OPNETWORK 2007 Achievment Awards

BEST OF OPNETWORK AWARD WINNERS

BEST TECHNICAL PAPER
Joseph S. Gomes, Mira Yun, Hyeong-Ah Choi, Jae-Hoon Kim,
JungKyo Sohn, Hyeong In Choi
George Washington University
Providing Strict Quality of Service in HSDPA for Real Time Services

BEST PROJECT BRIEFING
Nathan R. DeWitt
IBM Global Services
Delivering Optimization Services with OPNET Solutions

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

Outstanding ROI: Efficiency Gain
Awarded to a customer who has achieved clear, demonstrated ROI from OPNET solutions, by improving efficiency within their organization.
Kirk Bedevian
Verizon GNS - Transport and IT

Project
As a large Long Distance Carrier, our network has been growing and evolving over the years. Currently with over 69,000 route miles of fiber and a presence in hundreds of markets, thousands of circuits are routed over the transport network. The challenge is keeping up with future demands in the most cost effective way while meeting customer expectations for reliability and survivability.

For years the traditional method was building a network based on SONET rings. We used OPNET SP Guru Network Planner to help us build these rings in the most cost-effective manner. As the demands and the number of rings in the network grew, we thought that a mesh-based network would be more efficient and less costly, but we needed to prove this and present a recommendation to executive management.

The Transport Planning team discussed the approach we would take to build our case. First we created a traffic matrix by projecting (over the next three years) 7% growth of existing traffic between the 23 cities with the largest traffic demands. Then we applied this traffic matrix to two Scenarios for comparison: our “Present Mode of Operation (PMO)” which was our SONET Ring infrastructure, and the “Future Mode of Operation (FMO)” which was a SONET Mesh network. Inputs accurately represented our cost structure. The Bill of Materials report was produced for each Scenario and year, to determine total costs.

With detailed network costs nicely represented in an Excel spreadsheet format, it was very easy to perform a direct cost comparison between the two Scenarios. In addition, we used OPNET SP Guru Transport Planner to run several Failure Analysis scenarios on our FMO model to better understand its survivability potential. The end the results supported our expectations, and produced real data with which to make our case. Our findings were included in a company Network Planning Letter that was presented to management, and we received approval to move ahead with a Mesh build in 2007.

Outstanding ROI: Problem Prevention
Awarded to a customer who has achieved clear, demonstrated ROI from OPNET solutions, by avoiding problems before they occur.
Anthony Riccoboni
Citigroup

Project
On a monthly basis Citigroup’s Global Network Control Center (GNCC) handles upwards of 20,000 device changes on the network, and can add or remove dozens of devices on a weekly basis. Tracking these changes and ensuring that they are performed correctly is an absolute necessity; network downtime due to mistakes could spell financial disaster.

In an effort to create an accurate and consistent view of the network, Citigroup made a strategic decision to implement OPNET’s Hierarchical VNE Server and SP Sentinel for automated network integrity and security assurance. Citigroup looks to OPNET’s solution to help reduce/eliminate the number of severity 1 issues in the network that are within their control. The end goal is to proactively identify network design issues before they become service affecting to their customers.

The initial implementation tracks close to 30,000 devices worldwide. Configuration data is imported from Citigroup’s AlterPoint solution into OPNET’s VNE Server to enable SP Sentinel’s automated analysis. By generating NetDoctor reports on a regular basis, Citigroup has been able to quickly and easily identify potential business impacting issues, such as HSRP configuration errors, overlapping network statements, inconsistent port speed settings, and mismatched MTU sizes.

Based on OPNET’s SP Sentinel audit analysis report, in the month of June alone 113 business impacting issues were identified and repaired.

Significant Technical Challenge Solved
Awarded to a customer who has applied OPNET solutions to solve a really challenging problem.
Michael Zima
PACE Lab, Rockwell Collins, Inc.

Project
Rockwell Collins is designing a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) scenario to evaluate the Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT) protocol performance in an Adriatic Sea scenario. The technical challenge of this project is creating a federated simulation that runs in real-time, providing more effective operational scenarios within the OPNET discrete event simulation environment. The team integrated the OPNET Modeler scenario (containing live terrain data) with their custom software over System-In-the-Loop (SITL), by utilizing MAK VR-Forces over the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office’s High Level Architecture (HLA) specification. All federates were able to run in real-time, enabling them to evaluate the protocol efficiently. The resulting benefit is better war fighting capabilities for our soldiers.

Significant Technical Challenge Solved
Awarded to a customer who has applied OPNET solutions to solve a really challenging problem.
Michael Zima
PACE Lab, Rockwell Collins, Inc.

Outstanding Best-Practices Implementation
Awarded to a customer who has established best-practices within their organizations based on OPNET solutions.
John Arany
Bank of Montreal

Project
Bank of Montreal has broadly instrumented their application infrastructure to enable proactive performance management, including 30,000 desktops and servers throughout the organization. ACE traces are captured on demand, as well as continuously. This enables rapid troubleshooting of performance problems, and provides application profiling as input to network capacity management.

ACE is an integral part of the performance team’s tool set. It expands their capability to measure end users’ response times in production environments. Utilizing ACE, the team has established a reputation throughout the enterprise for quickly diagnosing and resolving application performance issues. Consequently, their skills are called upon on a daily basis.

ACE is also utilized in the (predeployment) Lab to profile application behavior, predicting performance with 95% accuracy.

Outstanding Best-Practices Implementation
Awarded to a customer who has established best-practices within their organizations based on OPNET solutions.
S. Rusty Sailors, Mark Klausner, John Gallucci, Dale Bardin, John Mangan Steven Carrillo, Dan Kepner and the entire Rapid-PMVA team
BAE Systems

Project
Rapid-PMVA (Performance Engineering, Models-Simulations, Visualization & Analysis) is an OPNET-based approach applied to assist in the rapid analysis of new systems or of existing systems that are experiencing challenges.

This capability has allowed BAE Systems to assist various customers in rapidly visualizing future architectures based on very low impact captures against their As-Is systems or even their prototypes - the validity and credibility of this empirical approach has resulted in very strong and favorable responses from both the IC and DoD community and has paved the way for entry in many of our emerging programs.

For a net-centric ISR environment, within 2 hours, Rapid-PMVA has allowed us to provide a "thin slice" of architecture to get a quick understanding of existing or projected capabilities. The following simple, but effective approach has been applied:
* CAPTURE: accomplish performance captures against a live system,
* ANALYZE: perform very quick but valuable analysis of the live system captures and quick predictions of possible alternatives
* MODEL: import those captures, system topology and system behaviors into our modeling environment
* ANALYZE: analyze those models using alternative cases to those actually captured
* SYTHESIZE: create new applications of those models, fill in missing capabilities and extrapolate their empirical based behaviors or their geographical locations to a distributed topology
* ANALYZE: perform analysis of the enhanced capabilities or geographically distributed system
* VISUALIZE: couple the geographically distributed model into a visualization tool, and then develop and apply sensors aboard platforms to allow the customers to see how their system could potentially be loaded - this visualization could easily be extended from the 2D to the 3D realm (SIM Dome)
* ANALYZE: perform analysis against alternatives of the platforms, sensors, and their collections as well as the underlying net-centric architecture

Partnering and Teamwork:
Applying Rapid-PMVA with the A3I process approach integrates both the internal and external customers into the process and very strong customer feedback indicates a high level of satisfaction and confidence in the BAE Systems team.

Value:
Traditionally, performance engineering, using software capture agents, has not been directly coupled to models and simulations and visualization has not been loosely-coupled through models and simulations to performance engineering. Rapid-PMVA takes these normally disparate elements and in some cases tightly couples them through the OPNET integrated tool suite and in other cases through loosely coupled relevant tools.
This integrated capability allows the rapid propagation of concepts throughout the process in a very short amount of time with a high level of credibility. This saves the customer money and makes BAE Systems more competitive and valuable.
Without exception, live demonstrations to potential customers have proven the effectiveness and direct positive impact on perceived BAE Systems value on new business opportunities.

Outstanding Best-Practices Implementation
Awarded to a customer who has established best-practices within their organizations based on OPNET solutions.
Anonymous
Large Commercial Enterprise

Project
This organization cannot afford website downtime or web application failures. However, as they were deploying new web applications, they began to experience a marked increase in website downtime and application problems that impacted customers. They estimated that only 50-60% of issues were being resolved, many after 2-4 weeks time spent diagnosing the root cause of the problem.

The organization turned to OPNET Panorama to determine the source of problems. With Panorama, they are able to continually monitor application performance, detecting when it is skewing out of normal range, and pinpointing the root cause. The huge volume of measurements analyzed by Panorama provides unique insight into application behavior. The lead systems engineer notes that Panorama “does all the legwork for us” so that IT staff can fix the problems, increasing customer satisfaction and web site performance.

The organization has experienced an additional benefit by implementing Panorama – finger-pointing between IT departments has been reduced, as the root cause of performance problems is identified more rapidly and conclusively.