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Technology Industry

Network remains problem-free: platform for network monitoring and troubleshooting provided analysis of traffic problems

Communications News, August, 2006

Founded in 1984, Smart City Networks is the nation's largest provider of event technology in the convention industry, providing clients with design, installation and maintenance of data, voice, electrical and utility platforms, coupled with voice and data network engineering, security, and monitoring across the United States. Smart City has deep roots in telephony, broadband data and cable television, and a significant presence in the convention, hospitality and master planned community markets.

For the past eight years, Smart City Networks has provided technology services for the International Computer Electronic Show (CES), one of the world's largest consumer technology tradeshows, which is held each January in Las Vegas. The show hit a new record in 2006, when attendance swelled to more than 150,000 attendees from 110 countries.

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On the first day, when 2,400 exhibitors, spread over more than a dozen facilities citywide, turned on 10,000 computers all at once, the network and the means to manage it had to be robust and responsive. In recent years, show managers have been concerned about the increasing threat of viruses and worms. Scalability had become an issue with many network-management and troubleshooting products.

With only 36 show hours available for exhibitors to impress attendees, downtime was not acceptable, and response time was critical. For this year's CES, Smart City Networks turned to the WildPackets OmniAnalysis platform for network monitoring and troubleshooting.

Planning for the event begins a year in advance. Smart City must support any number of different operating systems, in multiple languages, for participants with variable levels of knowledge about how to connect to a network. The firm built more than 180 VLANs on two physically diverse networks, with a combined 1.2 million concurrent conversations.

Smart City contracted with WildPackets partner Open Access Systems (Oasys) to set up the OmniAnalysis system, and to provide dedicated expertise for monitoring the network during the show. Oasys is a reseller and systems integrator based in Bloomingdale, N.J.

The two physically separate networks each required 1 gigabit of bandwidth, one for local use to Smart City's Nevada network operations center and one for Internet access. The first day of the show, when thousands of computers start up, is particularly critical. Rapid alert and response time to any problems are essential.

Using OmniAnalysis, the Oasys team monitored all key conversations in real-time during the show, and was able to provide Smart City with accurate evidence to confirm the source of various customer problems. For example, if a customer complained that a particular Web site was either not up or not fast enough, Oasys used OmniAnalysis to pinpoint the source of the problem. Oasys was able to determine that slow network response in one case was due to a user downloading Microsoft updates, causing the server to time out.

While in monitoring and tracing-to-disk mode, OmniAnalysis was also filtering for viruses, using virus filters that WildPackets releases whenever a major virus outbreak occurs. In recent years, WildPackets has released filters for all the major viruses, including Sapphire, Zoptob, Sasser and MYDoom.

Once a filter is enabled, the solution can detect a virus in a packet stream. Upon identifying a virus, Oasys immediately took action based on results seen in OmniAnalysis and closed all the ports associated with the virus. At CES, the product did this before the network's intrusion-detection devices had even detected the virus's presence.

Smart City was particularly impressed with the utilization analysis Oasys did for network address translation (NAT) router usage. Smart City plans show bandwidth requirements based on exhibitor orders for IP addresses. The use of NAT routers (which allow a network to share a single Internet connection over a single IP address) can skew the actual number of computers connecting. Using OmniAnalysis' deep-trace analysis to look at IP addresses and flows, and by creating a graph of IP identifiers over time along with address translation, Oasys was able to see additional stations behind each IP address.

NAT allows the translation of logical or physical source and destination addresses into vendor-specific or familiar device names. The ease and flexibility with which captured data can be imported and exported to other applications (such as Excel) adds to the power of OmniAnalysis for solving problems like how many users were connecting behind NAT routers. For example, an exhibitor may request five IP addresses, but actually connect 100 machines to the network. This unexpected load could negatively impact the entire network.

Utilization can suffer when customers use bandwidth beyond their contract rate. Oasys provided Smart City with documentation that was used for service-level agreement policy enforcement. That enabled Smart City to provide better customer service in the form of more accurate bandwidth planning.

Technology Industry

Network remains problem-free: platform for network monitoring and troubleshooting provided analysis of traffic problems

Communications News, August, 2006

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