* NetScout’s latest probe peeks into nets using Inverse Multiplexing over ATM
NetScout this week will announce a probe to give users application traffic performance data on aggregated links.
NetScout’s nGenius IMA Probe works with the company’s nGenius Performance Manager software to track application bandwidth consumption, traffic patterns and end-user activities in Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA) networks. IMA lets enterprises bundle four to eight T-1 links, rather than upgrade to more costly E-3 or T-3 lines. The plus is cost savings and a seemingly bigger pipe over which to send traffic; the downside is a loss of visibility into the application traffic activity on those bundled lines.
For Jim Mileski, a systems administrator at Agawam, Mass.-based Financial Partners, a provider of IT and other business services to farm credit associations and financial cooperatives, putting IMA in the organization’s ATM net saved money but cost him visibility. With 54 branches depending on application traffic from Financial Partners, Mileski says he needed to understand how traffic traversed the IMA.
“We had to put together a bunch of homegrown applications to verify some of the barebones data we needed, but for the most part we lost all visibility of Layer 5, 6 and 7 traffic,” he says. Mileski explains that traffic data would help him understand what users were doing in terms of applications across the WAN. If, for example, an employee was listening to satellite radio on the WAN and it was consuming a lot of bandwidth, he could advise them to stop that practice and bring a radio to work instead of upgrading links.
Having been a customer of NetScout’s “on and off” for about six years, Mileski was interested when the vendor offered a probe specifically to monitor the IMA network he had in place. “I didn’t see any other commercial products providing that visibility,” he says.
NGenius IMA Probe is an appliance that sits in a data center or network operations center next to a WAN link. It uses a passive tap to connect to the physical link, makes a copy of the traffic and brings it down to the probe. The probe then sends the traffic data to nGenius Performance Manager software, which is installed on a dedicated server and accessed via a Web browser.
NetScout says the IMA Probe closely manages business-critical application traffic as it travels across IMA circuits to multiple branch locations. The insight can help companies make management activities such as application monitoring, link optimization, capacity planning, troubleshooting and class-of-service verification more accurate and efficient.
“We spotted an application making inaccurate SQL queries,” Mileski says. He adds the information collected can help him better plan where bandwidth needs to be allocated and how application traffic can be better routed.
NGenius IMA Probe costs about $23,000 and is available now.
