ACCESS TO Demo system Links:  Bulgarian prefixes  Web banners Tools:  Check IP address  Aggregator  Hash generator	About IPACCT Short history of IPACCT IPACCT development emerges in the early 2000 with the first commercial neighborhood LAN networks in Sofia. Growing together with the networks progressively qualifying on the increasing demand for more features and scalability. IPACCT presents itself as an out-of-the box solution for ISP management in January 2003. In the end of the first year on the market IPACCT is used on more than 50 servers with tens of thousands of subscribers. Development of neighborhood networks The massive Internet penetration at home launched the local network neighborhood. Gradually small neighborhood networks merged together and some of them became urban networks. Number of subscribers for such services has increased thousand-fold within a relatively short period. The total volume of the resulting traffic increases even more rapidly - not only the number of subscribers but individual traffic usage as well. Management of such a network can not be a hobby anymore. Even with the necessary qualified personnel and equipment it is difficult to achieve stability and consistent performance. The alternative is to use hardware management solutions - they perform very stable while the disadvantages are many because such networks generate enormous traffic and grow quite fast. Hardware solutions that can be very costly and have high requirements for qualifications of the staff. Most of them do not naturally support traffic differentiation. Speed control and traffic sharing do not meet the high demands of the market for shared services and partially guaranteed speeds. Development goals IPACCT is a solution with high stability and performance. Whenever making a decision about adding new functionality the way it will affect performance is considered. In many cases performance is preferable to adding new functionality. When developing new versions changes are made in small increments with a strict quality control. ● New features New features must reflect changes in the market for Internet services to achieve synergy between requirements and offered services. The aim is for better control and integration of management of the entire process. When the process is guided and automated the probability of human error factor is minimized. ● Better performance Improving performance (the number of subscribers and IP addresses plus their traffic that a particular hardware can handle) is a goal that in some ways conflicts with adding new features. There are two ways to add a new feature - quick and dirty that leads to reduces productivity and proper way to do it which does not substantially alter the requirements to hardware. When productivity is affected we always choose the proper way – the one that will not require doubling of the CPU frequency. Increasing productivity while preserving existing functionality is a key objective in the development of IPACCT. ● Easier support One of the issues with PC hardware based solutions is the low stability of the hardware, the low quality of the components available on the market and components incompatibility. An advantage is the low cost and easier replacement. IPACCT utilizes two methods to reduce data loss - daily backup and RAID. One important factor is the time to recover a system from backup. We have developed a methodology to reduce this time to 15 minutes since the availability of an operator and a hardware replacement. For cases that require even higher reliability and availability we develop an automatic backup server solution.
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