ISP EMEA

Network monitoring and visibility for complex ISP environment

Toya is one of the biggest Internet Service Providers making digital TV, Internet and telephony available to 160.000 households in six cities in Poland. Its data network covers central Poland where Toya offers a complete portfolio of modern telecommunication services, mainly to Home and SOHO users.

Challenges

Cost-effective NetFlow export
Solution scalability across large data network
Improved network visiblity for peering optimalization and faster troubleshooting

Key Benefits

Better Price/Performance ratio compared to built-in NetFlow export capabilities of routers
Improved network performance thanks to complete IPv4/IPv6 traffic visibility
Drill-down to any communication flow and history without aggregation
Collecting statistical data to present on customer portal
Deployed solution can also offer additional security services

Deployed products

Flowmon Collector (Virtual)
Flowmon Probe

Situation

Because of the still growing Internet connectivity and connection speeds, Toya faced the need to replace the existing CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) routers. Toya needed a high performance solution able to generate relevant data traffic flowing through the CMTS and to collect this data in their internal NetFlow Database.

Toya considered and evaluated different solutions such as CMTS routers with NetFlow export capability and CMTS routers with standalone Flowmon Probes. The option of deploying CMTS, including netflow capabilites, was less attractive from a financial point of view. Therefore, they decided on standalone Flowmon Probes generating NetFlow traffic to obtain identification information for their security services and to visualize end user traffic.

Solution

After an initial PoC, Toya decided to put their trust into Flowmon. This decision soon proved its worth with a solution specifically customized to the 10Gb interfaces that complement the deployed CMTS router. The implemented solution consists of three Flowmon Probes 40000 SFP+, each one attached to one CMTS router.

The deployed solution is capable of generating NetFlow/IPFIX data and fulfills the requested processing performance for 10 Gbps interfaces. By using Flowmon solution, Toya administrators gained deep network visibility, accurate and reliable data for network statistics, reporting and alerting. In addition, NetFlow data provides the necessary information for fast troubleshooting and optimization of network performance. Toya uses network statistics collected by Flowmon Probes for the customer portal as well.

“After conducting insightful performance tests, we decided to purchase Flowmon Probe and Collector to complement the already deployed CMTS routers. The solution met our requirements for an efficient collection of user traffic data. Also, one of the important key factors of our decision to buy Flowmon solution was the capability to add new security functionalities such as Flowmon ADS for increased network security and the ability to discover botnets and also Flowmon DDoS Defender capable of mitigating volumetric risk.”

Rafał Banas
CIO