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Reserve Your Seat Today"DPS Telecom gives us a reliable way of accessing a variety of equipment, regardless of the brand or provider. We now have a common interface for our existing system."
KMC has deployed 60 NetGuardians and 120 NetGuardian Expansions. This should give you some idea of the scope of KMC's operations; altogether, the Huntsville NOC monitors approximately 3,000 alarm points. Monitor data from the NetGuardians is sent as SNMP Traps to the Huntsville NOC, where it is displayed using HP OpenView internet usage manager software. Moses says the decision to use the NetGuardian came from knowledge of the quality of older DPS Telecom products and research into current alarm monitoring offerings from a number of vendors. The deciding factor was that the NetGuardian gave KMC a cost-effective means of using its existing equipment.
"DPS Telecom gave us a reliable way of accessing a variety of equipment, regardless of the brand or provider. We now have a common interface for our existing system. We did quite a lot of research of what was available. We thought that the NetGuardian had a lot of flexibility, in terms of the various software options and terminal capacity," says Moses. According to Dale Stinson, manager of the Huntsville NOC, the NetGuardian was the solution that made the most sense for cost and capability.
"NetGuardian was the only solution that met both our technical and our budget needs," Stinson says. "The NetGuardian is tightly integrated with the way we work, in how it handles SNMP Traps and its tight integration with HP OpenView." Monitoring the network in-house has also improved KMC's monitoring visibility in ways that are impossible to accomplish with a third-party provider, Stinson adds.
"The NetGuardian is tightly integrated with the way we work, in how it handles SNMP Traps and its tight integration with HP OpenView.""It's really added to our peace of mind to be able to see what's going on real-time. Outsourced monitoring can't see problems in real time," Stinson says. The real-time monitoring capability was of great service on the morning of Nov. 11. Tornados had ripped through Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, knocking out the commercial power supply to several KMC Telecom sites. "Nine out of 10 of these sites are unmanned," says Stinson. "We have automatic backup generators, but we still need to send a technician to the site. It would have taken us several minutes longer to respond if we were still using outsourced monitoring. Being able to do real-time in-house monitoring probably shaved 30 minutes off our response time.
