Packet Design Announces BGP Analysis Technology

Packet Design Inc. on Monday announced a new technology designed to let enterprises and service providers better analyze traffic on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) networks.

Scheduled to be available later this year as an upgrade to the company's Route Explorer network-analysis appliance, the new BGP technology uses statistical algorithms and graphical visualization software to help administrators identify the BGP network "events" which are the root causes of follow-on events in BGP networks, Packet Design said.

Jeff Raice, executive vice president of marketing and business development for Packet Design, said the highly chatty nature of BGP (a protocol used by service providers and large enterprises to exchange routing and reachability information between interconnected systems) has made it historically hard to analyze, leaving administrators uncertain where or when problems occur in a BGP network.

"There's previously been no good way to analyze what happens [on a BGP network]," since one event (like a change to a routing table) can trigger millions of follow-on events, Raice said. Service providers, he said, have tended to ignore most BGP events as background noise. Though tools and techniques were available for determining root causes, the large amounts of data needed didn't allow for timely resolutions to such problems, Raice said.

Packet Design's new technology (which will be demonstrated in the company's booth at next week's Networld + Interop show in Las Vegas) uses statistical algorithms to examine potentially millions of BGP events in real time, and combines that with a topological view of the network to pinpoint the event or events that have triggered a problem, Raice said.Such diagnostic capabilities will be increasingly important to enterprises and service providers as they roll out more network-sensitive applications like voice, Raice said. "Administrators need to better understand the network as a system, and not just a collection of boxes," he said.