The Net is telling you something. You just need to listen
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Its roots can be traced back to two events--NetWorld and Interop--with the latter show's genes dominating the by-product. NetWorld was a Novellian sort of event and just when it started to broaden its wings, its blood was mixed with Interop's. Interop was so dominated by standard-compliant devices that the most exciting thing there would be a toaster managed from across a network with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). They called it ToasterNet. As the name implied, Interop's trademark was standards-based interoperability.
So it comes as no surprise, when walking N+I's show floor, to find mostly devices that conform to some standard. Despite the commoditizing effect that standards tend to have on markets, booth personnel seem genuinely excited about their latest gigabit Ethernet switch that brings the cost of the technology down to $250 per port. Why? The booth next door has the same thing for $255 per port. And so the show goes. To me, it's a dizzying sea of never-ending Ethernet switches. Finding a diamond in the rough is impossible. Or is it?
One thing that standards have always enabled are network management, administration, and diagnostic software. My favorite of these have always been the packet capturers. Once they're programmed to support a standard, they can lift any packet conforming to that standard off a network, tear it open, and present its contents to the user. (Hopefully, that user is someone authorized to do this.) A couple of these come to mind as long-term staples of the smelly sniffing business: Wildpackets' (formerly AG Group) Etherpeek and Network Associates' Sniffer. Wildpackets was at this year's event. The company has married Etherpeek's ability to extract packets off an Ethernet to the wireless 802.11b standard. Powerful stuff. Scary stuff.
But there appears to be a new class of product coming out that takes sniffing to a whole new level. With sniffing having been commoditized too (you can download sniffers for free now), the next natural step is task-specific sniffing. In other words, taking data that is regularly available and passively collected off a network, and organizing it in a way that is tailored to a very, very specific task. Sure, we could probably take a flexible off-the-shelf product like Etherpeek and tune it for a specific task. It comes out of the box with some task-specific functionality and alerting mechanisms. But where vendors like CompuWare and Network Physics can add real value is in bottling their expertise about something way more granular with the data that's generated and captured by your network.
CompuWare specializes in application development and Network Physics in network flow control and traffic optimization. Both companies have taken their expertise in those areas and asked the question, "While we know how to do such-and-such a task, is the network telling us that there's an even better way to do it?" Not surprisingly, according to officials from both companies, the answer is yes. This class of products extracts the salient points from a sea of data and organizes them in a way that enables companies to make task-specific business and technology decisions. This packaging of expertise and data results in the sort of eerily intelligent tools that one would expect to find in the toolbox of Jay Gridley, chief geek in Tom Clancy's novels about information warfare. They are jobs that ordinary packet capture technologies were always capable of, but never tuned for. For example, for Network Physics to pull it off, the company had to hire the worlds thought leaders and Nobel Laureates in quantum physics and chaos management.
I've spotlighted the products from these two companies--CompuWare and Network Physics in my coverage of NetWorld+Interop and I expect that we'll be seeing many more of these as this interesting category of intelligent network data mining, aggregation, and organization evolves.
Can you see applications for this new generation of sniffers? What's your product of choice? TalkBack to me, or write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com
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