Abell Labs spinoff hopes to create a new category of tool that could prove valuable to enterprise network planners and operators.
Lumeta Corp. last week launched its IPSonar 2.0 network intelligence gathering software, which can gather details of an enterprise IP network and identify security weaknesses that other monitoring products often dont see.
“We found a lot of organizations really only manage what they know about. Most customers dont know fully what all the resources are or whos on their networks,” said David Arbeitel, senior vice president of strategic development at Lumeta, in Somerset, N.J.
With thousands of users and devices on the perimeter of an IP network, it is often difficult to plan consolidations when companies merge or when a change of operational control takes place. Also complicating the patrolling of network perimeter are the growth of wireless networks, virtual private network links and frequent network changes.
IPSonars nonintrusive discovery technology gathers information from the TCP/IP stacks of each device it encounters along the network and from customized packets that traverse IP networks. It can gather data on address space, hosts, devices and the live interconnectivity of subnetworks. It can also take a detailed census of the IP addresses it discovers (see screen).
Such knowledge can be used to discover groups of servers that could be targeted for server consolidation and isolate hosts and network devices that may have unprotected inbound or outbound connectivity beyond the network perimeter to the Internet or other networks.
IPSonar is made up of a single, centralized server and multiple sensors located at different points of a network. The sensors communicate with the server using HTTP Secure and Web proxies. They actively scan portions of a networks IP address space to identify resources.
The sensors generate custom packets that gather information and interrogate TCP/ IP stacks encountered in the network. Sensors are typically placed in the network operations center and in two other regions.
IPSonar will be available May 1 for $21,500.