Daily Network Monitor

The Barcelona show is in full swing, unfortunately we didn’t have much time to attend the keynotes , but we did get to discuss networking management and monitoring with a great number of attendees and one thing stood out very clearly. How much enterprise networking professionals are concerned with bandwidth management. Not just looking at the bandwidth with tools like Netflow, but being able to prioritize and allocate bandwidth to certain applications over others within a corporate infrastructure. This is something that the carriers are already doing with MPLS and traffic engineering extensions. Interesting trend.

Have now been in sunny Barcelona for a few days now. Cisco networkers show has been very interesting from several perspectives. First, the number of people attending. The show was sold out with over 6,000 attendees from all over Europe.

Second, was the level of interest in network monitoring. Many people that we talked to were proactively seeking network management and monitoring solutions. Most interesting were the number of organizations that were going to or are currently implementing VoIP. It seems that VoIP has finally come of age. Consistent with this was hightened interest in not only bandwidth management but ensuring device availabililty for these types of services.

More tomorrow.

We recently wrote an entry on Blogger predicts the death of death that highlighted the death of IT. 

Au contraire, my friends, IT is a strategic asset and in most cases a competitive differentiator, and there are plenty of examples from the Fortune 500 all the way down to small businesses. Within the context of IT, it all comes down to predictable and reliable delivery of information to both internal and external consituencies. The foundation of predictable and reliable delivery of this actionable information is the network infrastructure. Unfortunately, many IT executives view the network as a utility rather than an asset, and while this is certainly understandable, it is the right view?

The real test is when the network or a server goes down. How is it viewed then? The new reality is down-time is money, no ands, ifs or buts.

IT and networking professionals need to highlight the criticality of the network as a business asset and not just a utility.