Daily Network Monitor

By Erin Hayes

This week is gonna rock.

I’m here in San Francisco with the WhatsUp Gold team gearing up for four days of serious Trade Show Fun.

I knew this was going to be my kind of trade show when I noticed the schedule made a point of serving dessert every day. I mean, come on. That’s amazing!

Anyway, make sure to stop by Booth 1331 during today’s Welcome Reception – or anytime this week really – and say hello. If the simple promise of meeting some truly dedicated and ruthlessly fun people isn’t enough to entice you, we’ve stashed plenty of fun swag to giveaway too.

As you may have noticed by now, video is sorta my thing. So look out for the blonde with a FlipMino video camera and introduce yourself. I don’t bite, I promise!

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By Erin Hayes

wugSpace

I love Fridays and I love this Friday particularly. Why, you ask? Because today WhatsUp Gold is unveiling its super, crazy cool Community site, wugSpace.

wugSpace is WhatsUp Gold’s newest resource for Network Managers, powered by WhatsUp Gold engineers and WhatsUp Gold users. Next time your network is down you won’t need to sift through hundreds of Google search returns to find a solution; you’ll only have to visit wugSpace and you’ll get real-time.

So come on in, roam around, and check it out. Share a script or tip or trick with a fellow WUG colleague or leave our intrepid Software Engineers feedback and/or suggestions for our Network Monitoring product. Heck, post a comment or two if you like! If you’ll be at Cisco Live! show in San Francisco next week, come on by Booth 1331 and say hello to me and the WhatsUp Gold team and tell us what you think of the wugSpace. We’d love to hear your feedback! I’ll be the blonde with a video camera.

And if you’re one of the first 100 members to register with wugSpace – a charter wugSpace member, if you will – we’ll send you over a free t-shirt. Because, come on, laundry days creepin’ up and who couldn’t use a free T?

Oh, and if you’re up to the challenge, be one of the first 20 to leave a haiku about WhatsUp Gold in the comment field and we’ll send you some additional fun swag. What would this swag be, you ask? Well, you’ll just have to haiku to find out!

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By Mike Manfredi

The newest addition to the WhatsUp Gold product family, WhatsConnected 1.5 has finally arrived! This upgraded version of our powerful network mapping tool brings a number of innovative new features to the table, lead by the ability to discover and classify your VMware virtualized environments. Another new feature that we are very excited to integrate into WhatsConnected is increased security in discovering devices with full support of SNMPv3 credentials. Since the intergration of virtualization is becoming a lot more common in IT infrastructures these days, we wanted to upgrade WhatsConnected to fit our customers ever-changing needs.

The WhatsUp Gold product team has been working extremely hard on getting everything ready for the launch of WhatsConnected 1.5, and while there is still much work to be done throughout the rest of the summer, we are excited to step back today and enjoy this product release.

Visit our home site to get a full run-down of all the new features that WhatsConnected v1.5 brings to the table. You can also download a free 30 day trial and experience the innovative new functionality of WhatsConnected first hand.

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By Erin Hayes

The Zettabyte and A Look Back (Forward?) to Web 2.0

This week’s news has got me thinking a lot about words. Particularily those words in tech.

Cisco’s new IP traffic forecast predicted the annual globe IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a Zettabyte (Zetta-who?) and Web 2.0 became the one millionth word in the English language recognized by the Global Language Monitor.

A Zettabyte, for those of you not in the know (like me, who had TechCrunch explain it to me) is a trillion gigabytes. Remember the simple days, oh, twelve years ago, when a terabyte seemed hilariously excessive? I mean, come on! Who would ever need that kinda memory? And besides, your 10 megabyte storage put you out $5,995 bucks. Only Bill Gates could afford that kind of byte.

Well folks, the time of the Zettabyte is upon us. Cisco said its so, therefore it must be so. And anyway, it’s been decided around our office that the Zettabyte is by far the “fly-est” (and I’m quoting an actual WUG employee here) byte yet, so bring it.

For those of you who like to look to the future, keep an eye out for the Yottabyte – one septillion bytes. And for those of you who prefer to look to the near-er future (WARNING: Shameless self-promotion ahead) look for me and my WhatsUpGold cohorts at Cisco’s upcoming Cisco Live! San Fransisco show. Booth 1331. I’ll be the blonde chic with the video camera. It’s gonna be awesome.

Ok, moving on to Web 2.0. Ha. That sounded funny, right? “Moving on…” to Web 2.0 … because the term “Web 2.0” is so, oh I don’t know, 2007?

Well, for the people of Global Language Monitor, Web 2.0 is still relevant enough to declare it the one millionth word in the English language. And who are the Global Language Monitor, you ask? They are a company that looks at usage of words on the Web and adds them to its online dictionaries.

Now – even though it’s my opinion they’re late to the table on this one, I still applaud the effort. However, their definition doesn’t quite do it for me:

“Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.”

As you Network Admins are so aware … Web 2.0 is here – and has been for quite a while.

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By Erin Hayes

Google debuted its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux last night. But you can rest assured this Mac user will not be downloading the beta software for use – and the reason why has nothing to do with the Search God’s new application being in its beta form.

I’ll admit it: I’ve guzzled that Google kool-aid time and time again. I clawed my way into being one of the first to have a Gmail account when Google released its email server in 2004; I sacrificed a goat for the Google gods when they acquired YouTube; and they don’t have to worry about this search engine aficionado jumping the Google train for the Bing boat: I tried it. I’m over it.

So why, you ask, am I not simply ecstatic about the long debated and much anticipated release of a Mac compatible Chrome browser? Well. I’ll tell you.

I’ll be honest; I swing both ways.

I have both a MacBook and a Dell Latitude at home. I won’t go into which I prefer, because that, my friends, is a blog post for another day. However, I will say September 2 did not come and go without my Dell getting equipped with Google’s Chrome browser.

And man did I LOVE it. Gmail didn’t take two to three minutes to load and I loved its “Most Visited” dashboard and it’s intuitive “Favorites” feature. I thought the interface was clean and bright and refreshing to look at after Internet Explorer’s formal front.

I forgave Chrome’s glitches in the beginning. I didn’t mind my laptop falling asleep while Chrome ran. I didn’t let it get to me that I couldn’t scroll up while using a Synaptics TouchPad on Windows XP. I mean, come on. It’d get fixed eventually.

And eventually it did. But then I noticed Chrome fell short when running other Google applications like gmail and YouTube. I mean, imagine if WhatsUpGold wouldn’t run Netflow? Insane.

Up until a week or so ago I couldn’t create an event in an email and have that synch to my Google calendar. I’m sorry, WHAT?!

But what made me throw Chrome out of my life was the continued issues I’ve had running YouTube. Chrome didn’t always allow me to sign into my YouTube account. Considering the amount of video I produce . . . this is kinda an issue.

I’d type in my username and carefully and slowly enter my password to avoid error; I’d then identify the word in the word catcher box and hit enter.

And I’d be led to another word catcher box. No “invalid password” prompt, just a loop of word catcher boxers.

It was like a bad dream. You know, those dreams that wake you up in a cold sweat because everything in the world is getting in the way of you completing this one task, this one task on which your entire existence depends?

Anyway. I Xed out of Chrome for the last time that day and reintroduced myself to IE. I uploaded the video, took a deep breath, and threw removed Chrome forever.

So until Google fixes all of its glitches Chrome has running other Google applications I am staying far far away from its “Download Now” button. That is for sure.

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By Mike Manfredi

Virtualization has been sort of a running theme around the WhatsUp Gold offices lately as we are preparing to release an upgraded version to our network discovery and mapping tool, WhatsConnected. The new WhatsConnected v1.5 will offer users the ability to discover and classify their VMware virtualized devices within their network, among other things.

Virtualization is a technology that more and more companies are beginning to integrate into their IT infrastructures. The thought behind virtualizing your company’s network is that virtualization has the ability to dramatically improve the efficiency of resources and applications within the infrastructure. The fact is internal resources tend to be underutilized under the old “one server, one application” model, and IT administrators spend too much time managing servers rather than innovating.

With virtualization integrated into your network, you are able to run multiple virtual machines on a single on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. The result of this is that different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications that same, single physical computer, hence enhancing the overall performance of your network.

Basically, to sum everything up, virtualizing your IT infrastructure lets you reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of your existing assets. There are many reasons why it makes sense to bring virtualization into your network. You can get more out of your existing resources, you can reduce datacenter costs by reducing your physical infrastructure, increase the availability of hardware and applications for improved business continuity, gain operational flexibility and you can improve desktop manageability and security.

Be on the lookout for more information about the new WhatsConnected v1.5 in the coming weeks.

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