NETSCOUT

CN, one of the largest railroads in North America, was facing application performance problems and response time delays in its IT network. The network supports over 22,000 employees who rely on it for various operations such as tracking shipments in real time, processing customer service transactions, fulfilling order requests, and ensuring the efficient and safe operation of the company’s extensive, automated rail system. The company uses a variety of NETSCOUT Intelligent Data Sources in combination with several nGenius analysis modules to monitor their wide area network (WAN) links and 1,800-1,900 Cisco switches and routers. However, they were unable to pinpoint the root cause of the performance issues they were experiencing.

The company was undergoing a transition to a Software-Defined Network (SDN) using a phased approach based on the recommended practices defined by their technology provider for this project, Cisco. The project involved the design of a next-generation leaf-and-spine architecture supporting 100GB network speeds, use of Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP), and new VMware ESX virtual servers. The IT team knew they needed a technology-neutral partner to assist their efforts in closing any blind spots that surfaced in the transformed SDN environment, including both east-west and north-south traffic paths, providing 'over-time' trend analysis and reporting into business service performance before, during, and after the move to SDN, and ensuring business communications continuity and coordination across a multi-phase SDN implementation.

The healthcare provider was engaged in a major multi-year, multi-million dollar unified communications (UC) project. The IT team recognized that if the upgraded UC clusters were not fully tested under load, the system could be vulnerable to a range of failures, such as call drops and lack of dial-tone. Without real-time visibility and analysis in the production network, patient-impacting problems could persist far longer than would be acceptable. IT needed to verify and stress test the system in pre-production before go-live, to attain service assurance. A further goal was to put a solution in place that would allow IT to protect the performance of the new VoIP services post-deployment in the actual production environment. This solution would have to enable IT to proactively get ahead of issues before they impacted patients. At the same time, IT wanted to reduce number of vendors they manage, thereby reducing time lost to vendor finger pointing in its complex UC&C environments.