[February 7, 2005]

Hopkins Public Health School Deploys Netcordia's VoIP Module

BY JOHANNE TORRES

VoIP-enabled products and services have been making their way into educational institutions to ease the communications amongst offices and campuses in multiple locations. The deployments have helped institutions to handle demanding student inquiries and other telecommunications needs. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is the latest educational institution to deploy a VoIP module system. Netcordia, a provider of network analysis products, will be helping the Baltimore, MD-based school to deploy its VoIP module as part of its NetMRI service plan. NetMRI for VoIP is an automated enterprise network appliance that identifies difficult to find issues that can significantly affect VoIP quality of service (QoS).

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducts extensive disease research which demands that the institution implements a better data network. Over the years, as the school has grown, so has its network, to over 200 network devices and 3500 computers. They have had success using the NetMRI during the expansion and decided to deploy the VoIP module to go along with it.

"The ability of NetMRI VoIP to identify poor call paths and then isolate the issue down to the device or system is very helpful," said Kevin Stone, senior network administrator at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "NetMRI-VoIP provides key useful information that we can act upon, in a manner that is intuitive and accessible. It is more than just graphs and statistics- it identifies the real issues to resolve to maintain high quality."

NetMRI's VoIP module determines the actual quality of IP phone calls by evaluating Call Data Records (CDRs) for delay, jitters and dropped packets. It also correlates abnormalities with other contributory network events, providing detail to solve the issues. NetMRI's VoIP module pulls CDRs from Cisco's CallManager system.

The new VoIP module also provides assessment of whether the existing IP network can support VoIP. It uses Cisco's SAA protocol, already built into most Cisco routers and switches, to create 'synthetic transactions' or simulated voice traffic to determine viability based upon the measured delay, jitter and dropped packet counts. This leverages the installed infrastructure, without buying or adding probes or external devices.

Johns Hopkins previously deployed the NetMRI, minus the VoIP module. Key features of NetMRI include its "network expert in a box" correlation engine, its Scorecard that provides easily understandable reports for both executives and network engineers, and its ease of installation and use.

Netcordia
www.netcordia.com