Assuring Railway Data Center Transformation Success With NETSCOUT
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
- NETSCOUT® Smart Visibility solution
- InfiniStreamNG® & Packet Flow Switch appliances
- vSTREAM™ virtual appliances
- nGenius® Visibility as a Service
Tech Stack
- Cisco ACI SDN
- VMware ESX virtual servers
- Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP)
- 100G network speeds
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
- Networks & Connectivity - Software-Defined Networking
Applicable Industries
- Railway & Metro
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The railway company’s heritage dates back more than 100 years, and today it is an early adopter of advance rail technologies, including autonomous track inspection to increase travel safety, “Smart yard” equipment to intelligently manage complex yard operations, and digital applications enabling truck drivers to streamline container drop-off and pick-up processes at terminals. With annual revenues approaching $300 billion, the company’s digital transformation activities have enabled it to increase operating efficiencies for customers and employees alike. As part of earlier digital transformation initiatives targeted at streamlining service delivery, the company implemented Positive Train Control (PTC), Unified Train Controls System (UTCS), Train Yard Execution System (TYES) solutions, all of which are assured by the nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution. The company’s information technology (IT) team also uses the nGeniusONE performance analytics platform and NETSCOUT visibility to monitor critical applications, such as IBM MQ middleware, Web-based utility apps, and Unified Communications (UC) solutions.
The Challenge
The railway company was committed to transforming its data center operations. This included plans for implementing Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN), Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP), introducing VMware ESX virtual servers, and upgrading to 100G network speeds. Alongside this transformation, the company’s data center operations were also transitioning to a hybrid data center environment that would include a new co-location (Co-Lo) facility. While IT leadership was intent on realizing data center modernization efficiencies, they were aware these new architecture boundaries required additional visibility for effective network and application monitoring, as well as reporting and troubleshooting. In short, they needed the same NETSCOUT Smart Visibility sources and real-time analytics performance already established in their current-day data center environment.
The Solution
The IT team is assuring the success of the railway’s data center transformation by leveraging NETSCOUT’s next-generation performance analytics, smart visibility, and advanced subject matter expertise. With this solution, the IT team is complementing its legacy nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to include NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG software appliances supporting 100G network speeds and providing needed smart visibility for the newly deployed Cisco SDN architecture and additional Co-Lo data center environment. Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) Software for Certified Packet Flow Switch 7120, which supports high performance in the ACI SDN environment by monitoring both logical and physical connections. In addition, this NETSCOUT packet broker solution complements the Cisco spineand-leaf design’s scalability, reliability, and high performance by load balancing traffic flow in the data center, as well as dynamically managing packet forwarding at scale. The IT team is also taking advantage of NETSCOUT’s Fabric Manager technology to pre-stage packet broker changes in advance of a maintenance window, without disrupting the current configuration. vSTREAM virtual appliance, which provides VMware ESX service assurance by monitoring server-to-server traffic in the new virtual server environment.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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