JULY 26, 2010 By Stephen Hardy -- Carrier-neutral Ethernet exchange CENX Inc. will use equipment from EXFO Inc. (NASDAQ: EXFO, TSX: EXF) to provide its customers with off-net service-level agreement (SLA) monitoring for Carrier Ethernet services, the two companies announced.
CENX will leverage EXFO’s BrixNGN Carrier Ethernet Service Assurance System to offer its customers the ability to monitor SLA’s end-to-end, including on links provided by carriers to which these customers are connected via CENX, say Eric Gillenwater, vice president of worldwide development at CENX, and Mark Towler, marketing specialist within the Service Assurance Division at EXFO. The monitoring service is available at what Gillenwater described as “a slight premium” above CENX customers’ existing programs.
The capability is available now in all CENX exchanges, Gillenwater and Towler say, and will also be offered in new exchange locations CENX expects to open later this year.
The new service in essence brings off-net SLA monitoring on net, Gillenwater and Towler assert. Without such a service, carriers hoping to monitor connections supplied by other carriers must deploy monitoring equipment at each of their customers’ premises, an expensive proposition that becomes more complicated the farther the off-net location is located from the carrier’s service footprint.
The new CENX service monitors each Ethernet virtual connection (EVC) from the CENX exchange to the off-net Ethernet service locations. Towler says the BrixNGN leverages a scalable, vendor-agnostic method to monitor any EVC. Buyers and sellers of the monitored EVC can access reports either via the CENX market web interface or via open APIs directly into their operational support systems (OSS). SLA reports can be customized for each carrier customer, Gillenwater says.
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