Wednesday, May 26, 2010

18 new Huawei devices for MIMIC SNMP Simulator

FYI, we have released 18 new Huawei device SNMP simulations:

* HUA WEI CORP. SNMP agent for Quidway R2621 Software Version VRP 1.65
* HUA WEI CORP. SNMP agent for QuidWay R2621E Software Version VRP 1.4.1
* HUA WEI CORP. SNMP agent for QuidWay R2631E Software Version VRP 1.5.6
* Huawei VRP Software Version 3.40, Release 0201P07..Quidway Series Router AR46-40
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version..Quidway S2008-HI
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version 3.10..Quidway S2016-EI
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software, Software Version 3.10, Release 0010..Quidway S2016-HI
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version..Quidway S2403H-HI
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version 3.10..Quidway S2403H
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software, Software Version 3.10, Release 2107P01..Quidway S2403TP-EA
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version 3.10..Quidway S3528G
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version 3.10..Quidway S3528G
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software Version 3.10..Quidway S3552G
* VRP Comware Platform Software, Software Version 5.20, Release 5303..Quidway S3552P-EA
* Huawei VRP Software Version 3.10, Release 1510P02..Quidway S3928P-EI
* Huawei VRP Software Version 3.10, Release 1510P02..Quidway S3952P-EI
* Huawei Versatile Routing Platform Software, Software Version 3.10, Release 1278P08..Quidway S8512-EI
* Huawei VRP Netengine Software Version VRPV500R001B12D053SP05..NE20-4 Version V200R002C01B200

You can download them with the Update Wizard in MIMICView.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Preventing network outages

Outages for major networks and websites have become so common-place, there
are even sites dedicated to reporting them.

For example, the recent Youtube outage caused a flurry of tweets. This
interesting posting details a technique to use Google's timeline feature to track
outages of major sites. Using that technique, one can search for "network
outage", and track down a Playstation 3 network outage starting February 28
that lasted for a couple of days.

Rarely does one get to know the specifics of a particular outage, such as
root cause and duration. When details are reported, one has to be skeptical
as to the veracity of the report. Regardless of the cause, what is interesting
is the relation of the cost of downtime caused by outages vs. the cost to prevent them.

The telephone companies calculated that relation a long time ago when they
instituted the five nines metric of uptime. They figured they could live with
the cost of 5 minutes downtime a year, and spent the money on resources to get
there.

When you plan for spending resources on your network reliability, ask yourself
how long a downtime you can live with first, then allocate the resources in
man-power, equipment and software to achieve the desired reliability.

SNMP simulation software allows you to test your network management
procedures before network outages occur.