Thanks to APG, Hughes predicts
failures before they happen…

About Hughes Network Systems
Hughes Network Systems is the global leader in providing broadband satellite networks and services for enterprises, governments, small businesses, and consumers. Since introducing the Ku-band very small aperture terminal (VSAT) over 20 years ago, Hughes has been the technology and market leader in satellite networks, with over 1.5 million’ systems shipped to customers in over 100 countries.

Challenge

Hughes [Network Systems], being a network service provider, is always looking for ways to provide more value to our customers. In 2006, we decided that we needed to provide more fault and performance information to our enterprise customers and embarked upon our "Network Management Portal" program. The NM Portal was designed to be used by operations, internal customer engineers, as well as customer facing. It is the single place to go to find information on a customer enterprise network.

Solution

We determined that the lack of tools to look at time based performance data was impacting our business from a historical analysis perspective as well as capacity planning. We installed APG onto one of the EMC SMARTS servers and within hours were producing graphs of all of the performance objects that our (at the time) two SMARTS AM/PM servers were collecting. I performed the installation myself and found it straight forward and easy to do in well under an hour including configuration. After presenting the resultant reports and costs of APG, it was an easy sell to management and we had our first APG purchase done.

As subsequent to that purchase, we realized some of the custom reporting tools built into APG and started producing reports that were emailed to various engineers and managers at Hughes. These reports have been a big help in our capacity planning and don’t require the users to even log into APG to receive them. Having the saved custom reports also ensures a consistent format and scale which can eliminate potential issues (think Mars mission...). This summarizes our initial APG installation - it was almost too easy — just install, configure it to talk to the AM/PM instances, add a couple users, and it does the rest with zero input required to get all the most requested information.

Now, we had AM/PM information from 20+ AM/PM domains with 40,000+ devices including the custom values in dynamic model plus the ICMP data from the APG SNMP Poller and needed to present it. The APG Portal front end provided a very powerful tool for creating highly customized reports. The topology had to be segregated by customer and further broken down by class — the APG reporting tool made this a 5 minute task using simple filters. The APG Portal includes several API interfaces to facilitate single sign on which we were able to quickly implement.

We have also implemented the “Reports on Notifications” from Watch4Net and it is providing excellent out of the box reports on the thousands of Notifications created by EMC SMARTS. This is providing both our external customers and operations staff a simple way to get some history on the Notifications - also something commonly requested by everyone!

Result

As a network service provider Hughes must be responsive to our customers’ needs. Utilizing EMC SMARTS we have been able to do an excellent job of fault detection and isolation, however this is only one piece of the management challenge. More often, it is the analysis of performance data that is used to predict failures before they happen and the analysis of historical data (performance and notifications) to ensure a full quality circle to prevent failures from re-occurring.
APG from Watch4Net allows us to perform those analysis functions and fills the large voids in the SMARTS product line. Without APG, the value of the SMARTS software is greatly diminished to the point that we can’t imagine using SMARTS without APG.

Karl Fosburg
Senior Director of Systems Integration and Principal Network Management Architect
Hughes Network Systems
Germantown, MD
USA