Modeling the University of California, San Francisco network was no small task. UCSF has a 30,000-node metropolitan IP network spanning San Francisco, containing more than 1,000 switches and more than 100 routers. Leased lines connect the backbone network to 194 remote sites scattered across California.

We installed IT Guru and NetRule on a Dell Intel Xeon 2.0-GHz PC running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional (Service Pack 4). To test IT Guru and NetRule application capabilities we modeled two separate environments. One environment used actual network configurations obtained from a CiscoWorks text export from our production network. This consisted of 70 routers and 50 switches representing the core of our production network. We also created a more modest manually configured network of 12 full-mesh routers based on a section of our production network.

Shunra's StormAppliance was connected to a simulated network of four Dell Latitude laptops that were used to generate traffic to and from StormAppliance. A fifth Dell Latitude, connected to the console port, ran the Visio interface.