IP Route Analytics
A New Foundation for Modern Network Operations

by Packet Design
Published January 2007, Posted January 2007

Abstract:

From enterprises to college campuses, throughout government agencies and across the global Internet, the economic advantages of networks based on the Internet Protocol have established IP as today’s communication infrastructure of choice.  Compared with legacy, connection-oriented networks, IP delivers far greater resiliency and scalability at a significantly lower cost of deployment.

These benefits have resulted in the large-scale migration of mission critical applications onto an IP infrastructure.  In turn, these applications have driven the requirement for ever-greater reliability and performance of the network delivering these services.

In addition to the need for higher reliability and performance, the adoption of applications with new demands for guaranteed service levels, such as voice/video communications, data storage and VPNs, requires a degree of predictability from the network that has been difficult to obtain with IP, given the dynamic nature of it’s routing.

While the advantages of IP are compelling and undeniable, the distributed architecture behind IP’s preeminence also makes managing the network more of a challenge. The growth in size and importance of IP networks has led to increased operational complexity and costs.  Bubble-era, brute force solutions of indiscriminately adding bandwidth and IT personnel no longer scale in today’s more “normal” economic climate.  Network operators and engineers need new solutions for achieving the requisite network visibility, analysis and control capabilities … all essential elements of running a network that have been lost in the transition to IP.

A fundamentally new solution called IP Route Analytics offers unprecedented visibility, analysis and diagnosis of complex IP networks, improving service availability and performance, while reducing operating costs and capital expenses. This paper describes a new approach to IP network operations that is based on leveraging IP’s inherent intelligence to gain essential knowledge of its dynamic routing functions … a required management foundation for effective service assurance.

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