Packet Island (News - Alert) today introduced its first VoIP “micro-appliance,” a nifty little device that lets network operators, service providers and VARs monitor and troubleshoot VoIP networks with speed and ease.

Housed in a 4” x 4.5” silver-colored, brushed aluminum case, the micro-appliance - which can be quickly and easily installed thanks to its in-line design - is based on Packet Island’s “PacketSmart” network monitoring and troubleshooting solution, which helps operators properly prioritize voice packets over other data. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) solution (which is hosted at a Tier-1 data center) is also used for pre-assessing networks for VoIP readiness.

Among its key features, the micro-appliance offers “fail-safe operation” (no network disruption even during power failure); the ability to work in front of NAT firewalls; the ability to work with mirrored switch ports; VLAN support; and an LCD display for easy use. Geared for the SMB market, the device also includes several firmware enhancements to further simplify “plug-and-play” operation in a plethora of network environments.

James Walker, vice president of professional services for Pandora Networks (News - Alert), which has been using Packet Island’s PacketSmart solution to help support its customers, said the new micro appliance helps simplify VoIP monitoring, especially for SMB networks.

“Very often we encounter network topologies in SMB environments that make it difficult to insert an inline device for VoIP monitoring,” Walker said in a press release. “Packet Island has delivered an elegant solution to this problem with their new micro-appliance. With this new micro-appliance, Packet Island has taken the term ‘plug-and-play’ to a whole new level.”

“Deploying VoIP over pre-existing data networks is a big challenge that many of our VoIP service provider and VAR customers face today,” said Praveen Kumar, co-founder and president of Packet Island. “Troubleshooting VoIP quality problems adds even more complexity to this challenge, because of the need to understand the SMB customer’s internal network. Since our micro-appliance is essential in this troubleshooting process, we’ve taken extra effort to make it easily deployable in a vast variety of SMB network configurations.”

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Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.