Viavi Solutions

A global electronic commerce and cloud computing company was facing significant service issues on its leased dark fiber, which interconnects their global data centers and transports all network services and applications for their customers. The company was experiencing several network outages due to fiber breaks, which affected many of their customers who could not access the website or their applications. The company's dark fiber vendor was often slow to dispatch a technician to troubleshoot the network, sometimes taking hours or even days. The service troubleshooting and restoration was so poor in some areas that the company decided to find their own fiber monitoring solution to quickly pinpoint issues and push dark fiber vendors for faster mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

Cisco's ASR 5000 Series is designed to address the high-performance requirements of the next generation of mobile Internet. It contains real-time integrated, session-state intelligence, enabling it to effectively manage IP-based flows on a per-session basis. A significant challenge that Cisco faced was how to efficiently test the stateful reliability of the ASR’s enhanced charging service function, which is part of the packet data network gateway (PGW), at a highly scaled level of network traffic load. The enhanced charging service (ECS) function is designed to identify and manage traffic on a per-session basis, helping develop tiered and detailed billing schemes based on mobile subscribers' usage. The challenge was to efficiently and reliably test the ECS function with an array of traffic types. The ECS is part of the LTE PGW, adding an additional complexity to the challenge of testing; requiring that the IP application flows be delivered in GTP encapsulated tunnels.

A large global technology company based in California was running SolarWinds Orion instances across their IT estate. The company needed to quickly ascertain the impact and their exposure due to the SUNBURST hack of December 2020. The IT team was running VIAVI Observer platform in multiple strategic datacenters around the world. The IT networking services team were also using SolarWinds Orion software. The production services were running a version of SolarWinds Orion that did not contain the vulnerability. However, a second, non-production demo instance, built in June 2020 for a 30-day trial period to explore new features, did contain the vulnerability. The key goal was to understand if any confidential or sensitive data had been accessed or exfiltrated. This was of particular concern given the nature of the solutions provided by the organization concerned, as reputational damage would have long-term consequences to current and future business relationships.