Just to ignore your wishes and reply on-list :) Other folks may be interested. The general area is known as "route analytics". The box you are talking about may be from Packet Design (the HP solution is OEMed from them, I believe) or Ipsum networks. This is separate from modeling and simulation tools like Cariden, Opnet, and Wandl which all offer some greater or lesser degree of routing protocol support. I believe the original idea for these boxes was to target service providers, but enterprises are also quite interested in the field, especially with the growth of RFC2547 VPNs. A box like this can help an enterprise keep track of the BGP advertisements and any OSPF/EIGRP redistribution at their sites (which can number in the thousands). Sales of these products are pretty small now, but that may change. Imagine doing data correlation between IGP (or BGP) convergence and dropped calls on a softswitch across a few thousand sites. My personal opinion is that questions about Internet/WAN technology vendors on a _high_ level are perfectly appropriate for NANOG - at least as much as "is xyz down?" :) More in-depth stuff ("how do I configure my GSR to dance the lambada") belong on the appropriate NSP lists... -- Daniel Golding On 6/24/05 5:55 PM, "Aaron Glenn" <aaron.glenn@gmail.com> wrote:
I apologize for the off-topic post, but I'm at my wits end trying to "rediscover" a peice of equipment I came across a few months ago but some how lost the datasheet/bookmark too. The appliance was a standard 1U rackmount "pizzabox" that spoke a whole variety of protocols (IS-IS, BGP, OSPF, MPLS + TE, etc). Basically, the pitch was you plugged the box into your network, and it spat out a pretty map with all sorts of interesting information without having to poll (much). I realize there might be more than a few of these products, but I've somehow managed to avoid all of them in my search.
Please contact me offlist if you might be familiar with a/the device described above. Thanks
Regards, aaron.glenn