BBN Turns To Cable tron For Network Management

ISP will unplug homegrown product in favor of Spectrum

By Caryn Gillooly

BN Corp. plans to unplug its homegrown network-management software and standardize on Cabletron Systems Inc.'s Spectrum to manage its 5,000-router Internet service network. BBN now uses its own Automated Network Manager (ANM) product to manage its service network.

"We began to explore off-the-shelf solutions so we could focus on our core business of Internet connectivity rather than on our own in-house-developed tools," says David Caplan, a senior architect at BBN, in Cambridge, Mass. "We were looking fo r something to do what ANM does."

ANM polls all the routers on BBN's network at three-minute intervals to detect and isolate faults and to help the company maintain service-level agreements with its customers. ANM also ties into BBN's operational workflow through a Spectrum add-on developed for BBN. The Spectrum Enterprise Alarm Manager can, for example, send all router alarms to one particular help desk while sending server alarms to another. This feature is expected to be generally available early in 1998.

BBN also tested network-management products from Bull, Hewlett-Packard, Seagate Software, SunSoft, and others. Caplan says Spectrum "was the closest fit, especially in scalability."

Still, BBN wasn't looking for a broader enterprise-management platform that could be tied into its internal systems. "Eventually we'll use APIs wherever possible to hook this into the corporate management system," Caplan says.

Unlike some of its competitors, Cabletron has not made a significant effort to add sy stems management capabilities to Spectrum. If customers are looking for systems management, Cabletron sells BMC Software's Patrol product.

Cabletron and BBN wouldn't reveal the size of their contract, saying only that the provider will buy 16 SpectraServers, which cost about $15,000 each, as well as engineering services.

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