Packet Design, the Silicon Valley network incubator founded by Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico, has spun off two new companies to further develop and market its networking technologies. The first company, which will use the Packet Design name, will offer a family of network appliances that extends the routing control plane of IP networks. The company's initial product is the Route Explorer announced last year, which provides visibility, analysis and diagnosis of an enterprise or service provider's IP network. The company will be headed by CEO Douglas Brent and has begun raising venture funding. Approximately 25 of the parent company's 41 employees will move to this spin-off.
The second spin off company, Precision I/O, will commercialize a new high-speed networking architecture that allows servers to take full advantage of rapidly increasing networking speeds, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond. The company plans to offer both hardware (chip- and board-level) and software products, the first of which will be announced later this year. Eleven of the parent company's employees will move to Precision I/O, which will be led by Judy Estrin while a permanent CEO is sought. Estrin will be chairman of both new companies.
http://www.packetdesign.com
- In November 2002, Packet Design introduced a new BGP Scalable Transport (BST) protocol designed to address security and reliability issues. Packet Design said the crux of BGP's problem is that TCP is inadequate as a transport method in networks exceeding 10 to 20 routers in size because it is inefficient and because during peering it exposes routing services and leaves the network routers vulnerable to attacks. Rather than TCP's point-to-point communications, Packet Design's BST transmits information using a technique known as "flooding." Instead of a message being sent from an originating router to every other router in the network, it is sent only to the first router's immediate "neighbor" routers, which in turn sends it to their neighbors, and so on. Packet Design said its new protocol also addresses BGP's vulnerability to malicious "spoofing" - the illicit interception and alteration of messages as they move between peers.
- In May 2002, Packet Design introduced a Layer 3 Diagnosis/Visualization tool that allows network operators to look into the IP network "cloud" and see the actual routing paths being traversed by traffic. Packet Design's Route Explorer is a layer 3 visualization, diagnostic and analysis tool that uses routing protocols to gather and display information on end-to-end routing paths, both on-line and historically. The tool lets operators view the details (e.g., link state, link metrics, router parameters) of the routers along a specific route. The system provides an animated historical playback and analysis feature that can diagnose intermittent router failures known as "route flaps." It can also import customer-collected time series data (e.g., information on MPLS tunnels or traffic data collected with an application such as MRTG) and correlate it with the accumulated topology history.
- Packet Design (the parent company) was founded in May 2000 by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico. The pair founded Bridge Communications in 1981, Network Computing Devices in 1988 and Precept Software in 1995 (acquired by Cisco in 1998). Packet Design has raised $29 million in private funding from Foundation Capital, Sun Microsystems and individual investors, including former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and Sun Microsystems Chief Scientist Bill Joy.
