"Geek in Paradise" and Test Center Contributing Analyst Brian Chee is my go-to guy when I'm looking for expert insight on anything networking-related. Earlier today, I wrote about EMC's latest version of its Smarts Service Assurance Manager (SAM) and IP Availability Manager (IPAM). Among other things, the company touted the products' support for MPLS networks, as well as the implementation of higher security, such as SNMPv3.
I tapped Brian for his comments about the product announcement. Here's what he told me:
"Considering how few enterprises have widespread deployment of MPLS, this is an announcement aimed at trying to lure future buyers. It starts off sounding EMC is promising the world, but it has some key features that are most likely being driven by Department of Defense (DoD) requirements."
"Network General's NetVigil product has a small number of common features, but is going in a similar direction. The goal for this segment is to better tie together disparate IP resources and provide a way to correlate events in a cross-platform, cross-site manner. Too much is being missed due to the needle in a haystack effect and this and a few others in the product category are trying to be the glue that enterprises will adopt to provide that cross-platform correlation."
"We saw a glimpse in the SEM (security event management) shootout where one of the vendors showed off how a card-swipe was correlated with a remote VPN connection. By themselves, each event is legal, but together, they spell break-in."
"I think it's about time vendors start working towards multiplatform, multi-event correlations. The folks in the IETF have definitely made headway with a common XML replacement for SNMP. So while that bakes in the IETF ovens, it only makes sense to get a product to market with SNMP v3 to make the DoD happy, while taking a first stab at trying to aggregate the NOC."
Brian, by the way, is the founder and directors the Univ. of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology's Advanced Network Computing Laboratory. Whenever we do a large-scale networking test, you can bet that Brian and his lab are involved.
Posted by Ted Samson on December 12, 2006 08:51 PM
