By Tara Seals

Industry newcomer Nakina Systems Inc. unveiled Network Assurance Suite Version 1.1, for multi-vendor optical network maintenance, and a VoIP services management suite, at Billing and OSS World 2004.

The network assurance suite runs an audit, to determine network readiness, before guiding automated software upgrades to each element in the optical network. It also automates backup and restoration across multi-vendor optical networks, and provides resource security in the form of access to network elements and accounts from a central site across nodes. A centralized interface layer gives users one set of procedures regardless of vendor and provides a buffer for the user from lower-level processes.

Nakina says the main key is automation: the upgrade process once took months because it was executed manually, node-by-node, now it takes half the time, allowing quicker time to market for the service provider.

Future plans include bandwidth management and the opening of the architecture, and potentially support for Layer 2 and 3.

The VoIP service assurance product, brought about from the recent acquisition of iPine Networks, allows Layer 7/IP monitoring capability for SLAs and traffic shaping in real time. It is non-intrusive, recognizes any IP application and can determine jitter, delay and response times by application. Users can identify which applications are hogging the network and causing performance issues. It can also perform intrusion detection.

The 18-month-old Nakina also has joined the OSS Through Java Initiative, which seeks to create standards-based APIs and develop modular OSS systems.