CASE STUDY NetBrain enables Saudi Telecom to operate their large complex network Quick Facts About Saudi Telecom Saudi Telecom Saudi Telecom (stc) is the leading telecommunications provider in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, offering a broad range of consumer and business communications services, Employees Served: including broadband, mobile wireless, IPTV and managed IT services. stc’s enterprise IP 7000 - 10,000 network (which supports the user network and IT server farm) includes upwards of 5,000 devices, encompassing five main data centers (with more on the way) and roughly 100 Data Centers: Five remote sites. The company has adopted Cisco ACI SDN technology and has been gradually converting all of its traditional network connectivity to SDN. stc runs a private Network Devices: cloud based on VMware NSX-T for its IP network, and a separate telco cloud based on 4000 - 5000 Huawei and Cisco technology. NetBrain Use Cases: The Challenge Network Mapping, stc has a fairly complex network configuration, with a combination of traditional Visualization networking devices along with a number of leading-edge deployments including software defined networks (SDNs) and a private cloud. The company is in the final phase of a data center migration, transitioning its existing traditional data center infrastructure to Cisco ACI. stc has been a NetBrain customer since 2016, with its network operations team initially licensing a small number of user seats primarily for network mapping, documentation and troubleshooting. stc’s Cloud Infrastructure GD team quickly realized that NetBrain NetBrain’s support also included a complete no-code automation capability and immediately became an “ advocate for the product within the organization. Over time, a growing number of is the best I’ve design and operational teams and their engineers began using NetBrain as word ever seen. spread throughout the company. In 2021, stc had a significant service impact which affected service delivery of a key ” application. It took nearly 30 days – and a lot of guesswork – before network operations, Mahmoud Elgebaly server, application and security teams were able to definitively identify the contributing Data Center Solutions factors and then determine the proper means to entirely restore production network Architect, Cloud services. The highly publicized outage caused stc’s Group CTO to realize that the Infrastructure organization needed end-to-end visibility and a strategic cross-sector automated incident management plan that spanned from infrastructure to application. To meet this need, Cloud Infrastructure GD proposed utilizing the additional automation capabilities already available within the NetBrain products they had as he and his team believed it was the only enterprise-class solution capable of building and maintaining the entire network infrastructure automatically. They knew that the detailed visibility and operational automation would allow them to resolve any future issues with any application much more quickly - or better yet proactively identify and fix potential issues before users are affected.

In terms of onboarding, I “ The Results would rate it a 9 out 10, which is top notch. For troubleshooting, NetBrain is particularly useful in helping to resolve A-B path issues, eliminating the tedious ” and time-consuming need to manually track paths from Mahmoud Elgebaly hub to hub. Elgebaly estimates that NetBrain has saved Data Center Solutions Architect, 80% of the time it would otherwise take to execute these Cloud Infrastructure tasks. For instance he noted that he can now do new routing implementations with a single click rather than the arduous and very manual processes his engineers had been accustomed to for years. The Solution From a customer support standpoint, Elgebaly has been impressed with NetBrain’s responsiveness and flexibility. Today, NetBrain has done all of this and more and has He notes specific examples, like NetBrain’s team become their core solution for managing stc’s diverse designing a script to fix a problem while on a call and network. There are now six or more teams of 10-15 NetBrain helping stc to develop a capacity planning people using the product as their basis for network dashboard. stc’s top management is very confident in operations, and it is focused on leveraging its preventive NetBrain’s ability to provide help when needed, which has automation capabilities which is driving even greater made them far more receptive to using NetBrain adoption. NetBrain has replaced many other network elsewhere. In fact, management has been so impressed monitoring tools and is being incorporated into stc’s with the results of using NetBrain in the data center that NOC Incident Management Dashboard. And stc is they have specifically asked how the product can be used already planning an integration between NetBrain and across stc’s entire network. its BMC Remedy trouble ticketing system. Within their From an onboarding standpoint, users find NetBrain quite NOC dashboard, NetBrain will provide an always easy to use, even without training and as more users up-to-date representation of the topology and complete begin using NetBrain, additional uses become apparent. visibility into network connectivity and performance status. stc is even using NetBrain for comprehensive inventory management - for example to find end-of-life What the Future Holds devices dynamically rather than tracking them in an stc is in the process of a massive buildout of sixteen new Excel spreadsheet. data centers. NetBrain is playing a significant role in network planning, validating network design, and The data center and design teams use NetBrain’s network intent features regularly for application discovery of new and existing networks. stc will also use performance health checks, protected change NetBrain for performance monitoring (taking full management, and proactive infrastructure monitoring. advantage of its ability to integrate with APM tools) as They have even found it useful for capacity planning. well as change analysis and intends to create a As stc continues implementing NetBrain and its network performance management dashboard for its complete automation in its IT cloud, it’s also exploring the infrastructure. And after seeing a demo of NetBrain’s possibility of using it with its telco cloud and public latest network visibility capabilities, stc’s management MPLS network. agreed that it will be the perfect solution to implement a capacity planning dashboard, which is currently in According to Mahmoud Elgebaly – Data Center Solution progress. They expect NetBrain to eventually replace Architect in Cloud Infrastructure GD, “It’s on my screen their entire current infrastructure management toolset. all day, every day. I use NetBrain every few minutes - as the data center network design team, we need full Ultimately, stc sees NetBrain as the single, central visibility on all network devices all day long for routing, solution to provide full visibility and outage prevention switching, connectivity, and other design purposes.” He through network automation across its entire network believes it will see even higher usage from operations infrastructure for design, management and teams as the rollout continues. troubleshooting. Copyright © 2023 NetBrain Technologies, Inc. All trademarks +1 (800) 605-7964 referenced herein belong to NetBrain Technologies, Inc [email protected] NB-CS-ST-050823 www.netbraintech.com