Collaboration enables CENX to offer its carrier customers the ability to monitor Ethernet SLAs when traffic goes off-net

July 26, 2010

2 Min Read
CENX, EXFO Team on Off-Net Monitoring

CENX Inc. is upping the ante in the Carrier Ethernet exchange competition, announcing this morning that it will offer service-level agreement monitoring on off-net connections for the service providers that connect to its exchange, using technology from EXFO (Nasdaq: EXFO; Toronto: EXF).

The idea is to give service providers a more cost-effective way to monitor SLAs over the facilities of other carriers with which they connect at the exchange point. Previously, says CENX founder and President Nan Chen, Carrier Ethernet service providers who wanted that kind of visibility had to buy probes and deploy them at each network endpoint, or "run blind" without any monitoring.

"Now with the collaborative effort with EXFO, we are able to give them the ability to monitor all our off-net locations, and they will be able to see for each circuit what are the delay, availability, and packet loss characteristics," Chen says. "The information will show up through a portal, for every circuit, or through an integrated effort we can upload the data into their existing management system."

CENX has integrated EXFO's BrixNGN Carrier Ethernet Service Assurance System technology into its network systems to offer this new functionality. The system collects key performance indicators of every Ethernet virtual circuit and enables them to be used both for real-time monitoring and for SLA analysis history.

Service providers can use the CENX Market Web interface or, through open application programming interfaces, send the data directly into their own operations and support systems.

CENX is pioneering use of EXFO's standards-based approach to collecting all of this data from a central location, says Kaynam Hedayat, EXFO's senior director of product management and CTO of its Service Assurance division.

"Our tools are system agnostic -- simple for us to integrate with CENX's OSS and use our probes or verifiers within various places within all networks, and CENX can access those and integrate that data," Hedayat says. "They are making effective use of what Brix can offer."

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading

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