* State of Kansas reduces number of tools, improves net performance and saves money with HP's Network Node Manager
The economic climate has most if not all enterprise network managers reassessing the tools they have in house and which new technologies could potentially help them do more with less. One such individual found increasing an investment in HP network management software would let him eliminate the need for six other tools, spend less money and guarantee better performance for network users.
Scott Steves, systems network software consultant in the Network Analysis Group for the State of Kansas in Topeka, is a long-time Network Node Manager customer – since Version 4.11 actually – and recently re-invested in newer versions of HP’s cornerstone management software application. Steves says upgrades to HP’s flagship management application drove him to consider further investment. HP in late 2007 overhauled NNM and more recently introduced a performance management add-on to help customers manage both fault and performance with one console.
“It allows us to have that single pane of glass for fault and performance management, and the products are ITIL-compliant, which is important to us,” he says, Steves was able to work with the beta team of HP engineers assigned to the updated NNM and NNMi SPI products and reports that managing more than 30,000 interfaces at the State of Kansas typically required multiple tools, but not anymore.
“HP provides an open interface that is versatile enough for us to make it do what we need it to do, but the software is not so much work that we have a ton of configuration we have to do out of the box to start gaining value,” he says. “We were able to cut six management tools and save money by investing more in HP. We will eliminate swivel-chair management looking at multiple consoles and be able to so for less cost.”
After considering competitive products from CA and Indicative Software, Steves landed on HP and has been running the software in the background for a few months, with plans to take it live shortly. The performance management software add-on, developed internally at HP, is called NNMi SPI for Performance and targets operations staff. It was developed following HP’s release of NNM i 8.0 and integrates with network configuration management technology HP acquired with Opsware. Steves is still in the process of adopting the configuration piece which he expects will save “tens of thousands of hours of labor and thousands of dollars” for him, fellow network staffers and the State of Kansas.
The configuration management project comes on the heels of the State of Kansas moving from a mixed Nortel-Cisco environment to a Cisco network end-to-end, Steves says. He admits, “Nortel support has been lack as of late,” but also feels it’s smart that his organization invest in the market-leading network gear provider and augment that with software from the vendor he believes knows the network best.
“Time and time again I have gotten the strong impression that HP is really serious about its network management software. While everyone else is treading water, they are reinvesting in it with acquisitions like Peregrine and Opsware, and putting a lot toward R&D,” Steves says. “I truly feel they are the Cisco of network management software.”
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