Router analysis tool now supports BGP

Colorado Springs, Colo. - Packet Design Inc. has added support for the Border Gateway Protocol to its Route Explorer 2.0 package, extending the router analysis tool across multiple autonomous systems-the realm where the BGP routing protocol operates.

Doug Brent, chief executive officer of Packet Design (Palo Alto, Calif.), said that the BGP capability supports "private enterprise Internets," because the notion of extending analysis across multiple autonomous-system (AS) domains remains a difficult concept for some network managers. In enterprise networks of the past, he said, corporate environments constituted a single route domain, using open shortest path first or intermediate system-intermediate system protocols within the AS, and only moving to BGP when corporate traffic went onto the public network.

Now, though, corporate nets might link dispersed sites with complex subnets for storage and server clustering, bringing BGP into the mainstream.

Route Explorer provides a real-time view of how packets are routed in the network on an ongoing basis, indicating failures and traffic load, and indicating how networks could change to take on different traffic loads or patterns. Analytical tools are standard for a single domain, but with the 2.0 rollout Packet Design is proving that the concepts can be extended across multiple domains.

"There's a general perception out there, among service providers as well as enterprise network managers, that BGP is too complicated to track," said Packet Design's vice president of marketing, Jeff Raice. "We have to be able to show customers that this is real."

Route Explorer 2.0 provides table-based views of route redundancy, and allows regions with different internal gateway protocols to be seen as a consistent whole, or as any combination of subnets, ASes or administrative groupings desired. The software supports multiuser login and operation, native X Windows and the ability to save custom-topology layouts for later use. Multidimensional event filtering is supported to trace complex faults and to isolate root causes of problems. A Network Baselining feature allows the definition of baseline performance and the analysis of BGP data as deviation from the baseline.

The high-end package with BGP support, the Route Explorer Internet Edition, is priced at $50,000. The standard Enterprise Edition starts at $35,000. A Campus Edition for single-user operation sells for $19,000.