Sierra Pacific taps open source management tools

For Kevin Nadin, rolling out network-management software seemed to be an all-or-nothing proposition: Either he'd have to spend all of his IT budget for tools or he'd have to make do with practically nothing to manage his network.

The network administrator for Sierra Pacific, a wood-product provider headquartered in Andersen City, Calif., realized he needed a way to ensure network connectivity and server health across 50 distributed locations without manually checking each distributed server and router. In business since 1908, the company in 2004 decided to look for software to address its traffic-heavy network.

Nadin reports his wide-area pipes are consistently bogged down with traffic between the corporate data center, which is connected via T-1 lines to remote manufacturing locations, branch offices and retail showrooms. The company's backbone is typically 1Gbps Ethernet, he says.

Adding to the problem, IT staff at headquarters learned of downtime in the worst possible way - from remote end users calling to complain the network wasn't performing.

"We have a pretty widely dispersed network, and we did not have any tool in-house to proactively monitor it," Nadin says. "I was looking for a product that would give me a fast assessment of the sites, especially those out in the woods where the network connection is not as robust."

With a growing business, Nadin knew it was time to invest in network-management software but admits he wasn't sure how to get there with traditional management tools.

"We looked at HP, IBM and Microsoft, but to be honest, not really that closely once we saw the price," Nadin says. "There is a point when exploring IT purchases that you ask yourself, 'Is this really where I want to spend all my money?' "

That's when Nadin came across GroundWork  Open Source Solutions. The company bases its GroundWork Monitor 4 software on Nagios, an open source network-management application, and says the price for Monitor 4 covers mostly support and services.

Nadin agrees, having signed up for a $16,000-per-year subscription for the software in January and rolling it out soon afterward. The software is set up to monitor 60 Cisco routers and 30 Windows servers across the company's locations.

Monitor 4 runs on a Linux server with memory in disk and can be used with or without agents. The agent option uses a Perl script that runs on managed devices and extracts management information from the devices' Management Information Base to send to the central server. Customers also can write plug-ins specific to their environment to broaden the software's monitoring capabilities.