Network Planning and Engineering

OPNET’s SP Guru^® Network Planner and IT Guru^® Network Planner enable planning and design of multi-technology, multi-vendor networks. Network Planner’s unique ability to model the behavior of the entire network and the supported applications:

• Delivers precise predictions in what-if scenarios to accurately plan for growth, change, technology migration, and new application deployment.
• Supports planning key initiatives such as data center migration, deployment of Unified Communications, VPN, and IPv6 migration.
• Automates capacity planning, survivability analysis, and traffic engineering.
• Provides a platform for validating network changes before deploying to the production network.

Carriers, ISPs, cable operators, wireless service providers, and enterprises obtain significant ROI from Network Planner’s ability to advance service and technology deployments, meet service level agreements, and maximize existing network investments.

Benefits

• Cost-effectively plan network requirements to support the deployment of new applications and technologies such as VoIP and IPv6.
• Right-size network capacity to support projected traffic growth.
• Minimize risk by evaluating different network architectures and technology migration plans.
• Achieve service level compliance through QoS and traffic engineering.
• Improve network survivability and security.
• Accelerate troubleshooting of routing and network configuration problems.

Key Features

• Automatically create a high-fidelity network model encompassing topology, devices, configurations, and traffic using configuration and operational data from the production environment; other network management systems; and XML or CSV files.
• Analyze network capacity usage to identify trends, threshold violations, inefficiencies, atypical behavior, and the timing of future upgrades.
• Plan for growth by forecasting traffic based on trends and right-sizing links and tunnels to meet service level objectives.
• Leverage best-in-class analytics to evaluate a wide range of “what-if” scenarios in a virtual environment without affecting the production network (e.g., changes to network routing, VPN or QoS configuration).
• Perform pre-deployment analysis to accelerate deployment of new applications and technologies (e.g., VoIP, IPv6).
• Improve network survivability by predicting the impact of node, link, or shared risk group failures and planning protection strategies.
• Automatically design network topologies based on user-configurable priorities for cost, resiliency, and performance-related criteria (e.g., optimize OSPF link metrics to minimize link utilization and reduce delay).

For Service Providers

OPNET’s SP Guru Network Planner provides the following additional capabilities for service providers:

• Perform automated off-line MPLS traffic engineering using exclusive OPNET algorithms that optimize resource utilization and increase service survivability.  Plan and analyze network survivability based on MPLS Fast-Reroute (FRR) protection and network QoS based on Diff-Serv Aware Traffic Engineering (DS-TE).
• Plan for MPLS-based L2 VPNs, BGP/MPLS-based L3 VPNs, and VPLS/VPWS carrier Ethernet services.
• Optimize peering relationships and determine the impact of core failures, peering failures, peering changes, and BGP policies on inter-AS traffic.
• Design and analyze IS-IS networks.  Optimize IS-IS link metrics to minimize link utilization and reduce delay using automated IGP traffic engineering design actions.
• Analyze and design multi-layer IP/MPLS over SONET/SDH, OTN, and (D)WDM networks. Multi-layer support encompasses the underlying optical transport network through integration with SP Guru® Transport Planner.

Carriers, ISPs, cable operators, wireless service providers, government agencies, and large enterprises achieve significant return on investment by using SP Guru Network Planner to:

• Reduce time-to-market for next-generation network and service deployments.
• Maximize return on network infrastructure investments.
• Optimize network performance and utilization.
• Minimize network downtime and lost revenues.
• Enhance operational efficiencies with multi-layer planning.

Compare

• Unlike other vendor solutions, Network Planner’s high fidelity network model combines multiple sources of data to provide a more complete understanding of the network and deliver more accurate predictions of network behavior and performance.
• Network Planner supports a broad scope of out-of-the-box analyses; other vendor solutions only provide a subset of these capabilities.
• SP Guru Network Planner integrates with SP Guru Transport Planner to perform network analyses that encompass the entire protocol stack, including IP/MPLS, Ethernet, SONET/SDH, OTN, and (D)WDM technologies. This industry-exclusive integration provides unique traffic engineering capabilities across multiple layers, and avoids sub-optimal designs, as performed by non-integrated point products.

Testimonials