A fundamental component of Meriton's Agile Optical Network, the Management Suite is the key to operational savings for the carrier through comprehensive and simplified NOC (Network Operations Centers)-ready management.

The suite's industry-leading, graphical software tools manage Meriton's portfolio of optical networking products, bringing ease of operation to every facet of network management: planning, installation, test and turn-up, remote monitoring, service provisioning, fault management, diagnostics, as well as network maintenance.

Not only does the Management Suite encompass the whole range of carrier operations, but it operates remotely. Almost every aspect of operations can be handled from the NOC, reducing the need for expensive truck rolls.

For those occasions that require field engineering, the Management Suite has craft terminals that provide all the functionality needed to manage a network element. Like the other members of the Management Suite, the craft terminals provide an intuitive graphical GUI for commissioning and diagnostic operations.

Another particularly convenient component of Meriton's Management Suite design is its OSS interface, which allows the system to integrate with the carrier's other support systems—such as fault management, billing, and provisioning.

Meriton's Management Suite combines the benefit of cost savings with its ability to reduce network down-time and simplify operations management.

Meriton's Management Suite is packed with features that help carriers to benefit from significant cost savings as well as rapidly realize revenue.

Network auto-discovery

One of the suite's key features is auto-discovery of the network's fiber and WDM topology. The technology underlying this feature is a standards-based GMPLS control plane, which enables all the network elements to auto-discover and communicate with each other. By simply connecting to a single gateway network element, the Management Suite can learn and automatically upload details of all the topology, equipment, and configuration of the network.

The Management Suite transforms the discovered data into a series of GUI windows that enable operators to visualize the network in multiple intuitive and easy-to-understand views. These windows include navigational trees and graphical representations of the network that break down into sub-network, lightpath, node, shelf, and service views.

Configuration with lightpath-centered management

The carrier's—and the customer's—primary concern is often the speed of turning up a new service. The Meriton Management Suite's advanced configuration management capability is designed to make lightpath and service provisioning fast and simple. The suite builds on the intelligence inherent in Meriton's network elements to speed up service provisioning across the network.

Although configuration and provisioning can be performed through CLI and TL1 commands, most Meriton Management Suite operators prefer the easy-to-use, point-and-click graphical interface. At the lightpath level, automatic provisioning can be as rapid and easy as selecting the two end-points and letting the Management Suite find the route.

At the node level, Meriton's template provisioning feature provides another method of speeding up configuration. The operator can provision one node, and then copy its configuration to the other similar nodes in the network.

With this kind of automation, a dynamic, service-ready network can be producing revenue in rapid order.

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Increasing network availability

Meriton knows that another vital concern of many carriers is to increase network availability and reduce down-time. The Meriton Management Suite improves the visibility and awareness of network operations, enabling the operator to detect degradation in performance and correct problems before they result in network outage. When failures do occur, the suite facilitates a rapid response.

Status monitoring

Meriton's Management Suite software is constantly monitoring all aspects of network operation. Any change in status, configuration, or performance detected by the system is immediately notified to all systems connected through management interfaces.

The Management Suite tracks the status of all equipment, lightpaths, and services, conveying event information to the operators through graphical and tabular views that include

• Event and log viewers
• Colored status icons on graphical views
• Status fields in summary reports

Performance monitoring

At the same time, the Management Suite is continuously monitoring and collecting comprehensive performance statistics from the network elements. Meriton's advanced software allows the operator to monitor performance data in real-time plots or historical views.

Performance data can easily be sorted and filtered, and also exported through the reporting system into files for later analysis. The operator can configure collection thresholds at the port or node level, and icons in the graphical views show at a glance exactly where data collection is taking place.

The system's end-to-end performance management and remote diagnostics allow the operator to detect service degradations before they develop into failures. For instance, reduced optical power levels often warn of impending bit errors, and Meriton's graphical optical power-level diagnostics let the operator catch the problem before it causes down-time.

Simplifying network management

The primary objective of Management Suite design is to reduce a carrier's operating expenses through the speed and simplicity of its provisioning, performance monitoring, and fault management operations.

The Meriton Management Suite is an intuitive, graphical, integrated network and element manager. At all levels—network, subnetwork, lightpath, node, fiber wavelength, card, port—Meriton's Management Suite simplifies network management. From the auto-discovery of a new network element or the automated routing of a lightpath to the bridge and roll of a lightpath for network optimization, Meriton's software automates the tedious, time-consuming tasks of network management.

From the highlighting of a single lightpath through the network and element views to the colored icons that indicate performance monitoring points or alarms, the graphical interface provides network data in easy-to-follow displays and tables designed for specific operations tasks. For instance, the lightpath view provides the ideal interface for service provisioning, the shelf view is best for maintenance purposes, and the statistical plots and graphs are invaluable for studying the network's performance.

From the ease of its administration tasks—such as software upgrade or database backup—to its comprehensive security management and reporting systems, Meriton's Management Suite demonstrates optical network management at its best.