"The ability to discover zero day vulnerabilities and identify the cause is a powerful capability for any company. There are likely to be numerous exploitable vulnerabilities in field-installed systems, including database and streaming media applications, routers, firewalls and network-attached storage systems that need remediation today. Mu offers a proactive security flaw detection system that can potentially reduce the number and severity of zero day exploits. "

Chris Christiansen
Vice President of Security Products and Services
IDC

VoIP, IPTV & IMS Architecture

Challenges

Service Assurance of next-generation IP services — or ensuring reliability, availability and security of services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), Internet Protocol-based TV (IPTV) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) — is one of the most critical issues facing service providers and their vendors. To compete and succeed, all next generation IP services must deliver an extremely high quality of experience.

With customers’ growing demand for high-value services, the inherent complexity and diversity of next generation networks, and the natural consequence of accelerated product development and deployment, the service quality problem is getting worse, not better.  According to InStat, worldwide cable telephony service revenues are on track to reach $12.6 billion in 2008, up from $10.7 billion in 2007. Total worldwide cable telephony subscribers are projected to reach 37 million by the end of 2008, and rise to over 64 million by 2012.

High Cost of Downtime

Achieving the service levels that customers expect means minimizing downtime. There are two types of network downtime:

• degradation, when a latency-sensitive service is slower than usual, perhaps even useless
• outright outage, when a service is unavailable

Both types of downtime incur significant costs for service providers. NSP Partners quantified many Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investments metrics including an online calculator.  These costs include:

• lost revenue
• customer churn
• avoidable support costs
• service level agreement (SLA) related penalties
• decreased average revenue per user (ARPU)

Solution

To address these challenges of reliability, availability and security, a rapidly growing number of service providers are turning to Mu’s service assurance solution. The Mu solution, including service-level traffic variations, helps eliminate quality issues including system crashes, distributed denial of service attacks, and more subtle issues like response-time latency and CPU utilization spikes. Proactively and continuously addressing these issues enables service providers to improve their bottom line.

To find out how the Mu solution helps leading service providers, refer to the following generic case studies:

• VoIP
• IPTV
• IMS

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