Before November’s Networking Field Day, I was trying to find out anything I could about Forward Networks. They were in stealth until the week of the event, but I still thought I could find a few leaks or details about what they were up to, other than that they were a networking startup. Sadly, my Google-fu failed me, leaving me a blank slate for their presentation. As a delegate at the event, David Varnum was in much the same boat. To say he came away excited is an understatement. What Forward Networks does is make a complete and constantly updating model of your network. They do this by mathematically predicting every single location a packet can travel within a given network configuration. David goes into full details about why this is amazing, but the Forward Networks elevator pitch is pretty good: They’re doing for network mapping what Google did to web indexes.
