* Netcordia survey reveals network executives' plans for tracking change, ensuring uptime during recession
Regardless of the source, the news is the same: the economy has most companies cutting costs and many reducing workforce, or at the very least, demanding more from existing resources.
Slideshow: What tech industry CEOs are saying about the economy
Keeping networks humming along smoothly is challenging in the best circumstances, but under the conditions of fewer budget dollars and overloaded staffers, the degree of difficulty for the job is exponentially increased. Network management vendor Netcordia recently polled 450 network administrators to learn more about their biggest worries in the face of an ongoing recession.
In December 2008, the vendor asked customers a handful of questions ranging from network availability to potential workforce reductions. The results prove that many in network management view change as the primary cause of network downtime and worry that tracking and managing change adequately will suffer with less staff and inappropriate tools. For instance, 64% of those polls said that the greatest threat to network availability came from internal sources. Nearly half said those internal issues would be inadvertent and 15% of the internal threats could be malicious in nature.
Among those surveyed by Netcordia late last year, just about one-third said they already had or expected to experience layoffs. For those expecting to have to deal with a workforce reduction, 28% said their existing staff would work more hours to get work done and 27% said they would prioritize to only do mission-critical work. About one-quarter plan to rely more on automation tools and 16% they will somehow find the budget for better tools and spend that money wisely.
Netcordia in response to such thinking from its customers updated its flagship NetMRI appliance to Version 3.0 with features that more quickly identify what network changes have been made, when, by whom and what is impacted by the change. If a problem does occur, the software loaded on the appliance would tell network managers “what changed,” Netcordia executives say.
“The product allows teams to be more efficient and makes it possible for more junior people to be able to manage the network,” says Lou Nardo, vice president of product management at Netcordia. “Network managers realize they can save a lot of time and resources if they can keep changes under control as networks become more complex and they need to become more efficient.”
NetMRI installs on a switch port or router interface and identifies network devices and the ports, or interfaces, being used to route traffic across the net. Network managers input the blocks of IP addresses for the appliance to monitor, and the appliance begins collecting data such as CPU utilization, routing table information, VLAN activities, MAC addresses and port connections.
Available now, pricing for NetMRI 3.0 starts at about $10,000, depending on the devices purchased.
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