Network in a box - Coming to a theater near you

MIMIC is part of a relatively arcane but important class of products - SimpleAgent from SimpleSoft is another - that provide simulated environments, or "virtual laboratories" targeted at evaluating network management applications for scalability, effective policy implementation and general robustness in terms of performance.

These tools are, crudely speaking, somewhat analogous to what MIL3, Optimal and CACI offer in terms of network and application design for broad IT environments.

MIMIC is not, however, designed for the technically faint hearted. Although it supports NT, Solaris and Linux and doesn't require Unix-specific skills, MIMIC is far from seamless.

THE COMPONENTS

The product comes with a compiler, a recorder and a simulator.

MIMIC offers a library of 600 precompiled MIBs. But if the devices in your network that you want to simulate didn't make the list you'll need to compile them yourself.

MIMIC can work with as few as one MIB to environments with up to 50,000. The real limit is how much your management application can scale. However, only 1,000 devices can be supported from a single MIMIC console, so a network with 50,000 devices requires 50 consoles (at about $20.00 per device without discount). You can, however, control the whole thing from a single screen thanks to multithreading and a distributed architecture.

To start, the MIMIC recorder takes a snapshot of your network to provide a customized context for the relevant devices, as well as to alert you as to which devices out there need separate MIB compiling. But so far what you have is analogous to a theater stage with actors all identified and no script.

The script (pun partially intended) comes from the simulator, which can create a customized set of scenarios designed to test your management application for scalability, unusual faults and events, policies, and customized network traffic situations.

You can do it all off line without jeopardizing your production network and you can run your scenarios forward, backward, fast forward and fast backward, at will. It's the VCR approach to testing management applications. MIMIC software comes with two prerecorded networks, one small (10 routers), and one with more than 150 devices.

So far MIMIC has been used by - of course - network device manufacturers and management software manufacturers. It is included as an extension of Unicenter TNG, for CA customers, for evaluation of policies and other implementation criteria.

It is also increasingly used by systems integrators and network service providers, one of whom is using MIMIC to create a virtual customer network (customer in a box?) for each of its clients. This way new management approaches can be evaluated seamlessly and nondisruptively.

IT organizations looking to try out policies and new management applications before moving into production are just beginning to use MIMIC. For large environments, at least, this makes sense and can save real money.

MIMIC is limited by SNMP. It's probably not going to do too much for application management and it will be limited in systems management, in spite of SNMP's often ignored hooks into those spaces.

MIMIC is also limited by its price and design, to larger environments with deeper pockets and plentiful high tech skills. In the future, though, there's nothing to stop someone from taking a product like MIMIC and putting a wrapper around it that would make it more appetizing for a broader marketplace.

In an increasingly virtualized world, this is at least one place where virtualization makes sense.