Sep 11th, 2006 |
Recent poll shows that a majority of Americans have accepted the current altered state of reality as the “New Norm”. Many Americans also mourned that after five years, causalities unfortunately have included erosion on our personal liberty, presumption of innocence, willingness to engage in open dialog for fear of being incriminated as unpatriotic and most importantly, the lost of our collective will to mandate adequate “checks and balances” between our branches of government.
The world of networking has changed as well.
Five years ago, in the midst of dotcom and telecom, IT was simply the source of money. Engineers visited Interop to preview the latest in networking technology which would enable their companies to exploit new business opportunities.
IT was measured by ROI, Return on Investment. To buy a new router, all one had to do to justify the expenditure was to figure out how many months it would take for the equipment to generate enough incremental revenues such that it could pay for itself.
Five years later, the New Norm for IT is that it has become the source of risks. ROI now stands for Risk of Incarceration.
Today, every business is eBusiness, every network is mission critical and every online resource must be available 24×7. To stay competitive, one needs higher performance, greater bandwidth, more reliability and lower cost. Downtime, slow response, security breaches and non-compliance with government regulations and industry standards can get us fired, even potentially landing our bosses in jail.
Moreover, ROI also means Risk of Indigestion. With a converged network, multiple applications and protocols now share the same physical infrastructure. When customer complains that the network is down, it does not necessarily mean that the network is dead. Often there might not be anything wrong with the physical layer of the network at all. The network might be working perfectly, but the application that runs on top might not.
In this four-part Blog series, we shall introduce SpyNet which is both a tradition of Interop and an industry Best Practice.
SpyNet is an auxiliary “shadow” network not accessible by the public and is built for the sole purpose of mitigating business risks by ensuring the absolute integrity of the mission-critical event network (InteropNet).
Sponsors to this year’s InteropSpyNet include Fluke Networks, Juniper Networks, Gigamon Systems, Network General and Network Physics, providing state-of-the-art passive monitoring appliances for the purpose of troubleshooting, intrusion detection, data access, forensics and application management, respectively.
As shown in this NOC Poster and the Virtual NOC Tour, SpyNet has gradually and successfully evolved to address new challenges imposed by the New Norm. SpyNet is now a virtualized data access network, allowing engineers to gain access to production traffic from anywhere at anytime and even when the network is under attacked and highly compromised.
Denny K Miu
Gigamon Systems
Part 1: SpyNet and the New Norm
Part 2: SpyNet and Gigamon University
Part 3: SpyNet and Entrepreneur (Kenny Frerichs of Network Physics)
Part 4: SpyNet and Entrepreneur (Doug Smith of Network Instruments)
