HP Releases Free Multicast Management Tool

Cisco Systems Inc.CA-based Hewlett-Packard has made available a free software tool that networks to monitor status and traffic and help isolate faults. Scientists at HP Labs developed the tool with the assistance of engineers at <%=company%> (San Jose, CA), whose routers implement the technologyt enables users of IP multicast .

The multicast management tool, called MMON for "Multicast Monitor," works with HP OpenView on HP-UX 10.20 and Sun Solaris 2.6 systems. It is now available on the HP Labs Web site, (http://www.hpl.hp.com/mmon). HP will monitor interest and feedback on MMON to determine whether to create a product version of the tool.

IP multicast is a technique that conserves network bandwidth and server resources when information flows from one to many parties simultaneously. Multicast enables one software process executing on one server to transmit a single stream of packets and reach tens, thousands, even millions of receivers. Without multicast, each receiver would require its own transmitting process and packet stream and reaching a large audience would call for many servers and a huge amount of bandwidth.

Multicast is ideal for transmitting live audio and video through the Internet and corporate intranets and can be used for distance learning, remote presentations, live event Webcasts, and Internet radio and television. It is also useful when data—such as inventory, pricing and stock quotes—must be transmitted efficiently to many destinations at once.

"Multicast has been around for years, but not widely deployed until recently," said Ed Perry, department scientist in the HP Internet and Mobile Systems Lab. "Network managers haven't had the appropriate tools for everyday operations and were concerned about the impact that multicast would have on their networks. We believe the use of MMON will overcome those concerns and enable the widespread adoption of IP multicast by enterprises."

Better management tools
Researchers at HP Labs found that inadequate management capability inhibited the deployment of multicast. Text-based management tools didn't help the network manager grasp the complexity of multicast traffic, which travels simultaneously through many branches and can change dynamically, making faults difficult to detect and diagnose. To visualize this behavior, Cisco engineers encouraged the use of OpenView's graphical map and provided valuable feedback and customer contacts to the HP researchers.

MMON provides a graphical view of multicast traffic overlaid on a topology map, status monitoring, traffic rate graphs and alarms integrated with open standards-based management on HP OpenView. MMON currently works with Cisco networking systems using IOS version 12.0 or greater. More information and software download of the tool is available at the Web site.

Edited by John Spofford