Smarts launches network protocol manager

CHICAGO--

Smarts launched a new network protocol manager at Supercomm 2004 this week designed to correlate protocol performance with the IP infrastructure. The company also demonstrated its MPLS management solution.

The new InCharge NPM proactively monitors the health of network protocols and provides root cause analysis of conditions arising from protocol problems and then correlates them with overall IP infrastructure problems. It is aimed at both the service provider and enterprise markets and works in conjunction with Smarts IP Availability Manager and Service Assurance manager.

Smarties: Michael Mansour, director of service provider marketing;
Roger Pilc, chief operating officer; and Darren Orzechowski,
VP of corporate marketing

InCharge NPM provides a visualization tool for viewing the membership and structure of protocols such as OSPF and BGP and discovers devices running them as well as neighbors and adjacencies. It also analyzes router configurations and reports on downed processes.

The NPM uses a common information model for modeling the routing protocol domain and Codebook Correlation Technology for performing root cause analysis.

Smarts is demonstrating how its MPLS Manager correlates management of the transport, MPLS domains and the virtual private network and business domains.

“A lot of service providers are implementing MPLS for variety of reasons and we want to put together an end-to-end solution for them,” said Roger Pilc, chief operating officer at Smarts.

Smarts also will demonstrate its discovery engine for identifying components in an MPLS environment and their logical and physical relationships.

“We built our own discovery engine and can stitch together capabilities from many disparate silos,” Pilc said.