Press Releases
| COMPANY CONTACT Jeff Raice Packet Design, Inc 650.739.1880 jeff@packetdesign.com |
AGENCY CONTACT Janis Ulevich Ulevich & Orrange, Inc. 650.329.1590 info@u-o.com |
PACKET DESIGN UNVEILS BGP ROOT-CAUSE ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY
Service Providers to Get Help Determining Which Event(s)
Led to Millions of Routing Changes on Their Networks
PALO ALTO, Calif., May 3, 2004 – Technology that can help service providers quickly determine which single routing event is the root cause of millions of other events in their BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) networks has been developed by Packet Design.
Packet Design's BGP root-cause analysis technology will be available later this year as an upgrade to the company's Route Explorer appliance. When combined with Route Explorer's existing ability to provide full routing-path visibility and analysis of BGP networks, the new functionality will give network engineers unprecedented knowledge of these historically hard-to-diagnose networks.
The technology will be demonstrated at the Networld+Interop conference May 11-13, at Packet Design booth #651.
BGP, used by virtually all service providers and many large enterprises to exchange routing information between interconnected autonomous systems, has posed major troubleshooting challenges because it is the most "chatty" of routing protocols. A minor connectivity change can produce hundreds or thousands – even millions – of updates following a significant peering loss.
"Today's networks are so large and complex that, while gigahertz processors and terabyte disks can capture and record the huge numbers of BGP events, making sense of these events in real time has been computationally unfeasible," said Jeff Raice, Packet Design's executive vice president of marketing and business development. "Advanced statistical techniques exist for pinpointing root causes from large volumes of data points, but until now it hasn't been possible to deduce the source of a problem in a timeframe that would be practical for resolving it."
Packet Design's technical team has leveraged its routing expertise to develop two new capabilities: a statistical algorithm that extracts the large-scale structure of BGP event streams to determine the root cause of those events, and visualization techniques to display that structure in operationally meaningful ways. The new algorithm provides the computational efficiency to examine millions of BGP events in real-time and identify the single or multiple events that triggered them, even if those events are several "hops" away from the user's network. It works by exploiting a real-time topological view of the network to analyze the "tree structure" of BGP events, thereby isolating individual sets of events resulting from a common source. This technique reduces the massive computational requirement to a manageable level, potentially narrowing down thousands of events to a single Syslog message.
"Tests have shown that our technology can keep up with a BGP event stream from a typical tier-one provider's entire backbone mesh using a 1-gigahertz CPU," Raice said. "When the algorithms are implemented in Route Explorer later this year, network engineers will be able to find and correct BGP problems much faster than ever before. They will quickly be able to see what happened, how it happened and how the network is affected. And they'll have real-time network topology views to help them rapidly diagnose and fix problems such as misconfigured community tags, policy filters with unintended consequences, and unexpected or unwanted backup paths."
More information on Packet Design's BGP root-cause analysis technology, including a technical presentation and on-line animations, can be found at http://www.packetdesign.com/technology/presentations/nanog-30/index.htm.
About Route Explorer
Route Explorer, introduced in 2002, looks into the IP "cloud," gathering, displaying and analyzing routing-path information to let network engineers rapidly respond to IP problems, effectively maintain networks and plan for growth. Sitting in the network infrastructure as if it were a router – though it forwards no traffic – Route Explorer "listens" to the network control plane, computing and displaying a layer 3 topology map while logging routing events in a local database. This data can be analyzed and visualized in real time from a remote console, for a complete picture of the network's routing operations. Route Explorer supports the BGP, OSPF, IS-IS and EIGRP routing protocols.
About Packet Design, Inc.
Packet Design, Inc., develops a family of network appliances that improves the reliability, efficiency and predictability of IP networks by providing network-layer (layer 3) visibility into them. Packet Design, Inc., was spun out in March 2003 from Packet Design, LLC, the fourth networking company started by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico, who previously founded Bridge Communications, Network Computing Devices and Precept Software. After receiving seed funding from Packet Design, LLC, Packet Design, Inc., raised $14 million in Series B funding from Advanced Technology Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Allegis Capital, Masthead Venture Partners and Packet Design, LLC. For more information, visit http://www.packetdesign.com.
© 2005. Packet Design Inc.
