“The key here is being able to understand the impact of a change you are about to make on an enterprise-scale, multi-vendor network [before] actually executing those changes on the production network,” Nikhil Handigol, chief AI officer and co-founder of Forward, told Network World. “You can have a lab, and you can make some changes, test it out, but those labs are never equivalent to the actual production network, which can be tens of thousands of devices.”
How Forward Predict works
Forward’s network digital twin has historically operated on the data plane, maintaining a complete model of forwarding state across every device in the network. Forward Predict extends that model to cover the control plane. The control plane model is verified against combinations of OS versions, configurations and multi-vendor device interactions.
“We have literally traced where every packet could ever go, proactively, to analyze it to the highest degree that is actually possible,” David Erickson, CEO and co-founder of Forward, told Network World.
A proposed change is fed into the platform, which traces how it alters control plane protocol behavior and models how that state propagates into the data plane. The platform then runs its full packet-path analysis against the predicted snapshot before any change touches the live environment.
