June 9, 2000, Vienna, VA— Network Designs, Inc. (NDI)--the Decennial Network Operations Center (DNOC) support contractor for the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census2000 DecennialNet--reported network availability at 99.5% from March 1st through May 30th 2000. "Based on past Censuses, the 99.5% performance level represents a significant achievement for network performance projections," said Mr. Kevin McGreevy, NDI Program Manager of the Census project.
The Bureau of the Census DecennialNet is the wide area network (WAN) infrastructure facility that provides data communications to more than 600 Census2000 locations throughout the U.S. (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico). The DecennialNet architecture uses AT&T FTS2000 service offerings and comprises more than 1200 Cisco Systems routers and switches, all of which are monitored 24/7 by NDI. There are over 10,000 desktop PCs on the network, which supports more than 340,000 Census2000 enumerators.
NDI integrated Concord Network Health into the DNOC to assess the performance, capacity requirements, and quality of service of the network management system. Currently, Network Health is used to monitor the performance of DecennialNet WAN circuits and routers. Operative at the DNOC since mid-February, Network Health continually collects network performance information that is critical to the decision-making process. The DNOC also uses HPOpenView for fault management and CiscoWorks2000 Resource Manager Essentials for configuration management. "Network events are correlated using the three primary network management tools and prioritized by severity and type. This information minimizes the DNOC technician's response time to each event," said Mr. Mike Pollak, Sr. Network Engineer, NDI.
"Given the size and diversity of the DecennialNet, 99.5% availability is quite remarkable," said Mr. McGreevy. Logging over 1500 events per day, the DNOC responds to an average of five severity-level-one (Site Down-Cause Unknown) site outages a day, amounting to about an hour of downtime. Twenty-five severity-level-two (Site Down-Probable Cause Determined) events occur each day, with an average downtime of fifteen minutes per event. "NDI is using best-of-breed software and "best practices" to monitor the DNOC and its auxiliary facility at the NDI corporate office in Vienna. We're confident that network support for Census2000 will be judged an unqualified success," said Mr. McGreevy.