MetaSolv Software Inc. has introduced MetaSolv Configuration Management, a new product designed to consolidate network control operations for next-generation multivendor networks.

The ongoing transformation to next-generation networks is pushing service intelligence to the edge, resulting in rapidly growing networks in terms of both size and diversity. This imposes increased proactive configuration management requirements on service providers and large enterprises as they seek to efficiently manage both high volumes and increased frequency and complexity of network configurations. Configuration control is at the heart of service provider operational concerns as they look to implement carrier-grade methodologies with centralized management, to obtain increased network-wide configuration quality and accuracy.

Legacy OSS software was designed in the days when networks were confined to vertical stacks a DSL network over here and an ATM network over there, said Dan Baker, research director, OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase of Dittberner Associates. But todays networks are so muddled with multi-vendor flavors of overlapping technologies, such as 2G and 3G, that carriers are crying out for more integrated OSSs.

MetaSolv Configuration Management supports the ability to optimize and centralize the network control operations for multi-vendor networks, and implement automated, proactive and consistent configuration management practices. Key product capabilities include:

Network Discovery captures network element information, manage and organize network elements into networks and sub-networks with customer or geographical organization.

Configuration Archiving and Versioning maintains records of historical configuration versions for change tracking, configuration troubleshooting and emergency re-build of the network elements. It performs intelligent network element software restoration with any selected network archive version using the product or using standard Trivial File Transfer Protocol to obtain the latest archived configuration.

Configuration Auditing and Compliance Management quickly identifies configuration changes between archived versions and/or with the running configuration using a highly intuitive visual audit diagnostic environment. Operators can then invoke automated configuration compliance auditing across the network to validate configuration consistency and accuracy, and identify any abnormality on a recurring basis.

Configuration Activation provides flexible configuration templating to network operations, enabling configuration implementations based on pre-defined network engineering guidelines, including rapid configuration modeling and effective configuration template versioning management.

MetaSolv Configuration Management can be deployed either in a stand-alone environment or in conjunction with MetaSolvs Activation platform. It will be generally available in the third quarter

MetaSolv Inc. www.metasolv.com