Network discovery is unsolved challenges for large network. Accuracy is number one issue: for a network of 5000 devices, 95% accuracy means 250 devices are not counted; second issue is speed: it was told that some “enterprise discovery solution” took a few weeks to finish discovering one large network.

NetBrain discovery engine is designed for very large network. The two key differentiators are 1)High accuracy -made possible by model-driven discovery engine and 2) High speed -enabled by a complex neighbor-walking mechanism  ...  read more »

Network consultants assess customers’ network for new application readiness or security vulnerabilities many times a year. Besides some scripting tools or a few one-feature software, they largely rely on customers to feed them domain knowledge via network diagrams and configuration files. They spent over 50% time collecting data and writing documents.

As most of the network professionals know, there’re many“network inventory assessment tools” such as those from 1)Cisco CNC(free) 2)Dorado Redcell 3)NetCodia NetMRI 4)Netformx Enterprise Discovery 5)Pari 6)GFI tool.  ...  read more »

EIGRP timer mechanism: Part 2 BFD

In the previous post, I wrote about how EIGRP recognize and establish adjacency with its own timer mechanism. In this post, I’m going focus on BFD, which can assist a wide variety of protocols in detecting failures in a timely manner.

Bidirectional forwarding detection (BFD) is a UDP-based, independent L3 protocol that can run on any routing protocol (proprietary or not) to provide fast failure detection of within one second. It is intended to implement in the forwarding plane and detect connectivity between forwarding planes.  ...  read more »

Both Opnet Netmapper and NetBrain SmartMap features are designed for network engineers and can improve productivities in network diagramming work. Some engineers feel confused, because they don’t know exactually that what the difference between them is. In fact, the two tools are totally different; let me try to introduce the difference in this article.  ...  read more »

The work of network automation needs to be automated and one of the most important reasons is that most organizations can't afford to have project failures or network outages as a result of inadequate knowledge about network configuration or performance.

Asssume you are a consultant, you will meet the basic requirements as following:
end-to-end automation, all collected data is in a single repository, not in different applications, full port-to-port connectivity and routing information, data must be accurate and complete, etc.  ...  read more »