Computer Associates International has begun shipping
a product that promises to collect network and systems management
data through a technology stack and boost system visualisation and
analysis operations.
Network Forensics is one of the first products to be rolled out
as part of the Sonar technology CA began to demonstrate at its CA
World 2003 conference in Las Vegas.
Sonar, which is enabled, in part, by software that CA acquired
last summer from defence contractor Raytheon, deconstructs any bit
of traffic or content on a network, such as an e-mail or a database
transaction, and maps it to its physical location in the
network.
According to Mark Barrenechea, senior vice-president of product
development at CA, Sonar will help IT staffers better understand
its function relative to the overall business.
Ultimately, CA believes the technology will enable a more
sophisticated and highly automated way to exploit enterprise
hardware resources on demand. Those resources are most likely to be
built around low-cost Linux blade servers, reducing IT head count
and costs.
Network Forensics, which officially shipped last week, can
collect information about network traffic and content, analyse it
and report it back to the Unicenter management console.
According to Barrenechea, Network Forensics could detect whether
someone had sent an inappropriate file such as e-mail or source
code. The application would run on a network server and IT staff
would designate on what parts of a network to collect
information.
CA is also working on an allied product called Network
Diagnostics, due out early next year, which can "look at patterns
of network behaviour" in real time, map out traffic, compare it
with historic data and establish performance benchmarks. This, in
turn, can be used to create alarms if preset parameters are
violated.
By creating a virtual topology of a network, the software can
detect where aberrations - such as an unauthorised web server -
might be causing problems in performance, he explained.
Also planned is Business Process Maps, which will allow IT staff
to see enterprise assets that are supporting a given operation over
a network "with minimal to no labour", Barrenechea said. That will
bolster management operations, boost resource availability and
enable modelling and network segmentation by business process.
That application should be available in the first half of
2004.
According to Rich Ptak, an analyst at consulting firm Ptak &
Associates, the Network Forensics tool will allow network
administrators to analyse traffic or content patterns in a network
to pinpoint real or potential glitches, as well as help visualise
the network data flows.
This is an important move by CA into automated, intelligent
analysis of network operations which ties performance to business
service delivery, he added.
Marc L Songini writes for Computerworld