Service Level Control Application – Get what you expect

Dynamically managing service quality needs

Business customers are not any longer happy to accept service level agreements to assure the quality of their outsourced services. Instead they are looking to obtain service guarantees that allow them to dynamically manage the quality of their service. This gives them the ability to decide where and when they want to increase or decrease the quality of their services letting them react to changing business needs and allowing them to better manage their operational costs.

The Elanti Service Management Systems’ Service Level Control Application gives end customers those crucial controls. Service Providers on the other hand will be able to ustilize their existing network resources better and offer highly differentiated service quality to a broader set of customers.

This decreases their capital and operational expenditures and increases their overall revenue streams.

The Elanti Service Level Control Application provides the VPN customer with the capability to directly control the class of service that individual services experience on their VPN. Best effort class can be used for run-of-the mill services such as email, but for real-time or other specialized services, a higher class of service can be directly enabled by authorized users from their desktop.

At the network edge, the edge switch/router will be configured to tag the appropriate packets with the class of service required. Inside the network, the Elanti Network Optimizer System (ENOS) has a unique class of service aware network optimizer that will route traffic, based on class of service, to maximize the network performance experienced by the customer’s service.

Solution overview:

Figure 1. Service Level Control Application

Figure 1 illustrates the interaction of the Elanti Service Level Control Application with the user and service provider’s infrastructure:

1. A customer, having successfully authenticated with the service management portal, requests dynamic traffic control to support a business function. This could for example be support for an important video-conference, or perhaps to provide temporary high priority to an inter-data-centre file transfer to assist in a disaster recovery process. A request for dynamic control might also originate directly under customer application control. A schedule might be a real-time request, or it might describe a requirement scheduled for some period in the future. A schedule might be recurring, to provide support for a regular Voice over IP (VoIP) teleconference for example.
   
   
2. The Elanti Service Level Control Application consults its service model and identifies the relevant service elements required to meet the customer requirement. Relevant service elements include the customer premises equipment supporting each end-point of the traffic requirement, the edge routers supporting the CPE, and may include customer application servers.
   
   
3. The Elanti Service Level Control Application constructs a service control trigger which it passes to the Elanti Network Optimizer System. The Elanti Network Optimizer System considers the impact of the service control requirement and if necessary, will optimize the routing of the core network to ensure the requirement is met.
   
   
4. The Elanti Service Level Control Application identifies the relevant control agent supporting the customer VPN and passes a control message to it containing details of the traffic requirement to it. Generally the control message will contain information describing the CPE to be configured, the protocol details, and the timing of the schedule. The Elanti Service Level Control Application agent acts immediately on a real-time requests, or adds the request to its schedule queue to act on later if the requirement is a future one.
   
   
5. At the nominated time the Elanti Service Level Control Application agent identifies the class of device supporting each end of the traffic requirement, chooses an appropriate adapter, and sends a dynamic configuration change to each of the relevant CPE. The dynamic configuration change ensures that appropriate packet marking occurs to support the required traffic
   
   
6. The customer data supporting the traffic requirement (marked green in this diagram) is then marked appropriately and delivered across the customer business solution in a manner appropriate to the traffic requirement. At the end of the schedule the changes are withdrawn and the network returns to its former configuration.
   
   

The Elanti Service Management Systems’ Service Level Control Application gives VPN customers the ability to dynamically manage the quality of their service. This gives customers the ability to quickly react on changing business needs and optimize their operational cost. Service providers are able to reduce their network and operational costs and broaden their market access by offering on demand service qualities.