Head in the clouds

Why didn't somebody think of this before?

Packet Design, the technology licensing/spinoff company founded two years ago by husband-and-wife serial entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico, this week unveiled a network appliance that actually manages routing in a routed network. The product, called Route Explorer, is a network appliance that lets operators look into the "clouds" of their IP networks to manage the routes calculated by routing protocols.

When a company unveils a router management system, it's usually no different from any other SNMP device-level manager: Management Information Bases and agents that monitor the performance of physical, hardware-based ports, modules and stand-alone routers.

These managers manage the router instead of the routed network, leaving the operators to stitch together as best he/she can a "view" of the network.

Route Explorer monitors the routes calculated by the routers that run between routers. In essence, it manages the brains of the routed network while SNMP element managers monitor the individual bodies.

The concept behind Route Explorer seems so simple, straightforward and obvious, why didn't anyone think of it before? Estrin says it's due to a church-and-state type mentality among router developers and router operators: Router developers only think about protocols and new ways to route, not about management; operators think about management and not about new ways to route.

Indeed, operators usually come form the circuit-switched telephony world and know little about IP, according to Dave Passmore, research director at the Burton Group in Sterling, Va. They just want to be able to manage any network the way they manage their telephony networks - by presetting static circuit paths between nodes.

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"Some grad students should have developed this a long time ago," Passmore says. "This is so simple and straightforward."

Route Explorer has two main architectural elements: the Route Recorder and the Route Explorer.

The 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. The Route Explorer creates a picture of this information, displaying the routing topology and any changes shortly after they occur.

The Route Recorder and Route Explorer reside on a single network appliance. One appliance can support a network of thousands of routers, Packet Design claims.

An animated historical playback and analysis feature lets the operator 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.

Initially the system supports Open Shortest Path First and IS-IS routing protocols. Support for additional protocols, such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), will be added at an undetermined date, Packet Design says.

Though lack of BGP support may be a big drawback to the product - it's the predominant protocol in service provider networks - Passmore says it's still more applicable to large ISP networks than it is to smaller enterprise networks.

"This is most applicable to large mesh networks topologies," he says.

Route Explorer is currently in lab trials with general availability scheduled for the third quarter. It's about time and far overdue...

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