The NANC LNPA-WG's "Slow Horse" subcommittee met November 7th at St. Pete
Beach, Florida.  Today's meeting was dedicated to discussion of LSMS performance questions.

Participants
AT&T - Dominic Choi, Beth Watkins, H.L. Gowda
BellSouth - Dave Cochran *
Bell Canada - Betsy Spyropoulos
Canadian LNP Consortium - Marian Hearn
ELI - Dennis Robbins *
ESI - Ron Stutheit, Jim Rooks
Neustar - Gustavo Hannecke,
Qwest - Dave Garner *
SBC - Charles Ryburn, Jim Alton
Tekelec - Colleen Collard
Telcordia - John Malyar,
Telecom Software - Jean Anthony
Verizon - David Marshall, Kevin Lewis, Sharon Bridges, Bob Angevine, Gary Sacra
Videotron - Richard Seyer, Pascale Lacroix
Williams - Rick Lenox
WorldCom - Steve Addicks, Jason Lee
XO - Jamie Sharpe
    * participated via conference bridge

SOA/NPAC Traffic Report

Neustar reported that it would deliver a Statement of Work for the SOA
Traffic Report to the NAPM LLC by December 6th.  This will be SOW 27.
Use a test or a production environment to demonstrate LSMS Performance?
Functionality testing is less difficult than performance testing to
accommodate in a test environment.  A test environment has no "background
noise" and so would tend to overstate performance, but using a production
environment for testing is risky.  Consensus is that using a test
environment is best approach for performance testing.
Demonstrating LSMS Performance

Two very different methods of demonstrating LSMS performance were discussed
today, one active, the other passive.  The active approach involved
periodically demonstrating future LSMS performance capability.  The passive
approach involved demonstrating ongoing actual LSMS performance.

    Demonstrate future LSMS performance

LSMS performance capability could be demonstrated each time a "life event"
occurs, in order to demonstrate LSMS' ability to meet future performance
needs.  These "life events" are a new NPAC release, a new LSMS release, or
possibly an SP LSMS reconfiguration.  That is, "life events" are all events
which introduce the need to re-demonstrate an LSMS' performance level. 
There appears to be some expectation that LSMS vendors would do the
certification work needed because of a new NPAC release or new LSMS release.

The group did not agree on whether it is necessary to have initial
certification testing of an existing service provider's  LSMS configuration
or, by extension, of its subsequent LSMS reconfigurations. 
The group appeared to feel that LSMS vendor could act as surrogate for
service provider in doing testing if the LSMS vendor had an appropriate test
equipment arrangement, i.e., one which was no more capable than the service
provider's production LSMS.  Exactly how configurations and their
capabilities would be defined, however, is not yet clear.

Demonstrate ongoing LSMS Performance

Jim Rooks, ESI, pointed out that the LSMS vendor certification could become
little more than a marketing tool because so many factors (load and
hardware) would affect any test result and suggested that we instead
concentrate on production system measurements which would demonstrate the
current capacity of each service provider's LSMS.  In response to concerns
expressed about there being sufficient load to test production systems, Jim
pointed out that the NPAC could be engineered to send real data to a
particular SP at significantly higher load than normal using batch approach.
Periodic reports of the production LSMS performance are needed to provide an
ongoing demonstration that the production LSMS' performance meets current
performance need.  These periodic reports would be provided by the NPAC.
(Change Order is required to define the Report's contents and the NPAC
modifications needed to allow collection of data required to prepare the
report.)  Service providers could use these reports to monitor their own
LSMS' performance as well as to view other SPs' performance (other's data reported under alias).

Status Report to NANC

* Subcommittee members hold widely divergent views:

* LSMS % Availability Requirement is sufficient to deal with inadequate LSMS

* Objective LSMS performance requirements needed, but for SP to use with its LSMS vendor

* SMS performance measurement needed, to be done and regularly reported by NPAC

* December Slow Horse meeting cancelled

* Written proposals requested

Next Meeting

The December meeting is cancelled.  We will decide whether to meet in
January at the December LNPA-WG meeting.