Gridpoint offers smarter network management

Gridpoint Systems, a new startup focused on traffic management, today unveiled a metro edge network node designed to maximize efficiency in carrier networks.

The 3400, a 1-rack-unit box, sits at the edge of metro networks, collecting network traffic statistics and reporting them to Gridpoint’s control plane software, which helps carriers maximize network utilization efficiency. (Both the 3400 and the control plane can be used separately, but they’re most effective when used together, Gridpoint said.)

Whereas some equipment vendors sell element management systems (EMSs) that view the network on a hop-by-hop basis, Gridpoint said its gear looks at the network holistically to determine optimum provisioning routes. And whereas those EMSs with a more holistic view generally provision based on which path is shortest, Gridpoint’s system makes more complex judgments, the company said.

“Often times the shortest path in the network becomes a congestion point in the network, and the rest of the resources around it are underutilized,” said Jim Arseneault, Gridpoint’s president and CEO.

To Gridpoint’s system, deciding which path to provision depends in part on the specific characteristics of the traffic being provisioned, the service level agreements it entails and characteristics of network routes besides mere distance. Carriers can impute “business rules” into the system that take into account considerations like which paths are less desirable because they are leased from competitors, for example.

“For a low-quality Internet service as opposed to video service, [a network operator] may choose to put it through a path that’s a little more meandering but uses underutilized resources, so that he can leave that core path, the high-cost, high-quality path, for new video services or more VoIP trunks,” Arseneault said.

Gridpoint uses off-the-shelf chips and components, technology based on Provider Backbone Transport and Provider Backbone Bridging techniques as well as operations, administration and maintenance standards 802.1ag (from the IEEE) and Y1731 (from the ITU). But the vendor also uses its own algorithm for a process it calls “multi-constraint routing,” rather than the widely used Dijkstra’s algorithm for finding the shortest path.

“The Dijkstra algorithm finds one path with one constraint,” said Brian Smith, Gridpoint’s chief technology officer and vice president of R&D. “A lot of people today pick ‘cost’ or ‘hops’ or ‘delay,’ but they don’t look at all of those parameters. We use a different algorithm to find all paths that meet those requirements. Then we look at our business rules, which may be load-balancing, and pick the path that meets the objectives with the least amount of bandwidth on it.”

Gridpoint distinguishes its control plane from the likes of Soapstone Networks (whose control plane is also based on PBT) by claiming that Gridpoint focused more on traffic engineering (managing network resources in sophisticated ways) and less on ensuring its system could provision links on equipment from multiple vendors.

“In most cases, the carrier either already has an OSS provisioning system, or the vendors already have provisioning systems, so we can strip all of that away, and our core competency is traffic engineering modules,” Arseneault said. “We’re capturing our expertise in network and traffic engineering without being burdened by learning how to talk to every box.”

In trials Gridpoint has performed with tier-one carriers, an existing OSS provisioning system asked Gridpoint’s software to determine optimum paths to provision, after which the OSS provisioned the link itself, communicating directly with network nodes.

“Conversely, we’ve got some equipment vendors that don’t have a traffic engineering rule set, and therefore we can easily partner with them because we don’t displace their management plane -- we plug in as a software application on their management plane,” Arseneault said.

Gridpoint expects the 3400 to roll out commercially in October.