RouteScience upgrades route control software

RouteScience Technologies this week plans to update its flagship software to let network managers set policies on which the software will take actions. The company also will introduce software modules for VoIP and streaming media.

Version 5 of RouteScience’s Adaptive Networking Software (ANS) adds features that let network managers write policies to prioritize application traffic based on a variety of metrics, including time of day or month, and customer use. RouteScience software optimizes outgoing Border Gateway Protocol routes by measuring the latency across site-to-site Internet connections. It monitors the delay found in each ISP connection and then ensures data is sent along the most available routes.

For example, if a specific customer uses a Web application more frequently and that customer is considered among the top five customers at a company, network managers could write a policy to alert ANS 5 to reroute WAN traffic to ensure this customer’s application request gets top priority.

“The software is designed to rescue applications that have been given priority,” RouteScience CTO Mike Lloyd says. “It can use the lingua franca of existing routing devices to inject a change into routing tables and take a flow that’s going, say, down a left path through one provider, and basically tell it to go right toward another provider.”

ANS 5 targets application traffic traveling over a WAN because “in a lot of cases once an app hits the WAN, network managers lose a lot of visibility,” Lloyd says. Now with five new software modules – VoIP, enterprise applications, Web applications, multimedia and streaming – to customize monitoring and rerouting for specific applications, Lloyd says RouteScience is attacking the application performance management issue from a different angle.

“Typically, network engineers track this stuff on the WAN, but we made it easier for staff not highly trained in low-level networking concepts to focus on brownouts or poor service rather than completely failed service,” Lloyd says.

Also new is the packaging. The software was once available only packaged on an appliance, called PathControl, but now it can be purchased as software only. RouteScience officials say customers requested the company “decouple” the software from the appliance and offer it as a stand-alone product. The software modules can be turned on or off based on network use, and customers would only be charged license fees for the add-ons they use in their nets.

The software is installed on a Red Hat Linux-based server and installed in a data center near application servers. It observes application flows and measures current paths. The software also explores other paths and will reroute traffic when one route gets more congested than others.

RouteScience ANS 5 software is expected to be available April 21. Pricing for the software on the PathControl 3000 and 5000 series hardware platforms start at $15,000 and $55,000, respectively.