Caimis Launched as CAIDA Commercial Spin Off
Goal Is to Give Internet Industry its First Production Quality
Network Management, Traffic Analysis and Location Sensitive
Measurement Tools pp. 1 - 8,
We interview Tracie Monk, Kim Claffy (kc), David Moore, and Daniel
McRobb on the details of CAIDA's creation of Caimis. Caimis
www.caimis.com is a profit making spin off from CAIDA that will take
many of CAIDA's research oriented, network traffic management tools
and upgrade them to production quality commercial software for use by
major ISPs. Kc explains the CAIDA Internet Teaching Laboratory
program, the san Diego Nap and plans for OC48 mon - as well as
CAIDA's work on defining and understanding the Internet core.
The Caimis web site went live on July 12. This interview is the
first detailed description of Caimis to be published. Caimis will
focus on monitoring systems, network management systems and
geographic location systems. In the monitoring area it will offer a
variety of solutions that are for passive and active monitoring
through active polling and passive analysis of router and link data.
Its network management systems will be used for acquiring, storing,
correlating, and analyzing data. The third area, geographic
localization services, involves a set of solutions aimed at mapping
different types of network data to geographic locations. It is the
latter area that has direct relevance for e-commerce and financial
transactions.
In June Caimis formed an affiliate company, Caimis Geo, Inc., to
develop the geographic location services business. These will be
tools aimed more towards content providers or e-commerce websites,
where they want to know where their customers are actually located -
perhaps because they have restrictions on distribution of software to
people in different regions, restrictions that are geographically
based or by country. Or, you might have web sites that might want to
change the language presented on their homepage depending on which
country the user is coming from or return targeted content based on
where the user lives, e.g., content appropriate to Southern
California versus Boston.
Caimis finds that ISP service level agreements generally still do not
measure up to the standards that business to business customers
expect to see. Hewlett Packard, Cabletron and Seagate produce network
management systems but do so without an adequate understanding of the
Internet problem domain. While current solutions can tell network
engineers what's going on with a particular router, when that ISP needs
to move up to something like defining an end-to-end service for a
particular customer, there is a big void. Providing such solutions
are challenges that happen both within and between providers.
When you start talking about inter-providers, the situation gets
worse. Information can't be exchanged. Providers don't want to
provide any sort of service level guarantees for infrastructure that
they don't control and to which they have no access. Among the things
that need to be done are the creation of some sort of common
interfaces that providers can use within their own network, but
between different systems. For example provisioning and network
management itself, and element management. Today, basically most of
the network management systems sit in the element level, meaning they
tell you what's going on with particular devices in the network. They
don't interface well with any of the other business processes within
a provider. These are the customer care processes, billing,
provisioning, ordering, trouble-ticketing, which is a big problem in
providing service to the business-to-business environment. Ironically
in this respect the ILECs have better systems than the Internet
industry. Caimis intends to solve that shortcoming.
Caimis has two offices. The San Diego headquarters is focusing on the
development of the geographic-locations services under Caimis Geo,
Inc. The San Diego headquarters will also be doing all of the
productization, sales and distribution of all of Caimis monitors and
network management systems. The Ann Arbor office will be the leading
edge site for senior software and network engineers who are doing
customized network management solutions. They will be the ones
staying on the cutting edge technology-wise and requirement-wise for
the large providers. San Diego will take some of these solutions and
develop standardized products that can then be distributed and made
available for the smaller ISPs, enterprises, and others.
Cogent Communications Guarantees 100 Mbs Internet for $1000 per
Month Buys Dark Fiber and Builds National Network Optimized Entirely for
Data - Business Model Emphasizes 100 BaseT LAN Interconnection in
Buildings it Serves pp. 9 - 14
We interview Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent which n July 17th
announced $90 million dollars in second round venture capital
fnding.. Cogent is the first national ISP to be formed with the
business model made possible by the new combination of SONET free
fiber, gigabit Ethernet and dense wave division multiplexing. This
technology permits IP data networks to be built for only one one -
hundredth of the cost of their voice equivalents less than 10 years
ago. It will use a two hundred million dollar 30 year IRU on a pair
of fibers from the Williams Communications Network and fiber from
Metromedia to connect office buildings in twenty cities nationwide.
It will offer tenants of these buildings 100 megabit per second
internet connectivity for $1000 per month. Cogent has signed
commitments to spend more than $600 million on its build out. Without
SONET equipment Cogent is protecting its network at layer 3. It
describes itself as a facilities-based nationwide switched LAN.
Gigabit Ethernet is used in their local loop. SONET framing in long
haul. The SONET framing is a transport standard that is built into
the Cisco routers. Consequently there is no additional cost. In the
event of a fiber cut instead of 50 milli-second SONET based recovery,
they get one second recovery at the router level which, for data, is
adequate. Any physical disruption in service would cause the core
routers to start rerouting packets. This process takes about one
second. Cogent promises to give its customers a full 100 megabits of
band width pledging not to put more than 96 on a OC192 - or 9.6
gigabit - loop of 1500 miles in length.
Schaeffer explains how Cogent selected its fiber providers. He notes
that: "There are some vendors whose equipment will only work with
certain physical shelter spacing. As we evaluated our potential dark
fiber vendor, we looked for that network vendor whose shelter spacing
would support the maximum number of equipment vendors. Note that the
shelter spacings are not inter connect points. They are there only
to amplify the signal. All that we need to be able to do is to rent
standard size rack space in the shelters." He points out that "fiber
can be optimized for the number of wave lengths, for distance or for
the power applied to it. There are a number of different design
criteria and each vendor takes a slightly different approach to which
of those criteria they emphasize with their fiber."
Schaeffer developed a matrix for the evaluation and selection of both
his long distance and metropolitan area software. He discusses in
detail how Cogent arrived at the decisions for selecting and
integrating both sets of equipment. Cogent's Network will open in
New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago in October.
GAO Report Shatters ICANN Founding Myths: Neither Privatizaton Nor
Power Sharing -- Policy Control Over Operation and Content of
the "Authoritative" Root - ICANN's Single Biggest Prize - Remains
with US Government pp. 15 - 21
We describe how ICANN marches onward to the chant of its own version
of reality. The GAO report released in July 7 found ICANN's creation
to have been legal but it could not find any support for the idea
that the Department of Commerce had the right to manage the root. It
concluded that it was also very doubtful that the DoC had the legal
right to give control of the root to ICANN saying that it did not
look exhaustively at this point because the DoC told it that it had
no intention of doing so anyway. In Yokohama only a few days later
Beckwith Burr proceeded to muddy the waters by stating that she was
prepared to give ICANN operational but not policy control of the
root. An ominous development considering ICANN's statement that it
was ready to demand that the root sever operators sign contracts with
it.
After having caved in rather than face discovery on its first
lawsuit, at Yokohama the ICANN Board proceeded quite skillfully to
disarm its next, potentially more serious, opponent IO Design.
Having given the impression that it might rule on who would get in
the root, it collected a number of TLD applicants on its web site,
lied that it had consensus for only a very small number of new top
level domains, (between 1 and 3) set up a $50,000 application fee and
then announced that it would receive applications August 1 and
announce the winners on October 1. In one swift move it deprived IO
design of both due process and anti-trust grounds for suing it. It
will choose on October first .eu and a gTLD that will have no
negative baggage for its trademark rulers. Dot web will not be in
the running.
The Board also showed its continuing fear of letting in any outside
influence that might expose its operations to public view. For the
ninth time in less than two years ICANN changed its by-laws. To
ensure continued control by the original Dyson, Roberts, Touton
cabal, it extended once again the terms of four of the original
directors through the annual meeting in November 2002. It decided to
study the question of whether it should even have an at large
membership. In its efforts to make certain that no one outside the
original cabal would ever have a voice it entered the following
paragraph into its by laws: "The Corporation shall not have members
as defined in the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law
("CNPBCL"), notwithstanding the use of the term "Member" in these
bylaws, in a selection plan adopted by Board resolution, or in any
other action of the Board. Instead, the Corporation shall allow
individuals (described in these bylaws as "Members") to participate
in the activities of the Corporation as described in this Article II
and in a selection plan adopted by Board resolution, and only to the
extent set forth in this Article II and in a selection plan adopted
by particular router, when that ISP needs to move up to something like
defining an end-to-end service for a particular customer, there is a
big void. Providing such solutions are challenges that happen both
within and between Board resolution."
Optical BGP Proposed as Means of Wide Area Interconnection of
Bandwidth-Rich Edges Without Burdening Largest Backbones With
Additional Traffic Created by Gigabit Ethernet and Dark Fiber Driven
Local Bandwidth Explosion pp. 22-24
"OBGP is a proposed extension to BGP for the manipulation of optical
cross connects to permit them to be automatically setup and
configured as BGP speaking devices to support multiple direct optical
lightpaths between many different autonomous domains. OBGP may also
allow customers at the edge to control a subset of lightpaths within
another network's wavelength cloud so that they can manage their own
light path routing within that cloud." . . . . [We suggest
treating] 'each optical cross connect as an independent virtual BGP
router with only one input port and one output port. A virtual BGP
router can then be set up for each optical cross connect and separate
BGP sessions initiated with its peers." . . . . "The physical
characteristics of a lightpath give it an intrinsic capability of
being a "poor man's" logical switched path with a predefined Quality
of Service. " . . . . "The exchange of lightpaths may also allow
for a simpler mechanism to allow for settlement in peering and
transit between ISPs." . . . . "In future there may even be
wavelength commodity markets where ISPs can trade wavelengths and
adjacencies on the open market."
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