TMCnet News
Lack of Troubleshooting Tools for MPLS Identified as Top Inhibitor In Recent MPLS IP VPN Survey Network Physics, the leader in eliminating response-time problems across converging networks, today announced a new Multi-Protocol Label Switch (MPLS) technology for its NP-2000 appliance. Dubbed Automatic Autonomous System Discovery (AASD), the new technology will allow the increasing number of enterprises with MPLS networks to, for the first time, understand how the MPLS network is affecting application performance for remote offices, and to identify and solve network and application problems that arise.“The lack of troubleshooting tools is the major inhibitor for MPLS adoption today,” said Steven Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Associates and the Webtorials education website (www.webtorials.com), quoting the results from a recent survey his organization conducted. “Users indicated that MPLS network adoption is rapidly increasing at the expense of frame relay, and is being driven by enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) and better support for IP services. In addition, users were also looking for better management tools than they currently have, especially for ensuring QoS. Customers are clearly ready for new solutions such as Network Physics’, which are directed at better managing MPLS and ensuring end-to-end QoS.” Legacy frame relay management has relied on layer-2 measurements to troubleshoot performance problems. As indicated by the Webtorials survey, MPLS deployments are driven by true IP networking and QoS at layer-3, and require a new management approach that maps the layer-3 MPLS network to application layer-4 QoS, performance and utilization. Network Physics’ new AASD technology enables users to explicitly monitor and troubleshoot IP service performance across the MPLS cloud. With the AASD technology, the NP-2000 can discover and adapt to MPLS Private Autonomous System (AS) network topologies. MPLS wide area networks (WANs) or MPLS virtual private networks (VPNs) are typically made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of remote branch offices. The appliance’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-aware technology can automatically seek out and discover MPLS AS topologies regardless of how complex and extensive they are, and map application performance, utilization and errors like packet loss and retransmissions directly from the remote branch office level, through the MPLS AS and down to the IP-address user level. The NP-2000 provides a first of its kind synchronization between MPLS AS topology and end-user application performance. “The march to implement MPLS topologies in today’s corporate networks is on,” said Bob Quillin, vice president of marketing for Network Physics. “With that drive has come the realization that MPLS can cause incredible management problems. Unfortunately, the last generation of management products can’t bridge the gaps between MPLS, applications, networks and business groups. The NP-2000 is the only product that can let companies realize all of the benefits of MPLS, without any of the headaches.” The NP-2000 measures critical metrics that allow for faster application performance problem resolution. The metrics tracked include usage and utilization, network performance, server performance, client performance, ISP/AS performance, and route performance. This gives enterprises the ability to “match” business-relevant measurements of performance to the application and the network. MPLS is being increasingly used by enterprises as a replacement for legacy, point-to-point based WAN technologies, like frame-relay and uses BGP as a routing protocol across the MPLS cloud. The Network Physics NP-2000 acts as a passive iBGP peer, and can auto-discover the AS paths for each application flow in the 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. This enables the user to reduce the management of a complex MPLS network topology to a simple, business-centric monitoring of remote office performance, while the NP-2000 retains the drill-downs to the specific IP addresses, devices, hops and applications, and users that enable deep troubleshooting when necessary. The NP-2000 is deployed at an enterprise’s major data aggregation points. By analyzing the real-time traffic flows, it is not necessary to install the product at remote office locations. This allows IT teams to simplify and centralize monitoring at centralized locations. Previous-generation solutions required instrumentation at both ends of the network connection, which for large enterprises with a number of branch offices significantly increased complexity, cost and administrative overhead. The new technology is available immediately as a free upgrade to all existing customers. |