They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Nothing could be more true than trying to visualize how a network is put together. Even walking into a lab or server room and looking at the racks and cables and systems leaves a lot to be desired. How are my applications communicating? What are the conversations going on in my network? What has discovered what?
The Plexxi Control networking view needed to show this information. Tell me about my Plexxi Switches and what they know about. What traffic are they carrying? Who's talking through them. So we built a network visualizer to show the Plexxi Ring and a handful of networking device types:
We'd display our ring, the connected switches and "buckets" of machines, storage and virtual hosts/machines. But what about routers and switches and other machines, generic machines, etc. How can I put these on my diagram to better define my customers network?
Given our ability to display a set of objects and their connections, why not open this up to additional types of objects? Why not allow the customer to define their own icons (maybe they use Juniper gear or Dell or Cisco or HP)? Why not allow these new objects to be connected wherever the customer wants? We can extend our network visualizer to do this...
And so, with just a little more code and a few more "Element" features, our basic network display tool has morphed into a full fledged network visualizer. We can use it to build just about any network diagram. We can get a better picture of what's connected where and how our communication is flowing. Our network application is now a network visualization application too.
I think I can hear the Plexxi product managers already thinking about a fancy "print" function to take a large network and stick it up on their wall.
