Lucent first to implement SMON technology across LAN switches family

Lucent Technologies today announced that a network monitoring application it has implemented in its data networking products has been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a Proposed Standard. This breakthrough Switch MONitoring (SMONO) technology allows enterprise customers to monitor their switched data networks from a single network management console.

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has approved the SMON Management Information Base (MIB) standard, which was co-written by Lucent, in the IETF Remote Monitoring (RMON) MIB Working Group. The document will become an official IETF standard once it is assigned the Request for Comments (RFC) number from the IETF RFC Editor.

SMON was pioneered and developed originally by LANNET in 1995 for specifically managing switched networks. Upon Lucent`s acquisition of LANNET last year, it became a staple of Lucent`s Cajuna Campus family of LAN switches and CajunViewO network management system, and is available for the Cajun P110O Switching System, the Cajun M400O Gate Switch, the Cajun P550O Gigabit Switch, and the Cajun M770O Multifunction Switch.

Lucent`s Cajun Campus solutions are a comprehensive product portfolio designed to alleviate the explosive bandwidth requirements and increasing demands associated with the convergence of data, voice and video applications across enterprise networks. These LAN switches range from sophisticated stackable units to high-performance backbone chassis capable of moving vast amounts of data traffic easily and quickly.

"We are pleased to see that our unrivaled SMON technology will formally become a standard for managing switched data networks," said Peter Hammond, vice president of Lucent Data Networking, Europe, Middle East and Africa. "This will benefit IT managers by helping them do more than what they could do with RMON by monitoring their entire switched network with a dedicated application.

SMON, an RMON MIB extension, is a network management application that enables managers to view all switch traffic in the network from a single application residing on the network management station. With SMON, network managers can glance once at the network, allowing them to get an immediate view not only of a port or segment, but of Virtual LANs (VLANs), the entire switch, and even the complete enterprise.

SMON also provides the ability to monitor levels of network utilization and view multicast and broadcast traffic in VLANs. In addition, SMON provides the ability to monitor traffic according to the IEEE 802.1D priority levels in Quality of Service (QoS)-enabled networks and apply port mirroring operations to switching devices.

SMON runs on most popular SNMP network management platforms and operating systems, including HP OpenView for Solaris and HP-UX environments, IBM NetView for AIX and MicrosoftWindows NT. SMON is available as part of Lucent`s CajunView Plus network management software at various prices depending on the platform being deployed.