By Beth (not verified) on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 4:24am.
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
By Beth (not verified) on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 4:38am.
Chris Giannini, a network engineer with Framingham State College, e-mailed info on his favorite products. In his own words:
I've been an Enterasys customer for over 5 years and I am extremely satisfied with not only their products but with the company as a whole. I believe their new wireless switches and notably their RASM wireless management software are by far superior products to any other wireless technology I have ever used. It is my opinion Enterasys is the leader in wireless technology and will continue to be in the future.
By Beth (not verified) on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 4:41am.
Jeffrey Sabella, senior network engineer with
Roetzel & Andress LPA, e-mailed us about his favorite network gear. In his own words:
Enterasys ROCKS!
ALL the products we have used:
The old CableTron switch chassis we used for 10 years placing brand new blades in those old chassis because they put dual backplanes on their blades for both generation chassis to protect their customers investment!!!! WOW!! Now we are moving to the new chassis and blades and I already have a substantial number of new blades that will now realize better performance based on using the newer backplane with the newer chassis. Cool move Enterays!!!
Platinum blades with the N7 and N3 chassis, redundant PS and POE shelf
XSR security routers/Firewalls/Client VPN end points
Netsight management software is the best in class for the cost - great value products
Let's talk about support - A1! The BEST support of anyone....including Cisco!!
We were a Cisco shop - switched to Enterasys and have never looked back or had reason to doubt our decision!!!!
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
Enterasys wireless products
Chris Giannini, a network engineer with Framingham State College, e-mailed info on his favorite products. In his own words:
I've been an Enterasys customer for over 5 years and I am extremely satisfied with not only their products but with the company as a whole. I believe their new wireless switches and notably their RASM wireless management software are by far superior products to any other wireless technology I have ever used. It is my opinion Enterasys is the leader in wireless technology and will continue to be in the future.
Enterasys blades ...
Jeffrey Sabella, senior network engineer with
Roetzel & Andress LPA, e-mailed us about his favorite network gear. In his own words:
Enterasys ROCKS!
ALL the products we have used:
The old CableTron switch chassis we used for 10 years placing brand new blades in those old chassis because they put dual backplanes on their blades for both generation chassis to protect their customers investment!!!! WOW!! Now we are moving to the new chassis and blades and I already have a substantial number of new blades that will now realize better performance based on using the newer backplane with the newer chassis. Cool move Enterays!!!
Platinum blades with the N7 and N3 chassis, redundant PS and POE shelf
XSR security routers/Firewalls/Client VPN end points
Netsight management software is the best in class for the cost - great value products
Let's talk about support - A1! The BEST support of anyone....including Cisco!!
We were a Cisco shop - switched to Enterasys and have never looked back or had reason to doubt our decision!!!!