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Turn a network live the right way - Infrastructure

Communications News, August, 2003 by Chuck Ganimian

Cable test and verification occurs prior to the inevitable alterations by local IT departments and tech-savvy employees. Daily operations within the wiring closet will inevitably affect the quality of the network. In other words, test and certification procedures are important to the customer, who needs a working cable plant, and needs to know it is building its complex enterprise systems atop a stable foundation.

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These procedures are equally important to the technicians themselves, helping to identify and replace trouble areas quickly in order for installations to run more smoothly. Proper certification documents the quality of their work, providing a clean demarcation of responsibility when a new installation is presented to a customer. The number of protocols, services and devices that are critical to a network's operation has grown. Many networks, for example, possess virtual private network capabilities, intranets, extranets, and a host of security and encryption mechanisms and protocols.

While certifying the physical cable plant is still necessary, the modern network demands additional scrutiny, if these types of services are going to work. The cable technician, as a result, is being forced to develop, investigate and understand the inner workings of network protocols.

Verifying that a cable will pass packets between an end-user and an upstream switch or router is no longer good enough. Since physical-layer errors within acceptable limits in legacy systems may create a bottleneck, the physical network needs to be tested against higher standards, and the network should be examined as a whole.

The solution requires both increased training and expertise among cable technicians, or tools that can perform these extensive tests automatically. These devices must not only certify cabling, but also possess the capabilities of protocol analyzers, and automatically detect and test these types of complex services. Today's tools can scan the network for critical devices and servers, verify their operation at the protocol layer and test performance for each of these key components.

Specific lines should be tested to guarantee each of the network services, such as confirming DNS servers, are responding appropriately. To avoid difficulty in verifying all of these services, a network performance analyzer should be used to automatically discover and test devices, and ensure there are no overlying IP configuration errors that may interfere with network operation.

Essentially, higher-level problems can be identified at the outset by locating network services and servers and then measuring their performance. As networks rely more on higher-level services, the initial certification of the network expands to include advanced tests for compensation purposes.

For more information from Agilent Technologies: www.rsleads.com/308cn-252

Ganimian is product manager, network systems test division, Agilent Technologies, Colorado Springs, Colo.

Technology Industry

Turn a network live the right way - Infrastructure

Communications News, August, 2003 by Chuck Ganimian

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