On Dec 5th 2006, Cisco NSSTG and Advanced Services held a Multicast Community 
Forum (MCF) in New York with the key leaders in the Financial industry. 

The Goals of the MCF are: 

 * Engage key industry leaders to discuss industry wide solutions
 * Discuss interactions between Financial Service Providers and customers
 * Drive consensus on networking requirements for Financial market space

Cisco has hosted several MCFs in London and New York. In the past we have
tried to keep the number of customer attendees down to a minimum to 
foster informal discussions about the industry. This time there was strong 
interest both from the customer side and internally at Cisco and
we expanded the audience. There were approximately 70 attendees from 
customers, partners, and Cisco field, marketing and development. 

The customers in attendance included:  

 Chicago Mercantile Exchange
 Citigroup
 CSFB
 Deutsche Bank
 Fidelity
 Lehman Bros
 Nasdaq 
 JPMC

Representatives from the middleware vendors Tibco and 29 West also attended. 

The agenda consisted of both Cisco and partner presentations as well as
a round table discussion. The overall focus of the event was Multicast
Network Management and Security. The agenda as presented to the customers
for the event is this file: mcf-ny-dec-5-2006-agenda-final.pdf

A summary of the Top Issues: 

 - mAAA availability 

   The group-range command would make a huge difference in being able to 
   deploy multicast applications securely

   The Public Sector group could use mAAA for access control of their 
   City-wide Video Surveillance (CVS)

 - Group Encrypted Transport (GET) VPN availability on 6500

 - Long lead time in general for Multicast Feature support on the 6500 

 - Latency - monitoring and measuring in the network 


Below are summaries of the presentations and the round table discussion. 

Cisco IOS Update - Dima Khoury
Dima presented an overview of the IOS software strategy focusing on the
platforms and features that would be of interest to the Financial community.
This included multicast security and HA features as well as other topics
of interest such as OER and NBAR. Dima's presentation can be found here: 

IOS-Update-NY-Dec06.pdf


Multicast Network Management Overview - Andy Kessler
Andy presented an overview of the instrumentation available in IOS to 
enable Multicast Network Management. The topics included SNMP MIBs for
Multicast, Syslogs, and Netflow. There was also an overview of the 
future support for Multicast with IP SLA. Andy's presentation can be found
here: 

mcast-net-mgmt.pdf


Multicast Management using Netflow Tracker - Mike McGrath 
Mike is the CTO of Crannog Software. Mike presented on the background, 
challenges and benefits of using netflow to monitor multicast traffic. 
The presentation included details on Crannog's Netflow Tracker product
and how it can be used for security threats, traffic profiling, QoS
troubleshooting and specific multicast issues. Mike's presentation 
can be found here: 

Netflow-Tracker-Overview-NY.pdf


Cisco Multicast Manager 2.3(4) - Paul Gilbert
Paul presented an overview of the current features in CMM that enable
Monitoring, Reporting and Diagnostics in typical Financial application
environments. Future roadmap plans for CMM was also discussed. Paul's
presentation can be found here: 

CMM-2.3.4-MCF.pdf


Group Encrypted Transport (GET) VPN - Donovan Williams
Donovan presented the details of encrypting multicast in different
customer deployment scenarios using GDOI. There was discussion on 
how GDOI can be used over a typical enterprise WAN, together with mVPN or
for PIM control plane authentication. Donovan's presentation can be found
here: 

GetVPN-MCF-DW.pdf


IP Interoperability Collaboration Systems - Keith O'Brien
Keith delivered an overview of the IPICS solution is being used today 
for Public Safety and Security. The presentation drew parallels on how
the same technology can be used for Hoot and Holler in Financial 
environments. There was one customer in the audience that is leveraging
their multicast infrastructure and IPICS today for their enterprise 
safety and security. Keith's presentation is here: 

IPICS-Tech-Talk.pdf


Round Table Discussion - moderated by Andy Kessler
The Round Table Discussion consisted of three main topics - Network
Management, Security and Hoot n' Holler. A set of general questions
were displayed for the group to foster the discussion. The slides
with the general questions are here: 

mcf-questions.pdf

Discussion: 

 Management and Monitoring: 

 * Latency in the network means potential loss of revenue to the financial
   customers. The majority of latency is often due to the applications 
   themselves but the network Ops folks need ways to monitor latency and
   prove that it is or is not the network. 

   We discussed using IP SLA as a tool to monitor latency - both using
   the unicast support today and then multicast support in the future. NTP 
   clock drift is a known issue and makes one way latency measurements
   challenging. We spoke about a number of different options for making
   accurate time comparisons on the network:

   o Deployment of GPS on both ends of the network 
   o Using a Timing T1 

   These solutions have scaling and cost issues. 

   Going forward Cisco is working with folks at Symmetricom 
   <http://www.symmetricom.com> to understand better ways of achieving
   accurate time synching than NTP. 

   Cisco is also investigating IEEE-1588 <http://ieee1588.nist.gov/> a new 
   standard for time measurement. 

   Customers indicated that they need sub millisecond measurements  
   capability. 
   
   Accurate time synch is also important to be able to correlate syslog
   messages from servers and routers throughout the network. 

 * Microbursts - servers sending out a burst of traffic can cause temporary
   congestion and packet loss. Network Ops are always looking for ways
   to be able to go back and determine the cause of packet drops. Common
   tools that customers said they use are Niksun and InfiniStream. 

   Niksun
   http://www.niksun.com/Products_Appliance.htm

   InfiniStream
   http://www.networkgeneral.com/Products_details.aspx?PrdId=20046117180712

 * Tibco spoke about RVTrace which is a standalone application that can 
   capture RV packets and report statistics on traffic rates, sequence
   gaps and retransmissions on a per group or per subject basis. Typically, 
   RVTrace is a tool that is used for troubleshooting and is run on a 
   non-production machine that is connected to a SPAN port. Rvtrace has mib 
   support so that you can query the stats. It also has the ability to set a 
   threshold for a certain level of retransmissions and then generate a trap. 

   Tibco indicated that they are working with on a strategy internally and 
   with vendors for a robust messaging monitoring and management platform. 

   Tibco has the enhanced retransmission control in RV 7.5 which will help
   in the fast producer/slow consumer situations when there are 
   machines that consistently can't keep up. 

 * Several customers indicated frustration with the long cycle time on 
   getting features delivered to the Cat6k. They said new features always
   seem to get to the 6500 last. 

 Security 

 * Some customers were interested in the ability to encrypt multicast with 
   the GET VPN solution. One possible application would be home based
   trading. Traders should be able to take home a PC and have the same
   environment as the trading room floor. It would need to be secure through
   a variety of different access methods. 

 * One customer suggested simplifying the config commands for GET VPN. 

 * Many customers were not satisfied with the Cisco firewalls in terms
   of feature set, performance and configurability. 


After the Round Table discussion there were two more presentations. 


PIX Firewall Multicast Case Study - Peter Fyffe
Peter presented an overview of the multicast support in the PIX and 
FWSM. He also spoke about a case study showing how in the past multicast
would need to be forwarded using GRE tunnels but today the traffic can 
be forwarded natively in multicast. 

PIX_Multicast_Case Study.pdf


Virtual RP in an ECN Feed Architecture - Reed Streifthau
Reed delivered a detailed presentation on a redundant feed architecture
for Electronic Communication Networks. The scenario represented is typical
of a major exchange data distribution network. Reed's presentation can be found
here: 

ECNfeed-05Dec06.pdf


Customer Feedback:
At the end of the event questionnaires were handed out for feedback. 

The average rating was 4.11 (1 - 5 with 5 being excellent). 
The full feedback results are here: 

feedback.html