Shanghai Unicom is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Unicom Limited, one of the largest integrated telecommunications service providers in China. Shanghai Unicom offers a wide range of services, including GSM and CDMA wireless, data and Internet, and domestic and international long distance calling. The company architected a new IP MAN, which includes NetFlow-enabled routers, as the infrastructure platform upon which it offers a variety of value-added managed application services to corporate customers in the Shanghai region.

To ensure its services would continue to meet customers' expectations of reliability and performance, Shanghai Unicom sought a performance management system to monitor and analyze network and application-level service traffic and to improve its capacity planning capabilities. After careful consideration, Shanghai Unicom selected NetScout's nGenius Solution as the most mature and comprehensive performance management offering on the market that could leverage NetFlow data from their Cisco infrastructure. Pairing the nGenius Performance Manager 3.0 and the nGenius Flow Collector for NetFlow, Shanghai Unicom is able to effectively monitor bandwidth utilization, traffic flows and the performance of application service offerings to corporate users.

"NetScout's nGenius solution for NetFlow monitoring offers us unprecedented, valuable performance information and analysis at both a granular circuit level and across our entire infrastructure," said the head of the Data and Fixed Communications Business Department at Shanghai Unicom. "Now we can understand in real time how our customers are using bandwidth, detect abnormal traffic trends, and troubleshoot problems to minimize the impact on our application services. NetScout's Chinese language localization efforts and flexible reports also set it apart from other vendors."

In the initial deployment, Shanghai Unicom has focused on collecting NetFlow data from the core routers in the company's data center, as well as from other core access points for traffic accounting and engineering. With detailed information such as the 'top talkers' and 'top conversations' on the network, network managers are able to identify and solve performance issues much more rapidly than with previous products and practices. Network managers can now also analyze user behavior patterns to more efficiently allocate network resources to better serve customers, particularly VIP accounts.

"Shanghai Unicom's successful implementation of the nGenius Solution with NetFlow is part of a larger trend of forward-looking service providers adopting leading-edge, integrated network and application performance technologies to enhance their service delivery and customer satisfaction," said Jim Frey, vice president of marketing at NetScout Systems. "With NetScout's High Definition Performance Management approach, carriers can more effectively and reliably introduce value-added services to achieve business growth while reducing network operations costs and assuring high service quality."