Canadian cableco Shaw Communications has completed the purchase of US-based data centre provider ViaWest for USD830 million plus USD370 million debt from private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners and other shareholders, following the agreement announced at the end of July. ViaWest, based in Denver, Colorado, operates 27 data centres in eight markets in the western US, with around 1,300 mainly mid-sized company clients, and will continue to operate as a standalone entity. ‘The ViaWest acquisi...

In April 2010, Network Instruments® announced the availability of Observer Infrastructure (OI), an integral element of their Observer® performance management solution, which complements their primary packet-oriented network and application performance monitoring products with an infrastructure viewpoint. An evolutionary replacement for Network Instruments Link Analyst™, OI has been significantly expanded and includes network infrastructure device health monitoring, IP SLA active testing, NBAR an...

A pre-eminent financial services firm provides products for customers around the world. Dedicated to serving clients’ financial needs‚ the firm is committed to delivering the best customer experience possible. Its commitment doesn’t stop with clients‚ but extends to improving the lives of individuals in communities around the world. A Business Challenge The customer was interested in implementing a web services-based self-service platform to bring together web services and IP telephony in all of...

IT needs end-to-end visibility, meaning tool access to any point in the physical and virtual network, and it has to be scalable and easy to manage, says Jason Echols, IXIA Networking is a rapidly evolving and changing landscape. We've quickly moved from parsing bits and bytes from workstation to workstation to providing powerful applications and services to millions of consumers. Speed and bandwidth requirements have grown exponentially, new traffic types appear daily, and now a functioning netw...

There is a common issue I deal with when speaking to end users trying to monitor applications. This confusion is partially created by vendors who would like to position themselves in the hot APM market, yet they clearly don’t enable performance monitoring. These vendors are slowly starting to correct the messaging, but many have poor market understanding, and continue to confuse buyers. There are two types of monitoring technologies, one is availability monitoring and the other performance monit...

The Company A worldwide technology company operating in more than 170 countries is focused on helping people apply technology in meaningful ways to their businesses, personal lives and communities. With R&D investments of almost a billion US dollars, the company is able to offer a complete technology product portfolio to the market. The ultimate goal of this market leader is to offer products, services and solutions that are high tech, low cost and deliver the best customer experience. The c...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is perhaps the most profound paradigm shift facing the networking industry. In carrier networks, proven functions such as switching, routing, firewall, and other security elements migrate from proven hardware platforms to unproven virtualized servers controlled by software to gain efficiency and flexibility. Carriers worldwide agree on the need and vision for virtualization, but may still struggle to quantify the benefits, understand practical migration ste...

Application intelligence (the ability to monitor packets based on application type and usage) is the next evolution in network visibility. It can be used to dynamically identify all applications running on a network. Distinct signatures for known and unknown applications can be identified, captured, and passed on to specialized monitoring tools in order to provide network managers a complete view of their network. In addition, well-designed visibility solutions will gather additional (contextual...

“IQ Services really made it easy. I learned all sorts of things about my routing tables that really caught me by surprise" It was essential for a major player in the mobile & computing devices industry to know for certain its three contact centers could handle full calling volumes during an upcoming shopping season. The company turned to IQ Services for an answer to the question “How can we be sure our self-service and contact center solutions will really work when we need them?” 7000+ Ports...

 If you are like the average network professional, Wireshark is probably a part of your   regular troubleshooting arsenal. And, why not? It's the tool by which you learned       network analysis. Its flexibility in licensing, no-cost download, and familiarity, make it a logical choice to deploy to capture and analyze packets. But, what might your network team be missing, if it depends solely on Wireshark for network monitoring? We'll look at a two-solution appr...

Telus Corp, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, reported a 33 per cent jump in second-quarter profit on Thursday, helped by the combination of growth in its wireless and fixed-line businesses. Telus said it signed up 78,000 net contract wireless subscribers, who typically pay more to use high-end smartphones. By comparison, BCE Inc’s Bell and Rogers Communications Inc signed up 66,186 and 38,000 customers, respectively, in the same period. Vancouver-based Telus competes against...

Good Decisions Reduce Risk The financial industry is at the forefront of network technology. The traditional image of bankers and financial traders is really an anachronism. The reality is that the financial industry, from retail banking to high speed trading, is at the cutting edge of network innovation – for better or for worse. Whether adopting new technologies to allow customers broad-based mobile access, squeezing out the last few nanoseconds of latency, or providing air-tight security, net...

The practice of network availability monitoring can range from simple standalone up/down monitoring of individual devices to complex, highly customized and automated approaches that fully integrate into broader management systems architectures. ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) analysts define the term "Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring System" (ENAMS) to include network-centric monitoring solutions that are used by enterprise network operations and engineering teams to discover,...

Canadian cableco Shaw Communications yesterday agreed to purchase US-based data centre provider ViaWest for USD830 million plus USD370 million debt from private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, the Wall Street Journal reports. Shaw’s CEO Brad Shaw, explaining the motivation for the cross-border purchase, said: ‘Demand [for data centres] continues to outstrip supply,’ and he added that Shaw sees opportunities to connect its existing data centres in Alberta with ViaWest sites to cross-sell s...

US-based private equity firm Providence is said to be considering acquiring a stake in Canadian cellco Globalive Wireless (Wind Mobile), Bloomberg reports, quoting sources with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity due to the information being private. Wind – which is Canada’s fourth largest mobile operator by customers yet has less than a 3% share of the market – is looking to attract a new owner or merger partner, as its main backer, Russian-controlled Vimpelcom, has drastically sca...

Business networks continue to respond to user and business demands, such as, access to more data, bring your own device (BYOD), virtualisation and the continued growth of the Internet of Things. Historically much of the traffic that runs through these networks has been known to network administrators but access to application and user data remains lacking. Application intelligence - the ability to monitor application flows based on application type - provides the insight that is desperately requ...

The following are four reasons why you should utilize Application Performance Management (APM) tools: 1. INCREASED REVENUE AND PROFITABILITY APM products ensure that bottom line costs are controlled through monitoring and discovery. APM technology also allows business to maximize the efficiency per employee by reducing downtime and increasing productivity per employee, which translates into retaining customers, better quality of service and improved brand positioning amongst potential customers....

The cost and efficiency benefits promised in business VoIP have led to widespread adoption among small businesses and enterprises alike. While advancements have been made in this technology area, there are still obstacles to quality of service (QoS) in the delivery of business VoIP. Here, we’ll take a look at a few of these obstacles and best practices for breaking through these barriers to improve overall quality. According to an Internet Evolution article, the main obstacles to QoS in business...

A visibility architecture is essential for security, network and integrated, service-oriented operations teams to establish and maintain a continuous awareness of activity, health, and performance of applications and infrastructure. Such awareness is only possible with continuous, reliable network visibility. But this is not an easy task when network and security professionals must ensure security and proactively meet performance expectations in dynamic, virtualized environments with increasingl...

Bell Aliant has reported that it is investing around CAD70 million (USD65 million) to expand its ‘FibreOP’ fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network to 125,000 additional premises in seven Quebec communities, offering very high speed internet and high definition IPTV alongside home phone service initially in Alma, Saguenay (including Chicoutimi, Jonquiere and La Baie), Saint-Felicien, Thetford Mines and Victoriaville, with additional communities including Riviere-du-Loup and Roberval to be added by year-...