|
Does Verizon's Voyager stack up to the iPhone? |
|
|
5 IT skills that won't boost your salary 
[1,407]
Women 4 times more likely than men to cough up personal info [589]
Japan's 10 funniest tech-related commercials [Videos] [407]
Throwing away a promo CD is "unauthorized distribution"? [1,265]
Adults too quick to dismiss educational video games [682]
Attack of the iPhone clones [Slideshow] [578]
10 things IT needs to know about AJAX [1,258]
This Year's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries [Slideshow] [409]
|
|
Citrix Netscaler & Opnet Panorama
Ernest Mueller, an IT manager at National Instruments, sent along info on his favorite network product. In his own words:
I'm the manager of the Web Systems team at National Instruments (www.ni.com), and I thought I'd share some of our favorite products. Some are more or less traditionally "network," but bear with me...
Citrix Netscaler. We performed a sizable in-house evaluation of all the load balancer/app acceleration vendors out there, and no one can touch Netscaler and F5 in terms of functionality - and Netscaler, though lacking the complete customizability of F5's iRules, is much, much less expensive.
When we moved from our old software-based load balancers to the Netscalers, with their compression, caching, HTTP pipelining, and TCP multiplexing, we saw a 33% or greater performance improvement across the board on all of our Web properties. The ROI was huge - we even stopped printing our traditional product catalog because the accessibility of our Web catalog is now great worldwide.
Opnet Panorama. Of course, Opnet has the best network simulation and analysis tool out there in ACE, but their Panorama product is even more amazing. It's an agent-based application performance management system for distributed apps - it takes system statistics, deep JVM stats, database stats, SNMP info, etc. across your entire environment and feeds it into a great correlation and visualization engine. With modern applications, even chasing down which tier, box, or sub-application is causing performance or crashing problems is difficult. Panorama automates much of this process, capturing the entire transaction path and in some cases identifying issues down to the line of code level. We have solved dozens of lingering application issues with the tool, saving countless man-hours and improving quality of the service we deliver to our end users.
We're currently implementing Splunk for log management and Coradiant TrueSight for real user monitoring - no hard ROI yet but we have high hopes. Keynote and Clearsight Networks Analyzer are also important parts of our toolset.
I know our network admins love NetQoS and especially Mirage Networks