MCI performance measurement server

MCI is one of the world's largest Tier 1 Telcos, owning and operating network facilities throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa , and the Asia-Pacific region.

As part of its quality commitment, MCI guarantees network performance to its IP customers. Amongst the performance parameters guaranteed by MCI are network latency and IP jitter, parameters not normally measured by network switches. Thus separate devices are needed to generate packets and measure jitter and latency.

Originally, MCI used Cisco 2600 routers to measure IP jitter and latency. These routers were installed in parallel with the data switches, their traffic paths being identical to the paths traversed by customer using the network. The 2600 units were running SA Agent , an application that supports the kind of testing required.

MCI found that SA Agent was designed for Enterprise level networks, but because of its architecture, it was not scalable to the size of network managed by MCI. Also, the Cisco 2600 equipment as configured was expensive.

Sangoma and Penguin Computing provided a solution based on high quality rack mount PCs with Sangoma S5147 PCI dual port T1 and E1 cards installed. The system runs under Linux. Open source utilities controlled by scripts perform the testing and alarm generation. Alarms are transmitted directly to the Network Operations Center . Routine results are transmitted to a central SQL server.

The rather elegant solution built by MCI has no proprietary software at all. The operating system and utilities are all open source, and simple scripts are used for configuration and management.