By Brian Boyko
We recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Bruce Clark, VP of sales at Network Instruments, and Charles Thompson, manager of sales and engineering at Network Instruments at the Network Instruments booth at Interop, where they talked about how they were working with the Interop NOC and talked about some of the experiences that they’ve had at Interop.
Network Instruments has a 8TB GigaStor appliance set up to obtain data from the Interop show floor – a sponsorship earned when they worked with Interop last fall in New York City, and they were able to look at the data going across the show’s Class A network, according to Thompson.
“The traffic level has been fairly consistent,” Thompson said. “A lot more BitTorrent than I guess I would have imagined at this particular showcase venue. It’s mostly Web traffic – some email traffic. A couple of the organizations seem to have SQL servers up and running, generating a fair amount of data across the network here.“
“We can dial in – I saw some MP3s going across, some people downloading music, random files, looked like there were some system images going across there as well.”
Bruce Clark talked a bit about the success they’ve been having at Interop as well.
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“We have a sign that says ‘TiVo for your network,’” Clark said, referring to Retrospective Network Analysis, “and you wouldn’t believe how many people stop and read that sign, and want to know more – but at the same time, they immediately understand it… I would say that 90% of our demos, when we’re talking to customers here – well, that’s what they’re interested in. It virtually didn’t exist last year, and now it’s the topic.”
Of course, not everyone “gets it” the first time.
“I had a guy who asked asked, ‘If I plug it [GigaStor] into the network, will it automatically go on and find and fix problems with my infrastructure?’” Thompson said. “It won’t, of course, it’s a tool that provides visibility but it’s not going to automatically fix problems. He wasn’t a fan of the way his network was architected and thought maybe an appliance could re-architect his network for him.”
Clark and Thompson have also learned a few things from vendors and potential customers at Interop that have surprised them. For example, they were surprised at the success of the recently announced GigaStor portable and the network security implications of GigaStor.
“I always looked at Retrospective Network Analysis as something that’s permanently deployed,” Thompson said. “That’s the whole goal of it – to go back and look at things because you don’t know when or what is going to be of interest. But we have a number of customers – service providers mostly – that wanted to be able to have that that technology in a portable platform. And so we came out with a product which we called the GigaStor Portable – which we announced just in time for Interop. And I’ve been amazed by the interest we’ve received from customers who come and say: ‘I read a release on the GigaStor Portable, show it to me. I want to see it – I love the idea of taking it out to remote facility.’ I’m surprised by that because I never thought that retrospective analysis would go that route.”
“A huge topic of interest for us this year is the security aspects of the GigaStor product. That’s something we recently enhanced – the ability to take the captured data and run it against Snort Rules, an industry-standard mechanism to determine what happened,” Clark said. “We’re not trying to be an intrusion prevention device or a screen of any sort, but the implications of what that security breach did to your network traffic are huge. It’s a new area for us.”
“Obviously, [GigaStor] plays into the NetQoS relationship as well,” Clark continued. “A number of people asked about the interconnection between the GigaStor device and the NetQoS solution, and that seems to be very well received.“
NetQoS is an OEM partner of Network Instruments and sells the GigaStor appliance under the NetQos brand, together with Network Instruments Expert Observer packet-level forensic analysis software.
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