Defibrillating the Net

Defibrillating the Internet? Sounds like something Jay Leno would say. But Gault isn't joking. Gault has assembled a team of Nobel Laureates and other scientists (one of whom contributed to the core technology behind the "implantable heart defibrillator") to come up with a family of products that can diagnose and eventually defibrillate the Internet.

As with the human body, the challenge is to gather data generated by an organism and translate that data into vital signs that enable intelligent diagnosis and automated action. Network Physics plans to handle both problems by bringing to market the Internet equivalents of electrocardiogram machines and automatic defibrillators. If it sounds to you like rocket science, you're not alone. I was pretty impressed too.

The first of these tools is the company's NP-1000. On the surface, it resembles other packet capturing and diagnostic products. Like network diagnostic tools such as Networks Associates' Sniffer, the NP-1000 is a combination of hardware and software. On the hardware side are two devices: SmartProbe and Coordinator.

SmartProbe works like an EKG machine, passively monitoring specific vital signs and sending these to the Coordinator, a device that houses a database optimized for network analysis. According to Gault, this two-tier architecture allows companies to deploy multiple SmartProbes feeding data to one Coordinator.

The capture and storage process extracts every bit of relevant information from every packet and continuously traces the route and round trip times of every data stream from source to destination. Consequently, Network Physics' software--the Internet Traffic Manager--can pinpoint where traffic to and from your site is getting bogged down and what business partners, customers, and other constituents are being negatively impacted. Picture yourself as a helicopter pilot flying over a traffic jam on an L.A. freeway. Suddenly, you spot an overly busy on-ramp or an accident (the equivalent of a crashed router) as the source of congestion. This is what the NP-1000 can do for you.

If your business depends on the Internet, or worse, if you have service level agreements (SLAs) whose thresholds are being compromised, Internet Traffic Manager may provide a clear picture of where traffic is getting backed up. What action you take next is your decision (or those of the entities that touch your Web site). For example, if you're able to isolate the problem to a chronically congested branch of the Internet, you could find ways to circumvent that branch--such as discontinuing business with the ISP that runs it.

But isolating the problem and making business decisions based on what you find could still leave the fate of you and your business in the hands of others (like the new ISP to which you switch your business). SLAs may be a contractual solution. But, at the end of the day, if your SLA is breached and you lose a million dollars because of it, does it really matter? Wouldn't you rather have done something proactive on your end to help contribute to the solution?

Probably. And this is where more of that rocket science comes in. As it turns out, when you take an EKG of the Internet, as the lab-folk at Network Physics have, you'll find out that the Internet actually resonates.

Now picture yourself as a driver in that same traffic jam. You wish that every other driver would slow down a bit and go exactly the same speed as you--maybe five miles per hour. That would keep things moving and no one would ever have to stop. But the car in front of you had an opening, gunned it up to 20 miles per hour, and now has to jam on the brakes. And because other drivers keep jamming on the brakes, some cars are moving and some are not. The process of constantly slowing down and speeding up ripples all the way through the freeway and the end result is that it actually takes everyone longer to get where they are going.

The Internet has a similar problem. The helicopter pilot sees packs of cars moving and stopping. The stopped packs of cars equate to packets that are stuck in queues in the routers that serve as the connective tissue of the Internet. Once one queue backs up, so too will all the ones upstream from it (with a little bit of traffic moving in between)--like the packs of moving and stopped cars on the L.A. freeway. If only we could slow all the packets down and keep them all moving at the same speed, they might actually get to their destination sooner.

A solution to this problem must start at the source: where the packets originate. By throttling back the packet entry rate at the edge of the Net, the downstream queues that are jammed (which is exacerbated by the bursty nature of Internet traffic) have a chance to clear themselves. Compare this to stop lights at the end of the on ramps to California's highways. The frequency at which the lights turn green to release a car is similar to the frequency at which a company at the edge of the network can release packets onto the Internet.

How frequently should the lights controlling packet entry on the edge turn green? Take all the data being gathered on a real-time basis by Network Physics' NP-1000 hardware and software and feed it to another product that's due to ship later summer: the Internet Traffic Controller. According to Gault, when a company deploys an ITC, it will be able to dynamically throttle packet entry based on what's going on downstream. The result? A company that deploys ITC, says Gault, will be able to optimize performance of their Net-bound applications. Depending on how many companies deploy an ITC--especially large companies that generate a lot of traffic--Gault says you could see a collective difference that equates to a defib of the Internet--the equivalent of getting all the cars on the L.A. freeway moving at the same (but slower) speed. Ultimately, this would have an optimizing effect on traffic, giving improved bandwidth efficiency a chance to solve congestion problems before resorting to the more expensive alternative--adding lanes.

Could Network Physics have a solution to the Internet traffic jam? Honk if you believe. Better yet, TalkBack to me. I'd like to hear what you think, or other solutions you have tried.

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