Author: Eamon McCarthy Earls Source: (
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Drew Conry-Murray, blogging with Packet Pushers, explored networking startup Veriflow Systems' approach to preventing network outages. Veriflow, based in Oakland, Calif., claims to stop network outages by relying on formal verification through algorithms to mathematically eliminate human errors. Veriflow said it has borrowed the method from the aerospace industry.
Veriflow's products to eliminate network outages include a data plane collector, policy explorer UI and verification engine. Data is collected from content-addressed memory and access control lists; from switches, load balancers, routers and firewalls; and channeled to the verification engine, where it is generated in a real-time view in the console.
Conry-Murray said Veriflow distinguishes between how a policy is written and how it actually runs on a network, and it can verify configurations within minutes when used in human configuration. (Within software-defined networking environments, verification takes place within milliseconds.) He added that Veriflow's data collection is configurable, but it usually takes place on an hourly basis, polling as little as a megabyte of data from appliances, so it doesn't slow down performance.
