When it comes to managing Cisco routers, Brian Jones wants to get more than he paid for. The manager of network engineering and operations at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg says the school’s IT team discovered a way to save money and staff time, while also managing its 1,454 Cisco switches and 71 Cisco routers more efficiently.
Many vendors, including Cisco, offer tools to simplify managing the gear, but the team at Virginia Tech wrote its own software designed to track device configuration and manage frequent changes.
“You can buy those canned tools for Cisco equipment from software vendors, but then you end up with their view of your network,” Jones says.
Whether it’s through tapping hidden features in the gear, deploying software tools or training staff, finding innovative ways to manage a large Cisco network can provide cost savings, reduce some tedious staff duties and optimize the equipment’s performance. Perhaps it’s because vendor equipment dominates most corporate wiring closets and data centers that several network managers have uncovered tips and tricks they’re willing to share with their peers in IT operations.
Virginia Tech wrote and uses scripts that can work across Cisco interfaces, ensuring that any engineer can manage multiple devices. Jones says the scripts eliminate the need for the network administrator to be familiar with each piece of equipment and/or its interface to understand what needs to be done.
“We have so much equipment and several people making changes that if we didn’t track them constantly, we’d have a real mess of a network,” Jones says.
The homegrown application captures all switch and router configurations, and changes made to the devices. All the data is then stored in a repository for easy access in case a network problem occurs. Not only do the scripts ensure accuracy across equipment, they also provide some automation when configuring routers and switches, which saves the IT staff time.
Jones says Cisco made it easier for Virginia Tech to write change management software with the company’s own configuration processes.
“With Cisco, it’s a text-based configuration file so it’s easy to store. With other vendors, there’s no way to easily store that data in a repository to view later,” Jones says. And he says he considered change and configuration management tools from software companies such as Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard and IBM Tivoli, but adds that at the time, the wares couldn’t track changes across different interfaces on the Cisco gear.
Jones also taps Cisco’s NetFlow metering protocol on occasion to take closer looks at potential security breaches. NetFlow is part of Cisco’s IOS that collects and measures data as it enters specific routers or switch interfaces, which network managers can choose to activate. The data can be used to monitor key applications, including accounting, billing and network planning, for corporate or service provider customers.
While NetFlow tends to collect volumes of log data – which potentially can slow down a network – Jones says he can spot the top network talkers by tapping the Cisco-specific feature. And he’s found that the protocol can provide a bit of extra security on the network periphery because it can gather more specific application and traffic metrics than common protocols such as SNMP can. He keeps the feature turned on in Virginia Tech’s edge switches.
“If we suspect any security issues, we’ll find them in our NetFlow logs. It generates a lot of data,” he says.
Open source help
The open source community is another option for inexpensive and easy software tools to manage Cisco networks.
Paul Watkins, a network analyst with Newell Rubbermaid in Freeport, Ill., takes an open source approach to managing the hundreds of Cisco devices on his network.
The home-storage products manufacturer uses a tool called Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) to watch over its Cisco-based infrastructure. A SuSE Linux as a virtual server image on an IBM S/390 mainframe is used to run the network monitoring application.
“We use MRTG in lieu of [Hewlett-Packard] OpenView or other expensive monitoring products,” he says. The fact that MRTG is a free, open source product without licensing restrictions was a major factor, he adds. “We’re not paying $10,000 for some application that we licensed on a per-node basis. And of course, since it’s on the mainframe, it runs really fast,” he says.
The MRTG application is used to poll about 400 devices worldwide. Rubbermaid uses the tool to monitor the status and make configuration changes to Cisco 2600s and 7500s and Catalyst 6500 switches across the company’s WAN.
Because the code for MRTG is open source, Watkins and his co-workers have made some changes to the program’s code to make it friendlier with their network.
“MRTG is pretty basic, but we’ve got a guy who’s written some extensions to it that let us automatically add devices through a Web interface,” Watkins says, which makes adding new devices and changing the program settings easier.
Watkins says he was not leery of using an open source tool to manage his Cisco network. Especially when he found out that AT&T, his WAN carrier, was using the same program to give the company reports on its routers.
Design issues
In addition to finding untapped features and deploying inexpensive management tools, IT managers with forethought also can design their Cisco networks to provide optimal performance for the price.
David Swan, senior manager of global network operations at Altera, a San Jose maker of programmable logic devices, designed his network infrastructure around one switch family: the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series.
High-end, fabric-enabled switches reside at the core of the network, where performance is more critical. A midtier version of the 6500 family performs distribution tasks on the network, and on the bottom tier where no routing is necessary, Altera uses low-end 6500 switches.
He says keeping his switch choices in one Cisco family reaped numerous benefits for Altera. Among the plusses are reduced support and maintenance costs, a network full of interchangeable equipment and a simplified architecture that staff with a variety of skill sets can learn and administer.
“We only have to support and stay current in one hardware family and one software set, and that’s a lot less confusing,” Swan says. “The need, and the cost, to train staff goes down because everyone is speaking the same language.”
On a switch-by-switch basis, Swan learned that turning on the 6500’s single-router mode features provides fault tolerance on the gear while also lowering the amount of processing power the switch users and reducing IT staff configuration duties.
He explains that a 6500 switch can have two processors running at once, with one serving as a failover mechanism for the other. But without flipping on the single-router-mode option, the one switch acted as two different processors, which required separate configuration and separate maintenance. Swan says he discovered that with the feature on, the two processors act as twins and provide the same failover capabilities. And he says he’s sure there’s more he can learn about Cisco equipment.
“Cisco gear is like an unopened box. You buy it and it does what you need. Yet some people don’t realize how much more it can do,” Swan says.
