In France, the General Directorate for Civil Aviation (DGAC) is organized to conform with European regulations relating to the Single European Sky and its operational arm, the Air Navigation Services Directorate (DSNA), is responsible for air traffic control over French airspace over the country and its overseas territories. Its mission is to ensure the safe and steady flow of air traffic. So its monitoring, information and warning services require high-performance and highly available computing and telecoms infrastructures and equally powerful and reliable means of supervision.
Given the complexity of the various different platforms being used and the requirement to be highly responsive in case of failure, the supervision systems have become essential tools for spotting and resolving faults. Nowadays they must not only be very user-friendly, but also take account of the various ‘business’ aspects to deliver the expected levels of efficacy.
The network equipment administration solution known as ADER (ADministration des Equipements Réseaux), which supervises the long-distance networks used by air traffic control, is no exception. Off-the-shelf tools only partially met the DSNA’s requirements, so Bull was asked to develop ADER, which has been in operational service since 2008 in various air traffic control centers and airports including Charles de Gaulle, Le Bourget and Orly airports and the regional air traffic centers to mention just a few. Its many users have been completely happy with the solution.
ADER:
- Covers a very wide range of heterogeneous applications and hardware: 3Com, Juniper, Nortel, Sagem routers; 3Com, Alcatel, Cisco, and HP switches; network and SNMP equipment; PCs, Unix workstations, and networked printers
- Combines user-friendliness and ‘business’ factors with mapping, the possibility to zoom in on the various locations covered, representations of the different hardware making it easier to intervene if there is a problem
- Ensures alarms are set off within seconds and can be dealt with remotely
- Enables the impact of a failure to be evaluated in terms of the service being provided to end users
- Makes use of innovative mobile tools (phones, tablet PCs).
As part of the implementation, Bull’s teams ensured rapid take-up by users, by providing a comprehensive set of support services including training, e-learning, telephone support, assistance and maintenance.
As part of the Css-IP (Communications sol-sol IP) ground-to-ground IP communications program to modernize network infrastructures, ADER takes into account the various technological updates by gradually adapting to their implementation, thanks to its modular design, enabling it to be highly responsive to future developments.
ADER is the answer for any organization that wants to supervise and administer a sensitive technical infrastructure that is spread out across different geographic locations and likely to be continually upgraded.
