* NetMRI makes network optimization easier but doesn't strain the budget
For many IT managers, money — or the lack thereof — outweighs the need for technology to make their networks run smoothly. For Jubel Caudill, senior network and systems administrator at Colgate University, finding a product that made network optimization easier but didn’t strain his budget seemed unlikely.
“Most products are expensive these days and we have to be very judicial with what we do with our money,” Caudill says. Caudill oversees some 300 closet switches and 100 servers at Colgate’s Hamilton, N.Y., and other campus locations, and says tweaking network configurations before performance problems happen prevents the faculty, staff and students from experiencing problems with the network. “I am always on the lookout for the product that would make my life easier.”
Last spring while browsing the floors of the Interop conference in Las Vegas Caudill happened upon what he thought could be such a product. Caudill visited Netcordia’s booth and become intrigued with the vendors flagship NetMRI appliances. He says the features exceeded the product fee; NetMRI comes in various models, starting with the NetMRI campus model for up to 200 routers and switches for about $25,000.
“[NetMRI] took a different approach to monitoring than I had seen in the past. It provides more analysis and is constantly chewing on the data out there in your network. The way it presents the data really caught my eye,” Caudill says. “With NetMRI, you can be as anal as you want to be when it comes to working on your network. You can fine-tune and tweak to your heart’s desire.”
The premise behind Netcordia’s product is the medical MRI exam, except on your network. 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 network. Network managers input blocks of IP addresses for the appliance to scan, and NetMRI begins collecting data such as CPU utilization, routing table information, VLAN activities, MAC addresses, port connections and much more.
“When you first install it, it finds basic rules you are breaking in terms of networking best practices,” Caudill says. “It will show you communications between modes and the main switches and trunk ports. Yon can really dig into it and start addressing these issues.”
Caudill installed one NetMRI E-400 appliance on the main campus and says it handles the entire network. Now in the process of upgrading to Version 2.0, Caudill reports he is now taking advantage of the tool to learn how his network should be tweaked for optimal performance. NetMRI’s “scorecard” feature helps him to quickly understand how his network is doing day-to-day and to prioritize the issues that need immediate attention.
“I check it every morning and depending on what it tells me, I know what I need to work on,” Caudill says. For instance, the NetMRI scorecard for a switch dropped significantly and Caudill was able to discover the wrong script was being used on some of the switches so several trunk ports weren’t configured correctly. “Most of what it tells me is not stuff that can take the network down in an instant, but information that can really go a long way toward improving performance.
