As an increasing number of businesses undergo digital migration, all aspects of the digital user experience are becoming increasingly important. Both the external customer experience, delivered via web applications, and the internal employee experience, delivered via SaaS or internal enterprise applications, are being transformed by the digitalization process. This has increased the need to monitor the user experience to optimize and improve it. That has required the development of improved monitoring technologies, including those that track both network performance and the user experience via Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM).
While APM and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostic (NPMD) tools track networks, its processes, and throughput, DEM adds the ability to track the process and quality of the user experience. Doing that allows administrators to gain a complete picture of both the network and the user’s experience of it, allowing both quality and performance to be assured and providing positive business outcomes.
Requirements
In the process of digital transformation of businesses, a growing number of enterprise functions are being moved into the cloud. As mission-critical applications migrate, it is essential to maintain an optimal user experience that ensures operational continuity and an enhanced user experience.
A U.S. company specializing in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) decided to work with Lanner to use our hardware appliances for applications ranging from entry-level to high-end functionality.
They concluded Lanner network appliances have the feature sets they need including:
- Intel® x86 processors – A range of x86 processors chosen for Network-Optimized Performance, with packet virtualization and cryptography acceleration.
- Advanced LAN Bypass capability with bypass ports that allow for uninterrupted network traffic. If any in-line appliance is shut down or crashes, traffic throughput is maintained. Lanner’s design engineering has achieved improvements over typical bypass capability to enable higher reliability and greater control.
- Scalable hardware design with F.A.S.T. N.I.C. or PoE modules. F.A.S.T. N.I.C. support for 1G/10G/40G/100G Ethernet speeds in one or more modular slots where modular kits can be retrofitted via either a copper or fiber interface.
- Support for SDN/NFV architecture – provides traffic intelligence that is a digital transformation enabler. Together they provide digital service assurance with cross-platform support that spans existing physical networks as well as SDN and Network Virtualization architectures.
Solution
Our NCA-2510 is a 1U 19” rackmount network appliance with a virtualization-optimized design and an Intel® Atom™ C3958, C3758 or C3558 CPU (Denverton). It provides up to 16 cores of processing capability, a 10Gb interface for SFP+ and SR-IOV support, and Intel® AES-NI and Intel® QuickAssist Technology running at 20Gb, making it a superior solution for Digital Experience Monitoring, Network Performance Monitoring, Diagnostics and service assurance.
The NCA-6210 is a 2U x86 rackmount network appliance built on a second generation Intel® Xeon® scalable processor platform and C621/C627 chipset. It incorporates powerful networking processing capability, higher throughput for virtualization, and up to 640GB of DDR4 2666MHz REG DIMM system memory, supporting 1.5 times as much memory bandwidth as the previous generation Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers.
Between them, these two appliances provide a broad range of options for deploying DEM for enterprises.