Press Release
VPIsystems Offers OnePlanTM Disaster Planning Solution for Core Communications Networks
Specialized Planning System Enables Service Providers to Maintain Business Continuity During Natural and Man-Made Disasters
Holmdel, New Jersey (September 18, 2007) - As businesses increasingly rely on communications networks to support their mission-critical processes, communications service providers are discovering that disaster planning is no longer an option—business continuity is a necessity. Fortunately, service providers are not alone in their struggle to provide "always on" services. VPIsystems, the leading provider of network resource planning software and services for the global telecommunications industry, today released its OnePlanTM Disaster Planning solution for communications service providers, giving them the ability to effectively analyze the risk to their core networks from disasters and plan and design the appropriate corrective actions to mitigate that risk.
Service providers are facing a growing threat from natural and man-made disasters, with seven of the top ten property losses in the history of the U.S. occurring in the past six years1 and the U.S. National Weather Service predicting extreme weather to worsen in the face of ongoing climate change. But while hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist attacks are the types of disasters that most quickly come to mind when "disaster planning" is discussed, routine power outages and human error can also have a disastrous effect on networks and are far more likely and common. OnePlan Disaster Planning enables service providers to prepare for all disasters - from the catastrophic to the "mundane."
"Disaster planning is preferable to disaster recovery," said Mark Mortensen, senior vice president of Marketing, VPIsystems. "The costs of disaster recovery extend far beyond quantifiable CapEx and OpEx. They include the costs of unhappy customers, lost customers and ultimately, brand damage. The OnePlan Disaster Planning solution gives carriers the insight they need to measure and manage the true risks of disaster."
OnePlan Disaster Planning enables service providers to not only evaluate the impact of network failures, but also map these failures to bandwidth-hungry services like VoD, VoIP, and IPTV. It gives service providers the insight and analytical system needed to counter threats to their networks and the services riding on them by conducting two levels of analysis—current state and potential threat. The first level examines all network layers and their dependencies to ensure that network diversity on one layer isn't compromised by a common platform at another. It guides service providers as they determine the policies and protocols needed to meet their SLAs and other requirements. Finally, it determines where additional resources are needed to provide the redundancy necessary to support those requirements.
A second level of analysis involves "what if" scenarios across a range of disaster, network and temporal conditions. OnePlan Disaster Planning allows service providers to explore various scenarios and the impact they would have on customers, enabling them to prioritize network enhancements based on the likelihood of disaster and the level of customer impacted. In addition, it enables service providers to create multi-year plans for staged phases of disaster preparedness.
Primary features and benefits of OnePlan Disaster Planning include:
- Network Survivability Analysis, Enumerated Multi-Failure Analysis, Multi-Failure Survivability Design and SRLG (Shared Risk Link Group) features that enable service providers to analyze their networks across all domains, ensuring that they and their customers are truly protected at all layers
- Identification of alternate service routes that avoid or minimize downtime
- The ability to perform focused analysis that anticipates hot spots
- The ability to anticipate the service impacts of restricted or global network failures
- Cost-optimized network capacity augmentation plans that can survive network failures
About OnePlan
OnePlan offers communications service providers a single, cross-domain (geography, technology, discipline and network domain) integrated capacity and network planning capability, OnePlan has become the system of choice for any carrier planning transition to a next-generation, IP-enabled network. Through its modular design, OnePlan provides a scalable solution that can start as a single technology module, and grow to a high-availability system spanning multiple network layers where OnePlan automates all network planning, engineering and decommissioning activities.
About VPIsystems, Inc.
VPIsystems is the only provider of integrated capacity and network planning software and services for the global telecommunications industry. The company's OnePlanTM software system gives telecommunications and multi-service providers the ability to cohesively plan the financial, technical and marketing aspects of their network evolution, for all current and future network types. Headquartered in Holmdel, NJ, and with offices in Europe, Asia, and Australia, VPIsystems' software is used by over 150 communications service providers and network equipment manufacturers to assess current and future capacity needs, and optimally plan their QoS-constrained service networks and underlying transport infrastructure. For further information, visit us at www.vpisystems.com.
1Source: Insurance Information Institute (www.iii.org/media/facts/statsbyissue/catastrophes/)