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First Look: NextHop's Aim - Graceful Net Restarts

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(01/23/03, 01:50:07 PM EDT)

Mountain View, Ca. -- On the heels of the approval by the Internet EngineeringTask Force of new specifications for routing software manageability and reliability,NextHop Technologies Inc. has moved to establish a lead with new implementations of its GateID 10.0 routing software that incorporate the standards.

According to Sue Hares, founder and CTO of NextHop and co-chairperson of the Inter-Domain Routing Group within the IETF, the new version of GateID supports recent Internet drafts from the IETF for graceful (or hitless) restarts, a major step toward moving beyond the typical three or four 9s (99.999 percent) reliability associated with most data processing applications and closer to the five and six nines reliability associated with telecomm applications. This is particularly important, she said, as data and voice communications converge in such specifications as voice over IP (VoIP).

The hitless restart mechanism incorporated into the GateID is a standards-based mechanism for allowing a networking device to continue to forward packets, even while the routing software itself is being re-started. "Such restarts are often triggered by a hardware failure," she said, "or are part of a planned process for updating or reconfiguring the software." But in the past, she said, this process often required going offline momentarily, causing slight disruptions in traffic flow. "This non-disruptive process allows developers of network equipment to provide a higher level of equipment availability. This then in turn allows both public and private networks that utilize such equipment a higher level of network reliability."

Such mechanisms are increasingly important as useage of the Internet continues to climb driven not only by more human users, but with more unique URLs with the shift to the 128 bit Ipv6 protocol and more and more wireless and embedded devices being deployed with unique URL addressing.

Graceful (or hitless) restart capabilities are extensions to the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), BGP (Border Gateway) and IS-IS (Intermediate System to Intermediate System) protocols. The IETF is working on additional standards to continue to provide even higher levels of reliability and availability in the IP network, she said.

NextHop is also the first out of the gate, said Hares, with a commercialized version of an XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) Routing API (application-programming interface). This API enables vendors to quickly and easily build customized command line or web interfaces and provide users with a readily accessible script interface. While a number of proprietary interfaces had been used in the past, none had established any significant foothold beyond specific product implementations and the IETF-approved API is a significant step toward establishing an industry wide mechanism using the wide availability of XML in a number of network venues.

Accrording to Mark Bieberich, senior analyst, Communications Network Infrastructure, the Yankee Group, the networking industry is on a mission to deliver 99.999+ percent availability platforms, and the hitless restart and other mechanisms bring much needed high availability features to the IP networking arena. "As IP networks are carrying mission critical data, including voice traffic, the need for reliability in IP routing is ever increasing," he said.

The XML interface, he said, is also important in the context of the industry trend in that direction. "What NextHop has delivered is at the vanguard of an industry wide trend towards XML APIs, which have also been adopted by Juniper (a longstanding GateD customer) and Cisco," said Bieberiich. "This trend promises to mitigate one of the industry's sore points, the tremendous effort involved with configuration and on-going maintenance of networking devices."

In addition to the XML API and graceful restart features in the BGP, IS-IS, and OSPF protocols, said Hares, including several patent pending enhancements to algorithms in the OSPF and IS-IS protocols to allow for higher reliability and availability and speed of calculation.

Available now, GateD 10.0 routing software comes in several packages. More information can be obtained by going to www.nexthop.com.

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