Riverbed SteelCentral NetPlanner
Predictive multi-layer network planning

Benefits & Features:

Key Benefits

NetPlanner help carriers, ISPs, government agencies, and enterprises facilitate service and technology deployments, meet service level agreements, maximize existing network investments, and obtain significant ROI. NetPlanner’s in-depth analysis of “what-if” scenarios can compare pre- and post-change impact on network infrastructure from a performance perspective.

• Cost-effectively plan network requirements to support the deployment of new applications and technologies such as VoIP and IPv6
• Right-size network capacity to support projected traffic growth
• Minimize risk by evaluating different network architectures and technology migration plans
• Achieve service level compliance through QoS and traffic engineering
• Improve network survivability and security
• Accelerate troubleshooting of routing and network configuration problems

Key Features

• Automatically create a high-fidelity network model encompassing topology, devices, configurations, and traffic using configuration and operational data from the production environment and other network management systems
• Leverage best-in-class analytics to evaluate a wide range of “what-if” scenarios in a virtual environment without making changes to the production network routing such as VPN or QoS configuration
• Analyze network capacity usage to identify trends, threshold violations, inefficiencies, atypical behavior, and the timing of future upgrades to links and tunnels to meet service level objectives
• Automatically design and optimize network topologies based on user-configurable priorities for cost, resiliency, and performance- related criteria such as link utilization and reduced delay
• Visualize all VPN deployments, their underlying topology, traffic flows, and relevant KPIs from a single browser dedicated to VPN analysis
• Import flow information from Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler for realistic traffic flow information when performing capacity analysis and planning

Unique Capabilities

• Unlike other vendor solutions, NetPlanner’s high fidelity network model combines multiple sources of data to provide a more complete understanding of the network and deliver more accurate predictions of network behavior and performance
• NetPlanner supports a wider range of out-of-the-box analyses, in both breadth and depth, than other vendor solutions. The high level of detail in the network model and customizations allow planning with minimal network impact
• NetPlanner’s reporting capabilities are far superior to competitive products, providing the hard data to make calculated network planning decisions instead of just recording uncorrelated metrics
• Unique multi-layer planning and analysis capabilities with integration to SteelCentral NetProfiler and OpticalPlanner provide capabilities superior to nonintegrated point products

Features for Service Providers:

NetPlanner provides the following additional capabilities for service providers:

• Out-of-the-box auditing of BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, MPLS, and VPN configurations
• Service summary reports describing configured L2/L3 VPNs and VPLS instances
• IPv6 readiness assessments to evaluate a network’s ability to support required features prior to migration or deployment
• Specialized rules to verify subscription/oversubscription thresholds based on client interfaces and services
• BGP diagram showing neighbor relationships with internal and external peers and route reflectors
• IPv6 topology diagrams

Netplanner traffic center allows you to analyze and edit traffic and run what-if analyses, with flexible visualizations

Create rich network diagrams in ms visio for documentation and distribution with the Steelcentral Netmapper for Netplanner module

Netplanner survivability analysis report provides a high-level view of network survivability, with the ability to drill down into the details to pin point which parts of the network need attention

Branch assessment report provides site-level capacity information on utilization metrics for separate sites	Reduce the amount of money spent on unnecessary infrastructure with reports on underutilized high bandwidth sites	Periodic reports make planning easy by telling you exactly which parts of the network to focus on in the future

Network difference report provides a summary of the changes made to the network – for performance, routing, configuration, and per object differences, as well as highlighting any needed changes in performance

Rich set of network visualizations allow you see what is in your network at a glance. Examples shown here are link utilization, MPLS TE metrics and IPV4 protocol visualizations

Documentation:

Download the Riverbed SteelCentral NetPlanner Datasheet (.PDF)