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Packet Design's Route Explorer Helps Honolulu
City/County IT Staff Manage Island-Wide Network
PALO ALTO , Calif., April 8, 2008 – The city and county of Honolulu, Hawaii, has deployed Packet Design's Route Explorer route analytics solution to help manage the IP network that connects government agencies and departments across the island of Oahu.
Route Explorer was installed in 2007 on the 200-plus Cisco router network that links Honolulu's police and fire stations, parks and recreation facilities, disaster recovery centers and other sites. It provides the city's information technology staff with visibility into the dynamic routing changes in the complex IP network which runs Cisco's Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), enabling them to quickly diagnose and solve problems and do proactive network planning.
Gordon Bruce, chief information officer in the City and County of Honolulu's Department of Information Technology, said Route Explorer, which uses a network management technology known as route analytics, has saved his staff many hours of network troubleshooting time.
"Before Route Explorer, our network management tools could tell us that a specific router was either up or down, but they didn't get us very far in figuring out what was causing application problems," Bruce said. "If users were seeing their applications disconnected, we would have to manually check everything from cables to routers and switches one by one, and sometimes locating the problem might take two or three days. Route Explorer helps us get to the root cause of problems much faster by telling us which path through the network was carrying the application traffic, so we can focus our efforts there."
"With Route Explorer we can discover, often within minutes, logical problems that used to be very confusing," said Tony Velasco, a systems analyst in the department. "Recently, when a route was 'flapping' [going up and down intermittently], we could see immediately that it was the result of two network segments being configured with the same IP address."
Honolulu's IT department also uses Route Explorer to take the uncertainty out of network planning by modeling changes on the as-running network before actually implementing those changes. "If we're thinking of taking a router down for maintenance or adding another main switch at our disaster recovery center, Route Explorer can tell us beforehand how it will impact the overall network topology," Velasco said. "And when we plan a new agency site or relocate an existing one, we now know in advance how to design the network for maximum robustness."
Route Explorer lets users visualize, monitor and analyze an IP network's logical (routing) operation, revealing otherwise hidden aspects of how OSPF and other routing protocols operate. It works by discovering all routers on the network, creating an end-to-end view of the routing topology, and "listening" to the protocol exchanges to learn when routing changes occur. By having such information, network engineers can identify and resolve problems more quickly, perform more effective network maintenance, and have a sound basis for accurate network-change planning.
About Packet Design, Inc.
Packet Design, Inc., pioneered the field of route analytics and is the leading supplier of network appliances that provide routing-layer visibility into IP networks. The company's products create an accurate layer 3 topology map, analyze routing events, and provide a unique end-to-end, "path-aware" view of network traffic (including MPLS-VPN customer traffic), letting network engineers quickly pinpoint network problems and accurately model changes. Packet Design solutions help manage networks in hundreds of organizations, including many of the world's largest service providers, global enterprises (financial, retail pharmaceutical and other firms), government agencies and educational institutions.
Packet Design was founded in March 2003 by serial entrepreneur and former Cisco Chief Technology Officer Judy Estrin and former Cisco Chief Scientist Van Jacobson. For more information, visit www.packetdesign.com.
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