Seasoned network engineers wear many hats and are fluent in complex technologies from routing to spanning-tree. But why are so few professionals comfortable with multicasting when it is so prevalent in today’s network communications? Simply Hired reports that multicasting job postings have increased by 63% in the last 18 months. From my observations, the number of qualified multicast specialists isn’t satisfying this demand.
Multicast Job Trends
It’s clear why multicasting demand is growing. The financial industry is reliant on multicasting for distributing market data and stock updates. Enterprise video and collaboration are on the rise with technologies like Cisco TelePresence, DMB, and WebEx all increasing in popularity. The entertainment industry is growing more reliant on multicasting for cable services and Video on Demand. In fact, here is a list of popular applications that use multicast.
Popular Multicast Applications
With such an increased demand for multicasting, why aren’t there more multicast specialists? I think it’s because multicasting technology is just too complicated. Multicast forwarding is dynamic in nature and difficult to visualize. The terminology is complex and the underlying concepts are elaborate. What’s the difference between a Shared Tree (*, G) and (S, G)? How is a Designated Router elected? What if the DR goes down? How are Shared Trees Pruned to stop the RP from forwarding traffic to a downstream router?
Shared Tree Pruning
During troubleshooting, engineers often need to know if a PIM interface or PIM neighbor has changed. Most importantly, they need a way to visualize the Multicast Distribution Tree (Shared Tree or Source Tree) and map the First Hop Router, Last Hop Router, Reporters etc. With such high value information as financial data on the line, imagine the pressure on the engineer when multicast problems occur. The right tool can help lower the barrier to understanding, visualizing, and troubleshooting multicasting.
Automatically Detect PIM Neighbor Changes
Automatically Map MDT
If engineers could more easily visualize the flow of multicast traffic down the source tree and understand dynamic changes in multicast configuration, I think more of them would consider themselves ‘multicast experts’.
