Network performance monitoring pays dividends

REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand) operates a high-speed national and international network that is a key piece of New Zealand’s innovation infrastructure. The 23 national points of presence PoPs are connected to one another at 10 Gbps, and to the rest of the world through two international PoPs connected at 1 Gbps. The international links can experience bottleneck issues, as large amounts of data are passed over the network.

REANNZ needed a way to closely monitor these PoPs, in order to quickly determine when and why a performance issue occurred, ensuring the correct response to restore performance.

REANNZ and the Endace Division of Emulex have worked together over the past five years, collaborating on product development through participation in the Endace customer beta program.

One of the key areas of collaboration was network performance monitoring. REANNZ is constantly faced with the challenge of staying ahead of the demand for resources and changing traffic characteristics. If it doesn’t, the result will be packet loss. A small rate of packet loss (less than 0.01%) in a national scale network causes hugely disproportionate effects (>50x reduction) on data transfer speeds for large flows.

REANNZ has a number of diagnostic software tools it developed itself, which integrate with Emulex tools (eg, alerts are sent to mobile devices should the EndaceProbe INR detect an issue during non-business hours). The Endace Application Dock enables REANNZ to use any third-party tool and take advantage of the EndaceProbe INR’s 100% accurate capture and nanosecond accurate timestamping.

“We required the visibility and intelligence to understand what is happening on the network both proactively and reactively, knowing ahead of time if something suspicious is happening on our networks, affecting both our own organisation and our members,” said Sam Sargent, CIO of REANNZ.

REANNZ deployed the EndaceProbe INR to monitor its Los Angeles and Sydney PoPs. The EndaceProbe INR provides the physical hosting and recording infrastructure, delivering continuous 100% accurate packet capture and network recording in the 1GbE environment as well as providing nanosecond-accurate timestamps for every packet. The EndaceProbe signals when an anomaly is detected and takes corrective action when an issue occurs.

Operating as a non-profit, REANNZ is also under pressure to operate efficiently, as well as reporting back to the government on the return of their investment. The EndaceProbe INR enables REANNZ to maintain tight network monitoring while also reducing OPEX.

“The Emulex visibility solutions have already provided us with a measurable return on investment as we were able to diagnose a serious problem on our international connection, which enabled us to present quantifiable, forensic evidence to our supplier to demand immediate action and save thousands of dollars,” said Sargent.

“We were also able to identify an international attack on one of our member networks, which enabled us to go in and look at the evidence at a forensic level to understand what happened, confirm the scale of the attack and identify how much data was breached,” he added. “This type of ability is critical to ensuring that the intellectual property of our members is not compromised.”