XO Communications Gains Network Visibility and Control with Peakflow SP

• Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software

• Telecommunications

• Business Operation

• System Integration

XO Communications, one of the largest service providers in the United States, was facing challenges in managing its rapidly growing network and dealing with traffic congestion. The company had basic visibility into traffic statistics, such as bytes in/out, but this was not granular enough to tell where the traffic was coming from or going to. The company also had to constantly determine if the traffic was legitimate or illegitimate. Removing congestion due to legitimate traffic was fine, but if done for illegitimate traffic, it actually made matters worse. The company knew that Netflow, a technology already embedded in the company’s network infrastructure equipment, had the information they were looking for. However, conducting their own in-house Netflow analysis proved to be a large undertaking due to the huge amount of data that needed to be collected, analyzed and turned into something presentable.

XO Communications is one of the largest service providers in the United States. The company delivers a full spectrum of communication services to businesses, government agencies, carriers and wholesale customers nationwide. Its services extend from Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), network transport and fixed/wireless access, to data, Internet, managed and hosting services. The provider delivers these services to over 90,000 customers via a network that consists of approximately one million miles of metro fiber, nearly 1,000 central office colocations and a fully peered IP network with more than 100 private and public peering relationships.

XO Communications decided to deploy the Peakflow SP solution, consisting of the Peakflow SP Collector Platform and Peakflow SP Flow Sensor appliances, for granular, cost-effective visibility into customer traffic, intelligent traffic engineering, and peering/transit analysis. The Peakflow SP Collector Platform appliances collect flows from all the peering routers, while the Peakflow SP Flow Sensor appliances collect flows from the customer edge routers, which contain a high number of router interfaces ranging from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. The Peakflow SP solution allows XO Communications to easily collect network statistics and turn them into something usable for real-time or historical analysis, gain granular visibility into its customers’ network traffic by understanding where the traffic is coming from or going to—either by autonomous system number (ASN), prefix or protocol, manage traffic coming into the edge and across the network backbone, and differentiate legitimate traffic from illegitimate traffic.

• Comprehensive visibility into traffic flows and removal of congestion in network hot spots.
• Understanding of traffic flow, which has helped in retaining customers and making more informed hardware purchases to augment certain sections of the network.
• Control of traffic and reduction of impact on the network backbone.

• Rapid ROI by eliminating the purchase of additional network infrastructure that would have been required to accommodate the illegitimate traffic.