Science & Technology
Science and Technology
Science and Technology 
Wed, January 21, 2009
XO Communications : XO Communications Offers New Tools to Help Businesses Improve the Performance of Applications Across Their
HERNDON, VA--(Marketwire - January 21, 2009) - XO Communications (
With the introduction of [ XO Applications Performance Management ], XO Communications is giving XO MPLS IP-VPN customers even greater levels of visibility and control to maximize the performance of applications such as video, voice over IP (VoIP), point-of-sale transactions, Oracle and SAP across their entire networks. With XO Applications Performance Management, XO MPLS IP-VPN offers one of the most comprehensive, application-aware, wide area networking solutions that help businesses increase applications and network performance, improve the end user experience and optimize the use of bandwidth across the network for greater cost efficiencies.
"Today, businesses must confront a number of challenges in getting the greatest performance and return on investment from their corporate networks despite the increased complexity and volume of applications they are running over their networks," said Brent Spooner, director of data and managed services at XO Communications. "With our application aware networking solutions, XO Communications is providing businesses with the tools that give them greater control, performance and the benefits that they expect through the convergence of voice, data and video over a single IP network infrastructure."
Businesses face a multitude of factors that can create poor network performance, including rogue network applications, application misconfiguration, and computer viruses. Each of these factors can result in delayed transaction times, degradation of VoIP call quality, inability to access applications and decreased productivity. According to Ted Chamberlin, research director, Gartner, "The key to application performance starts with gaining application visibility across application users, application owners and the network organization to understand application performance expectations. This is an ongoing process. As application portfolios change, application use changes, and the enterprise must continuously maintain application visibility."
XO Applications Performance Management helps businesses resolve these issues by providing real-time and historical network, server and applications statistics. This enhanced, panoramic visibility enables network managers to quickly identify performance issues, determine if they are application or network specific, and make adjustments to bandwidth and Class of Service settings to optimize maximum network efficiency and bandwidth utilization. Specifically, XO Applications Performance Management can help businesses:
-- Increase revenue and production capabilities; -- Optimize bandwidth expenditures; -- Improve the identification and repair of virus and worm attacks; -- Reduce application mean time to repair (MTTR); -- Lower the number of trouble tickets and support calls; -- Reduce network configuration time; -- Plan network upgrades and new applications; -- Manage traffic at all network locations through one web-based user interface; and -- Improve end user productivity.
XO Applications Performance Management is fully integrated with XO MPLS IP-VPN, XO's private, managed wide area networking solution that enables businesses to connect offices, customers and partners and converge a wide range of voice, video and data applications over a single IP network infrastructure. Customers have access to network and applications performance statistics through a private web-based interface and can select between three service tiers depending on their network needs and requirements:
-- Tier 1 - Network Performance: Provides a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute snapshot of network performance, including: - Analysis of physical access type, port and circuit; - Traffic flows by location from the physical to the application layer; - Live views of service-level metrics such as packet delay, packet delivery ratio, Jitter and availability; - End-to-end performance validation of every XO Class of Service and bandwidth use by Class of Service; and - Network layer troubleshooting alarms. -- Tier 2 - Network and Applications Performance: Provides all of the capabilities of Tier 1, plus: - Protocol analyzer capabilities that capture live traffic of applications across all locations; - Autodiscovery of applications, services and users across the entire network; - Monitoring of server connect and response times; and - Threshold alarms for applications and servers. -- Tier 3 - Network, Applications and VoIP Performance: Provides all of the capabilities of Tier 1 and 2, plus: - VoIP performance troubleshooting; - Autodiscovery of VoIP calls, call managers and handsets; - Individual call forensics, including MOS score and Jitter measurements; and - Long-term VoIP performance trending reports for network readiness assessments.
Metastorm Deploys XO MPLS IP-VPN and XO APM for Application Aware IP Network
One company already benefiting from XO Application Performance Management and XO MPLS IP-VPN is [ Metastorm ], a leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Analysis (BPA), and Enterprise Architecture (EA) software for aligning strategy with execution. Metastorm utilizes XO MPLS IP-VPN and XO Applications Performance Management to support the company's VoIP, Internet access, storage area networking and data applications. "XO Applications Performance Management has given us a detailed look at how our applications are performing across the network and to effectively report network activity," said Steve Wenzel, network engineer at Metastorm. "With this capability we have been able to troubleshoot, diagnose and fine tune many of our applications to increase performance and stability."
For more information about XO Applications Performance Management, go to[ http://xo.com/smb/data/ipvpn/Pages/APM.aspx ]. To learn more about the features and benefits of XO Applications Performance Management, listen to a podcast from XO Communications here:[ http://xo.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/business-services/data-and-internet-services/mpls-ip-vpn-service/APM_Podcast.mp3 ].
XO Applications Performance Management was developed with XO technology partner Fluke Networks® and incorporates the more comprehensive elements of its Visual Performance Manager solution.
About XO Communications
XO Communications, a subsidiary of XO Holdings, Inc. (