One of the new technology rages in the market today is Cloud Computing (and Storage), of which Amazon’s Web Services (S3, SQS, SimpleDB, EC2, and HaDoop) is one example. As I was reading through the example of “Grep the Web” described in the paper Cloud Architectures, I wondered what applicability this technology had to network management. In just a few minutes, I had a couple of ideas.
- Data storage. Keep large NMS data sets in the S3 storage system. The rates seem pretty reasonable for bulk storage ($0.15 per GB-Month), plus an additional amount for data transfers in each direction. But if you’re primarily using it for backup storage, you’d only have a one-way trip for most data. Deletes are free, so when you age out the data, just delete it. If you never need to go back to it, you’re using Amazon’s storage system (servers, disks, racks, facilities, and staff) to store your data. I’d want to encrypt the data before sending it to them, but that’s easily done. Imagine keeping detailed weekly data for an entire year. If your NMS can create a summary of each week, store the details on AWS S3 and keep the summaries around for your trend analysis. Then, if you need to go back to research some detail, you can easily retrieve the detailed backup data.
- Routing analysis. Large enterprise or service provider routing infrastructures are pretty complex systems. If all the routing tables were extracted and stored in AWS S3, then the other components of AWS could be used to perform analysis on the resulting routing tables. With the large data store provided by AWS S3, a time-series of routing tables could be kept and, using the other AWS components, a trend analysis could be performed on the tables. I’ll be that there are some interesting visualizations that could be generated from a time series of routing tables. For example, build a topology map of interconnected routers and color the devices according to the number of local route changes. Show a sequence of these topology maps as a movie. Imagine being able to watch an EIGRP Stuck-In-Active route in action as a way to help diagnose what’s happening.
I’m sure there are other, more detailed analysis that could be performed if the large volumes of NMS data could be kept and analysis routines were developed to mine it. What suggestions do you have for using AWS for network mangement?
-Terry
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Re-posted with Permission
NetCraftsmen would like to acknowledge Infoblox for their permission to re-post this article which originally appeared in the Applied Infrastructure blog under http://www.infoblox.com/en/communities/blogs.html
