Viavi Solutions

Recently, a global electronic commerce and cloud computing company had service issues on leased dark fiber. This fiber interconnects their global data centers, transporting all network services and applications for their customers. The company experienced several network outages due to fiber breaks, and outages that affected many of its customers who could not access the website or their applications.The company asked their dark fiber vendor to dispatch a technician with a portable instrument to troubleshoot the network. However, it often took hours and even days to get a technician out in the field. Service troubleshooting and restoration were so poor in some areas that the company decided to find its own fiber monitoring solution to quickly pinpoint issues and push dark fiber vendors for faster mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

The Cisco ASR 5000 Series addresses the high-performance requirements that the next generation of mobile Internet brings. The ASR contains real-time integrated, session-state intelligence enabling it to effectively manage IP-based flows on a per session basis.The challenge Cisco faced was how to efficiently test the stateful reliability of the ASR’s enhanced charging service function, which is part of the packet data network gateway (PGW), at a highly scaled level of network traffic load.

The key goal was to understand if any confidential or sensitive data had been accessed or exfiltrated. This was of particular concern given the nature of the solutions provided by the organization concerned, as reputational damage would have long-term consequences to current and future business relationships.