Start-up aims to track both route and traffic data

Enterprise network managers looking to add network analytics to their toolbox might want to check out a start-up launching this week whose products collect and report on route and traffic data in real time.

Bluewave Networks’ Network Analytics and Management System (NAMS) competes with products from the likes of Ipsum Networks and Packet Design. NAMS can monitor LANs and WANs on one screen, and it alerts network managers to anomalies in route, traffic and application performance.

“We believe network managers need to look at the entire network in one graphical view, both LAN and WAN,” CEO Kumar Sripadam says. “Tools today lack information about Layer 3 availability, and that’s exactly the information network managers need to figure out a detailed analysis of their network.”

The company was founded in 2001 and is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Sripadam and Guna Ramireddy, CTO and vice president of engineering, came from Redback Networks and say they plan to incorporate their knowledge of data networking into NAMS.

The product, they say, combines route and traffic analytics into one tool, whereas competitors offer one or the other technology in their products.

“It took us a while to build this product, because from the beginning we wanted to include all the pieces necessary,” Ramireddy says.

NAMS consists of two components: NAMS Sensor and NAMS Console. NAMS Sensor can be sold as software only, or can be packaged onto a proprietary appliance. Sensors are distributed throughout a network and logically peer with routers. They watch traffic and routes, constantly building a database, and can monitor routing protocols such as ISIS, BGP and OSPF. Network managers can configure the software to alert them when thresholds are missed and create management events when network anomalies occur.

NAMS Console runs on a Windows or Unix server and serves as the central management point to administer and control NAMS Sensors. From the console, network managers can get a single view of routing and traffic analytics, and operators can replay routing and traffic events logged over time and correlate application performance problems with, for example, periods of network congestion. Network managers can access the NAMS Console via a secure Web interface.

Customers can choose to buy NAMS, available this week, for routing analytics, traffic analytics or a combination of the two. Pricing for the basic route analytics features starts at $25,000 and scales according to customer specifications. Pricing is based on a single sensor and console, and the company says multiple sensors can be distributed throughout a network.