Deterministic Networks is bringing network management and forecasting tools developed for satellite networks to ISPs of all shapes and sizes.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 14, 2002]

Deterministic Networks was founded in 1997 as a quality of service (QoS) toolkit vendor. The company's clients include networking giants Cisco, HP, Microsoft, NetScreen and Nokia. In July 2000, the company was acquired by Gilat Satellite Networks and turned its sights on delivering reliable network services over high-latency, low-bandwidth satellite links.

Over the past two years, the product has been deployed for a variety of Gilat clients, from large businesses to owner-operated startups. Now, Gilat has given Deterministic permission to sell its product to other ISPs.

The product has two components. NetworkJustice QoS (left) maintains service according to pre-set policies on an ISP's network and also tracks usage data, and the NetworkJustice Traffic Analyzer builds a database of network use to determine what QoS policies would be most effective.

Steve Jackowski, Deterministic president and chief executive officer, said the company is like a startup that's got a product that's already been deployed in large and small networks, so it's ready for the ISP arena.

"Our products are specifically targeted at ISPs of all sizes. That's the market we've been developing for, and it's the market we understand," Jackowski said. "We have been directed by our parent company to build products that specifically meet the requirements of ISPs. Most of our competitors are focused on the enterprise network management market."

Deterministic's rivals include Allot and Packeteer. Most of the company's competitors deliver hardware-based solutions and price their products according to the throughput of the hardware they supply. In order to sell to service providers, Deterministic adopted a more ISP-friendly pricing plan, basing its fees on the number of active users. Prices range from $2,000 for a single-box software solution supporting up to 100 users to $100,000 for a fully redundant solution supporting over 100,000 users.

Far from being a household name, Deterministic reckoned that the best way to market its new QoS products was to show ISPs what the company could do. Consequently, Deterministic believes that a product demonstration is the most effective form of marketing.

For the right service provider, Deterministic will set up its NetworkJustice Traffic Analyzer on an ISP's network for a week or two, collecting usage data. From there, the company will recommend policies to make the ISP's bandwidth usage more efficient. Then the company sells its NetworkJustice QoS software product, while the ISP operator selects the hardware.

Jackowski explained that the trial period isn't a way to look for faulty circuits—that's not what Deterministic does—the testing analyzes network usage to make bandwidth allocation fair.

"That's why our product is called NetworkJustice," Jackowski said. "In one network we examined, we found that three percent of the users were taking up 40 percent of the bandwidth. If you can restrict bandwidth hogs when there's contention for traffic, then the bandwidth hogs learn to be better network citizens. They'll still get to use a lot of the bandwidth when it's available, but they'll get no more than their fair share when the network is fully loaded."

If an ISP wants to keep the NetworkJustice Traffic Analyzer, it costs an additional $25,000. As an alternative, an ISP can obtain a traffic analysis as a service for a recurring fee that depends on the size and complexity of the network. The company might charge $5,000 per year for an annual analysis of a complex network.

"Small ISPs don't need the Traffic Analyzer," says Jackowski. "They just need real-time analysis plus several hours' of history. It's a graph GUI where they can literally grab a bar and slide back through several hours of data."

Deterministic looked at the specification sheets of the competition and decided to build something that would be bigger, faster, and cheaper than what they saw. The NetworkJustice QoS software product can scale massively because the ISP can choose the hardware it sits on. The product runs on Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux, and Sun Solaris.

Depending on the hardware selected, the software will support up to 64,000 simultaneous users per box, but hardware clusters could enable the software to support hundreds of thousands of users. The software supports up to 500 Mbps of throughput on each box.

NetworkJustice QoS allows ISPs to define over 500,000 traffic control policies, drilling down to individual users and applications as well as groups of users, groups of applications, or servers on the ISP's network (right). Deterministic designed the system with the ability to create more policies than any ISP would ever need.

Ayal Lior, Deterministic chief technology office, said the software is also useful for ISPs that resell their services.

"If you're like Gilat, and you have more than one ISP on your network, you need to physically delineate them," Lior said. "There can be no sharing of bandwidth between two of your customers if they're competitors. Furthermore, groups within each customer need an entirely separate set of bandwidth policies."

Lior explained that another advantage of designing for difficult satellite Internet networks is that the company has experience with low-bandwidth situations. If, for example, you're supplying 100 Kbps of satellite connectivity to a remote scientific outpost and ten additional users suddenly come online (for a total of eleven users), each has about 9 Kbps, and signaling traffic can consume a significant amount of bandwidth.

"Of course, you start by queuing packets, but eventually, you do have to start dropping them," Lior said. "At that point, you have to look for the packets that maintain the connection, such as SYN and ACK packets, because if you drop those, you drop the connection completely."

Jackowski added that the key is to provide flexible solutions for different types of ISP businesses.

"If you want to reduce the use of your backbone links, you can prioritize news traffic that goes to your own news server and give a lower priority to traffic headed to others' news servers," Jackowski said. "If you want to prioritize a specific application or group of applications, you can prioritize traffic coming from a specific server on your network. If you want to restrict file trading, you can do that too."

Lior said the value of Deterministic's solution should be clear to ISP operators.

"If you can increase your network capacity by 25 percent (which is a conservative estimate) then you have the opportunity to increase revenues or decrease fixed costs." Lior said. "We can show that this is possible for any customer."

Pricing and availability
The products are currently available from Deterministic Networks.

The NetworkJustice QoS software product is priced according to the number of users on your network, starting at $2,000 for up to 100 users, and reaching $100,000 for a scalable, fully-redundant product.

The NetworkJustice Traffic Analyzer is priced at $25,000, but Deterministic is also able to supply traffic analysis as a service, priced as a recurring fee that depends on the size of the network and its complexity.

—End