Cambridge, Mass. - In GTE Internetworking's battle against net-management data overload, the weapon of choice is software from a start-up.
The telecom giant is beta testing Opticom, Inc.'s Executive Information Systems (EIS) to sift through event data that Cabletron Systems, Inc.'s Spectrum management platform collects from devices scattered across GTE Internetworking's sprawling internal network.
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``The events [presented by EIS] are very succinct; you don't have to go through reams and reams of event logs," said David Caplan, a senior member of the technical staff in GTE Internetworking's technical solutions and deployment department. And the reporting capabilities let us ``deliver business-quality metrics to our customers."
Caplan is testing EIS on the network used by 3,800 people to support GTE Internetworking's Internet service. It is comprised of over 100 Cabletron SmartSwitch 9000 and 6000 switches, and Cisco Systems, Inc. Catalyst 5000 switches and 7500 routers.
The SmartSwitch 9000s are configured in a fully meshed, full-duplex 100M bit/sec Layer 3 backbone supporting IP, IPX and AppleTalk (see graphic). The SmartSwitch 6000s hang off the backbone as departmental switches. Clients and servers connected to these switches are arranged in 60 SecureFast virtual LANs to facilitate moves, adds and changes, Caplan said.
This configuration means the wall jacks throughout the building are essentially backed up by a giant, virtual patch panel, Caplan said. ``If someone moves, no one needs to go into the [wiring] closet," he said. The office jack can be activated from a terminal and virtual LAN access rights granted at the same time.
Traffic is shuttled between VLANs by the Cisco routers, which are tied directly to the backbone switches.
The Catalyst switches, on the other hand, support a separate development network for software engineers. Users on this net have restricted access to the SecureFast net through a Cisco router with security policies, Caplan said.
There are 450 ``critical" managed network elements in Cambridge alone, some of which may have more than one SNMP agent, Caplan said, so there is a lot of SNMP event data to tally.
That's where Opticom's EIS comes in.
Cabletron's Spectrum logs all the event data, but much of it is superfluous to the root of a network fault. For example, when a switch fails, events will be generated for the switch and everything downstream, when in fact all the downstream devices are fine. EIS sifts through this data to extract only those events relevant to the source of the problem.
``We do a lot of filtering to separate the wheat from the chaff," said Roger Dev, chief technology officer at Opticom, based in Manchester, N.H.
EIS processes and analyzes Spectrum event data to gather causal alarms, then determines total network service availability per device, and presents this data in Web-based reports.
A device's total service availability, according to EIS, is the sum of the number of users of that device, plus the number of outages, amount of downtime and mean time to repair. Identifying problematic gear is simply a matter of using EIS to generate availability reports that show when equipment falls below, say, 99.5% availability.
EIS currently supports only Spectrum, but there's good reason for that. Dev is an ex-Cabletron software developer who wrote Spectrum code. Opticom's 14 other employees include a handful of former Cabletron officials, and the company's sales and marketing vice president is Larry Benson, a former Spectrum sales executive at Cabletron, and brother of Cabletron CEO and co-founder Craig Benson.
But Opticom plans to branch out EIS and enable it to work with Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView, IBM's NetView and Computer Associates International, Inc.'s Unicenter TNG management platforms, company co-founder Ed Flannery said.
For now, though, EIS is helping GTE Internetworking deliver timely and meaningful service-level data to staffers so they can keep users of the company's Internet service surfing along. Less time spent on network downtime means more time spent creating profitable service innovations.
``The motivation [for using EIS] is the sheer amount of SNMP information," Caplan said. ``One way to deal with information overload is to turn off the valve. We opted to keep that valve wide open and come up with best-of-breed information management tools to reap value from all of that data."
