Network Physics adds MPLS support

Traffic analysis vendor Network Physics last week announced it added Multi-protocol Label Switching support to its flagship appliance – and just in time, according to a recent survey that says MPLS adoption is on the rise.

NP-2000 appliances now include a technology Network Physics dubbed Automatic Autonomous Systems Discovery (AASD), which will relate how MPLS affects application performance at remote offices.

Network Physics says that often, as on typical WANs, application performance suffers across MPLS WANs. NP-2000 appliances use Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-aware technology to automatically discover MPLS networks and map application performance, utilization and errors such as packet loss, the company says.

The appliance could help those responding to a recent survey conducted by Steven Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Associates and Network World newsletter author. Of the more than 200 respondents, 45% expect to adopt MPLS over the next 18 months and 45% already have deployed MPLS-based networks. Taylor attributes the rate of adoption to MPLS’ quality of service and support for VoIP.

To monitor traffic, the NP-2000 acts as a passive BGP peer and can auto-discover the paths for each application flow in a network. The new AASD technology maps each group of application flows to their respective destination’s autonomous system, which equates to a branch office or remote site location. Network Physics says this allows customers to reduce the complexity of managing MPLS networks down to monitoring remote office performance. The NP-2000 appliance also retains the drill-downs to the specific IP addresses, devices, hops and applications, and users that enable IT managers to perform deep troubleshooting when necessary.

The 1U appliance plugs in to a network and looks at all the traffic that travels across key aggregation points. The technology is available immediately as a free upgrade to all existing customers. Pricing for the NP-2000 depends on the bandwidth managed; the average initial deployment consists of two to four units and runs between $100,000 and $200,000.