MIMIC Simulator Helps Pepco Identifying and preparing for Crisis Situations

Pepco Holdings, Inc. is one of the largest energy delivery companies in the
Mid-Atlantic region, serving about 2 million customers in Delaware, the District
of Columbia, Maryland and New Jersey.

PHI uses various network management platforms (NMS) to manage their large
production network. The engineers managing the network need to configure
it to handle all issues and failures. This is a complicated task considering that
there are new challenges appearing everyday. They needed a way to create all
those problem scenarios in the test lab so they can configure NMS
appropriately and train the engineers to identify the root cause of those
problems. It was not practical for them to have a test environment to be of the
same size as the production network. That made the task of recreating
problems not only hard but many times impossible. To reconstruct the daily
issues of a scalable product network, PHI decided to supplement their NOC
environment with thousands of simulated devices, using MIMIC SNMP
Simulator.

MIMIC enables PHI engineers to setup a scalable simulated network with
10,000 devices. They simulate different combinations of routers, switches,
firewalls, WLAN controllers from many different manufacturers.

More details at our site.

“MIMIC Simulator is a powerful tool that is easy to use. Because it has the
ability to capture all the different SNMP versions, it minimizes the number
of devices that need to be purchased saving money and lab space. “
Albert Jennings
PHI NOC Engineer

MIMIC SNMP Simulator and HP NNMi

This shows a small simulated network of 250 SNMP agents simulated with
MIMIC SNMP Simulator discovered by HP Network Node Manager.

MIMIC simulated devices from different vendors and types.
We have posted some of the images here.

In these images you can see that NNMi has discovered all the
devices and is displaying a nice topology of various routers
and switches. You can drill down and see the detailed device
configuration.

You can also see that it is graphing counters at real-time and they
are increasing at a predictable rate set by MIMIC Simulator. It is
very easy to create variations in counters using the MIMIC GUI or
a script.

MIMIC SNMP Simulator: MPLS network discovered by CA Spectrum

This post describes a network available for download in
 MIMIC SNMP Simulator's network library: a Juniper network in  an
MPLS configuration.

The MPLS topology diagrams show 3 MPLS networks, red, green and
blue, with all MPLS instances discovered by CA Technologies' Spectrum.

Each of the PE routers serves multiple MPLS network points of presence.
For example, R2 hosts the red and blue VRFs as well as the green VPLS.
Each MPLS instance is indexed by a different SNMP community string.
The VPLS topology includes 1 MPLS VPLS; the mBGP VPN topology
includes 2 MPLS VPNs.

Pushing the Network Management Scalability Limits

This is for all providers of network management applications.

Submit your applications to us for the scalability testing. We are looking to run your network
management applications against MIMIC SNMP/NetFlow Simulator with 50,000 to 100,000
simulated nodes.

Once tested, we will provide you the results and create a demo. We can publish the results
or stay confidential, at your discretion. Publishing will greatly improve the visibility of your
application.

Contact us at marketing@gambitcomm.com and let's get started.

Large networks with IBM Tivoli Network Manager

We have recently simulated increasingly large networks with MIMIC SNMP Simulator and discovered them with IBM Tivoli Network Manager.

First, a 1000 node network with 181 routers and switches, the rest end systems:

Time to discover the network: 32 minutes

Next, a 3000 node network with 525 routers and switches:

Time to discover the network: 1 hour 32 minutes

And a 5000 node network with 617 routers and switches:

Time to discover the network: 9 hours 24 minutes

Finally, a 7000 node network with 1200+ routers and switches:

Time to discover the network: 15 hours 31 minutes










 

MIMIC allows you to easily test scalability of your network management application.

MIMIC SNMP Simulator exports network with 20000 devices

MIMIC SNMP Simulator ran the 20000 agents on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instance, and the devices were discovered by Avaya Visualization Performance & Fault Manager (VPFM) over the internet.

The network consists of about 20 routers, 1000 switches, and the rest are servers.

Avaya VPFM needed 12 hours to discover and layout the network.

Nearly 1 million interfaces are monitored.

Gambit computes for the common good

Gambit participates in the World Community Grid to fight AIDS,
Cancer, Malaria, Schistosoma, Leishmaniasis, etc with spare 
CPU cycles on our cloud servers.

You too can contribute CPU cycles for solving tough problems.
 

Device42 Chooses MIMIC Simulator

Device42 Chooses MIMIC Simulator Suite for QA & Customer Support of

Comprehensive Data Center Management Software

"Device42 is a comprehensive solution to manage the IT
assets in the server room,  and outside the server room with
IP address management, centralized password management
and application dependency mappings. Device42 software
makes it easy for IT Infrastructure managers and network
administrators to document data centers, servers and
networks and gives them un-paralleled insight into IT
Infrastructure as a whole. To verify their new features and to
better support customers, device42 is using MIMIC SNMP
Simulator to supplement their physical test lab.

...

With MIMIC, device42 reduces the time to deliver product updates to the customers while
ensuring high product quality and reducing capital expenditures.

...

It has saved thousands of dollars in hardware expenses and significant amount of time in
QA and customer support. ", Raj Jalan, Founder and Chief Architect, device42 llc"

Read the case study (PDF) .

SNMPv3 USM configuration with MIMIC SNMP Simulator

This video demonstrates SNMPv3 capabilities in MIMIC SNMP Simulator by
interoperating with SNMP Research's Enterpol application:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpO2AytgLgk&hd=1

Earth Day 2013

Monday April 22, 2013 is Earth Day.
We do our part every day.
Green Apple Award

Tech 2000 Delivers 1000+ Online CCNA Training Pods using MIMIC Virtual Lab

Tech 2000, a leading provider of highest quality training, announced that it is using Gambit 
Communications' MIMIC® Virtual Lab Cloud product to provide Cisco CCNA® training to 
employees of a large telecom company...

More details here.

Live webinar - Learn about SNMPv3 - Security and Administration

Gambit is joining SNMP Research, a leading architect of SNMP and SNMPv3 standards,
to deliver advanced SNMPv3 training on April 23rd and 24th. In this class we will examine
various aspects of SNMPv3 Security and Administration.

Register here.

Do you need to schedule multiple Snapshots of a network

Do you run into conditions in your network which occur at a certain
time and are hard to reproduce? In that case you want to take multiple
snapshots over time and recreate that condition using a simulator,
allowing you to investigate and customize your network management solution
to get to the root cause of the problem.

Just released, MIMIC Simulator 13.00 includes the capability to schedule
device/network snapshots and reproduce the scenario that occurred at
that time.

For example, if an interesting condition happens only from midnight to
8 am, or on the weekend, you can schedule snapshots of the network
devices during that time, and replay at any time with MIMIC Simulator.

Gambit Communications

CCNA Lab Comparison Matrix

MIMIC NetFlow Simulator for intrusion detection

Watch a video showing how MIMIC NetFlow Simulator recreates
a SMTP worm scenario for flow-based intrusion detection systems at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoJ01G1dh6s&hd=1

With MIMIC NetFlow Simulator you can create many other worm,
Spam, DDos scenarios.