Digital Island, a global IP network, optimizes the integration of architecture and technology to accelerate the deployment of applications to local markets worldwide. The Digital Island Applications Network bypasses the public Internet to provide the first reliable network solution for global Internet applications. The Applications Network, a high-availability network with a distributed-star architecture, provides multinational corporations with the reliability, security and performance needed to deploy business-critical applications. Digital Island currently has direct connections to 16 countries and 24 points of presence (POPs), with POPs added worldwide on a regular basis.

Digital Island has four strategically-located data centers in Honolulu, London, New York, and Santa Clara. The network's unique star topology enables its digital content to appear as if it resides locally on every continent. In addition, Digital Island uses an ATM backbone to reliably interconnect their data centers.

Digital Island Addresses Industry Need for Quality of Service

There is currently no standard or formal definition for Quality of Service for Internet applications. Historically, the Internet has offered a "best effort" level of service, defined as basic Internet connectivity with no service guarantees or IP packet prioritization. Because of Digital Island's unique global star-network architecture, the company has the capacity to offer a level of Quality of Service that is unavailable on the public Internet today.

Digital Island provides a Quality of Service guarantee based on throughput delivered to an end user. This guarantee provides the necessary performance and reliability to pass business-critical data over the Internet.

"The key to Quality of Service is ensuring reliability and performance based on throughput," said Allan Leinwand, Digital Island's vice president of engineering and chief technology officer. "To ensure maximum security, reliability and performance, Digital Island is dedicated to implementing the most advanced hardware and software on its network."

Digital Island provides a constant supply of available bandwidth to handle large volume data and business-critical Internet applications 24 hours a day, seven days a week without interruption, guaranteed. Digital Island's data centers house multiple, load-balanced NT-based and UltraSPARC servers coupled to a fault-tolerant RAID array that can store terabytes of data. As a Cisco Powered Network, Digital Island uses the latest router technology from Cisco Systems to provide global priority routes in and around the public Internet infrastructure. The Network Operations Center (NOC) uses Hewlett-Packard OpenView Network Node Manager to provide immediate notification and constant monitoring of all resources to ensure the highest quality of service.

HP OpenView Network Node Manager Ensures Delivery of Quality of Service

Digital Island uses Network Node Manager on NT to monitor its network of Cisco routers, switches, and servers. Network Node Manager is Hewlett-Packard OpenView's network management solution. OpenView offers users integrated network, system, application and database management for multi-vendor distributed computing environments to help customers improve IT service and reduce operating costs.

Network Node Manager helps Digital Island evaluate network performance, preempt network disruption and anticipate the impact of network growth of realignment. Network Node Manager provided Digital Island with a central point to receive alerts. This is an important consideration for Digital Island because of the complexity and far-reaching nature of its network. Because of its open architecture, Network Node Manager receives alerts from all the various systems monitoring different parts of Digital Island's network and present that consolidated information in an intuitive, graphical format to the viewer. Network Node Manager's ability to map the entire network also helped to make this information more useful in resolving network events and maintaining Digital Island's QoS.

Digital Island fully exploits the functionality of Network Node Manager for creating traps and thresholds to help the company maintain its mission-critical network. For example, the company proactively manages the thresholds on its ATM backbone and Cisco systems, as well as monitoring network response times. This ability to define thresholds for data collected by Network Node Manager to trigger an event when network conditions threaten resource availability is important network providers because it enables them to create a proactive service management environment.

An important consideration for Digital Island was that Network Node Manager was built upon a distributed and scalable architecture to efficiently manage environments of any size. To manage it's complex network across 16 countries and multiple points of presence (POP), Digital Island needed a reliable, business-class network management solution.

"We selected Network Node Manager because it provided an open platform for our network management," Leinwand said. "When dealing with a complex network like ours, integration of information is critical. In addition, we wanted to implement our solutions on NT because it is a familiar platform for our NOC and NT is a strategic direction for HP OpenView."

NNM was designed to work in a heterogeneous environment. It has the largest number of integrated partner applications in the marketplace, providing Digital Island with investment protection by ensuring that Network Node Manager will work with whatever existing applications the company has in place. Network Node Manager's application program interfaces (APIs) provides a quicker and easier way to leverage existing applications and hardware.

Network Node Manager's open platform enabled Digital Island to easily extend the product with bolt-on applications they needed. For example, Digital Island could integrate information from Network Node Manager with other solutions, such as products from Empire Technology, which Digital Island uses as its systems management agent. Network Node Manager's event logs could be used to correlate events, an important task in identifying trends and finding bottlenecks in the network. Network Node Manager and Empire Technology products enables Digital Island to proactively check application uptime - a key quality of service capability.

In addition to monitoring its network, Digital Island also uses Network Node Manager for fault and configuration management and some performance management including monitoring BGP events, monitoring link status events and looking for IP address configuration problems. Network Node Manager offers controlled discovery and layout, robust data collection, event collection and filtering, and report generation tools for troubleshooting and planning. Automated notification can be defined for events that require immediate attention, reducing the demands on administrators.

"We have found Network Node Manager to be a viable tool for global network management and feel it provides a solid foundation for building a world-class management solution for ISPs," added Leinwand. "For this reason, we are working closely with Hewlett-Packard OpenView to successfully drive product design and the addition of features such as pre-configurations for ISPs and customer and link management to continue our partnership with OpenView to bring the best service to our customers".