A large Telecom service provider used NetBrain to discover and document a 20,000 node network and saved over one million US dollars.

This well-known Telecom service provider won a five year, $650 million outsourcing contract to manage its customer's 20,000-node network across 650 sites. After the contract was signed, the first task was to perform network discovery and network documentation for the customer’s colossal network so that the network operation team could initiate its management. The delivery included a detailed inventory report and a set of site maps to document the network to pre-defined specifications.

A team of 22 network professionals was brought in to tackle this daunting challenge over a period of six months.  The team evaluated all available tools for the task, and decided to use NetBrain. Impressed with the automation capabilities NetBrain provided, they reduced the team size from 22 to 16 members and deployed 16 NetBrain workstations, 1 Enterprise Server and 1 Discovery Appliance .      

The first round of network discovery included Layer 2 and Layer 3 network discovery lasted about 12 hours with a few seed devices as inputs, and discovered a core network of about 20,000 routers, switches, firewalls, WAP, Load Balances, etc.  Then, with NetBrain’s smart mapping features, the team automatically generated over 1,000 L2 and L3 site maps to their required specifications. Complexities such as multiple username-password-community string, 18 in this case, and restricted live network access were all handled with NetBrain’s model-driven discovery engine.

The second round of the network discovery covered the IP Phone, Call manager, Wireless access point, cache engine and other network devices as defined by the contract.  Leveraging the NetBrain Discovery Appliance and first round results, 20,000 network devices of over 180 vendors/models were discovered in about 10 hours. The results were also documented with visual maps, in both native Q-map format and Microsoft Visio format.  NetBrain was then programmed to automatically re-discover the network every two months and generate a detailed inventory report of the entire network and any changes that were made.

“We are extremely satisfied with the speed and functionality of the NetBrain tool, ”the program manager for this project stated, “Using other methods, we would at best finish 25% of what we have done because many things, like creating network diagrams, would all have to be done manually.”  

With this simple discovery and documentation project, NetBrain enabled the company to save over one million US dollars.

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