Shouldering The Load

With the help of solution providers and vendors, telecom carriers are beefing up their networks in response to growing pressure to develop an infrastructure that can support ever-growing Internet traffic from organizations of all sizes.

One VAR at the forefront is Nominum, a Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of IP-address infrastructure solutions. Just last month, the company joined the Juniper Networks J-Partner OSS & Network Management Alliance with an eye toward developing joint solutions that will enable more effective IP-address management on mission-critical networks. The companies intend to co-develop a high-performance network infrastructure with highly available, configurable and scalable Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services for broadband Internet applications and mobile connectivity.

By combining Juniper's E-series edge-router platform with the Nominum Foundation Dynamic Configuration Server (DCS), the companies will give carriers increased network availability and performance, and will enable service providers to support many subscribers with differentiated services.

Tom Tovar, Nominum's vice president of business development, says the increasing demand for voice, video and gaming applications is motivating telecom carriers to make the switch to more powerful network infrastructures.

"As service providers begin offering these new services, there [will be] a growing interest in using DHCP to integrate with the network elements," he says.

Tovar says the partnership will offer many improvements over standard network architectures, including the ability to support always-on networks via Nominum's DCS open-standard failover capabilities and Juniper's E-series reliability and redundancy; increased service availability because Nominum's DCS can be configured on the fly; better extensibility of internal business logic for IP-address lease allocation; and increased revenue and reduced operational costs, thanks to the solution's granular IP configuration and QoS levels, which let service providers introduce and manage value-added services as needed.

"Customers are turning away from static PPPoE [Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet] to dynamic DHCP, and they want more from their DHCP server," Tovar says. "Some carriers are looking to deploy totally new architectures, and in other cases they're putting a new server behind their existing architectures."

Nominum already works with a variety of carrier-class customers, including British Telecom, Verio, Samsung Networks, Asahi Net, Colt Telecom, NTL, Telewest Communications and KPN.

Whether carriers decide to make large migrations or modest changes over time, Nominum's DHCP expertise is key to their success, says Tony Scarfo, Juniper's vice president of partner management.

"Nominum does a much better job than traditional DHCP server solution providers at getting better access for high-performance applications, such as VoIP, video and gaming," Scarfo says. *