Packet Design delves into IP brainwork

Packet Design last week unveiled an appliance that manages the brains instead of the body of an IP network.

Route Explorer lets network operators look into the IP network "cloud" and see the actual routing paths being traversed by traffic.

Typically, router management is done on a hardware-element level, where SNMP agents monitor the status of physical Layer 2 links, ports, modules and the entire stand-alone system. This technique is limited in its ability to provide a complete picture of how the network is operating, Packet Design says, because operators have to rely on correlated device-status information to get a "view" inside the network.

Route Explorer monitors the router control plane - the intelligence of the system that processes protocols and calculates routes. The product uses the routing protocols to gather and display Layer 3 information on end-to-end routing paths, online and historically.

Route Express brings to IP the type of management typical in circuit-switched telephony networks, says Dave Passmore, research director with The Burton Group. These networks require operators to preset static circuit paths between nodes.

"It's truly amazing to me that nobody did this before," Passmore says. "It's so obvious and straightforward. Grad students should have developed this a long time ago."

Route Explorer presents a routing-level view of networks that lets operators see routing-path changes and anomalies as they happen, Packet Design says. The appliance has two main architectural elements: Route Recorder and Route Explorer.

Route Recorder is a discovery engine that "listens" to the network's routing control plane and builds a routing topology map, logging all routing events in a local database. Route Explorer creates a picture of this information, displaying the routing topology and any changes shortly after they occur.

Starting from a high-level view of the network showing all active routes and routers, an operator can highlight one route between any two locations and view the details - link state, link metrics, router parameters - of the routers along that route.

The network can be displayed in its entirety, hierarchically or selectively - showing only backbone routers while hiding edge routers and links, for example.

Route Recorder and Route Explorer reside on one network appliance. Unlike common SNMP management tools, Route Explorer adds no monitoring traffic to the network, so one appliance can support a network of thousands of routers, Packet Design says. The visualized data can be displayed and manipulated from a remote console.

An animated historical playback and analysis feature lets operators diagnose problems such as the intermittent router failures known as "route flaps," which can degrade network performance. Route Explorer also can import information on Multi-protocol Label Switching tunnels or data collected with an application such as a multirouter traffic grapher, and correlate it with the accumulated topology history to pinpoint the effects of routing on performance parameters such as link utilization, delay and packet loss, the company says.

Users can "rewind" and "replay" the network topology map from the point at which it began logging data. Starting with a coarse "fast forward" playback from the time a network service problem was detected, an operator can slow the playback to step through individual routing events and other correlated data to gauge the effect on the network, Packet Design says.

Route Explorer also lets users show specific routes on network maps and then observe the potential impact of bringing down links or changing router parameters along that route on how the network operates. This would help an operator understand the impact of network failures on customers and to incorporate the optimal level of redundancy into a network, Packet Design says.

Initially the system supports Open Shortest Path First and Intermediate System-to-Intermediate System routing protocols. Support for additional protocols, such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), will be added later.

Although the product currently lacks BGP - the predominant protocol in service provider networks - Pass-more says it's still more applicable to large ISP networks than smaller enterprise networks.

"The network needs to be fairly large to benefit from this," Passmore says. "This is most applicable to large mesh networks topologies."

Route Explorer, priced at $25,000, is in lab trials with general availability scheduled for the third quarter.

Packet Design, founded in May 2000 by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Bill Carrico and Judy Estrin, develops technologies designed to enhance the performance, scalability and manageability of the Internet. It conducts research and development through the product prototype stage, with marketing done through separate venture-funded spinoff companies, technology licensing agreements or, most recently, directly.

Packet Design's first spinoff, Vernier Networks, addresses security, management and control of wireless LANs.

Packet Design is the fourth network company that Estrin and Carrico have started. The company has raised $29 million in private funding from Foundation Capital, Sun and individual investors, including former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and Sun Chief Scientist Bill Joy.

Jim Duffy is managing editor of The Edge, Network World's service provider equipment print section and Web channel. He has 15 years of high-tech reporting experience, including 10 years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at jduffy@nww.com.