operational costs.

Optimizing Network Upgrades and Rollouts: Route Explorer delivers time and cost savings to network engineers planning upgrades and expansions to their networks:

• Informing network planners with an easily gatherered Layer 3 view of the network that is more accurate and detailed than off-line modeling tools or traditional SNMP-based network management tools
• Performing what-if analysis of routing configuration changes before touching the network
• Equipping engineers to view and validate the routing behavior of network upgrades and expansions in the production network

Delivering a Speedy Return on Investment: Decreased network downtime, faster problem resolution and enhanced network engineering and operations productivity enabled by Route Explorer lead to a positive Return on Investment (ROI) within months. In addition, Route Explorer is self-contained, installs speedily, operates automatically with low overhead and provides the tools network engineers need out of the box, without needing costly and time-consuming development projects, leading to an extremely rapid time to value.