A Gem of an Application in WhatsUp Gold

Have you ever wanted an easy way to view multiple WhatsUp Gold reports or other application data at a glance? The Dashboard Screen Manager is a great solution to do just that. It’s a stand-alone utilitarian application that’s included with WhatsUp Gold Premium, Distributed, and MSP editions. It’s designed to display a series of Web pages, or a “playlist,” on one or multiple monitors. The Dashboard was developed as a complement to WhatsUp Gold, and as a tool to help keep your network status highly visible. 

The Dashboard runs on a single or multiple display panels and cycles through report pages on the WhatsUp Gold web interface. This capability provides network administrators with important network information on display at all times, cycling and changing report pages without the need of constant configuration or manual navigation. It also provides the capability to view multiple networks that you’re monitoring simultaneously.

Though the Dashboard Screen Manager was developed to work along-side WhatsUp Gold, it can display any web page. For example, a network admin for an Internet business providing service to a small town in the desert glances at a screen on the Dashboard and sees that the connectivity to the town is down. With a display showing the weather for this town on another screen, the network administrator quickly sees that the extreme temperatures of the day have likely caused problems for the cable transmitters. Now she can take swift action to resolve the problem.

The Dashboard Screen Manager is simple to install and configure. Just run the install program, located in the default folder C:\Program Files\Ipswitch\WhatsUp\Dashboard_Setup.exe. Now configure the web pages you want to display and you’re set with better visibility to web pages and reports that are critical to maintaining network performance. For more information about configuring the Dashboard Screen Manager, see the WhatsUp Gold Help.

-This post was written by Mike Randolph, part of our amazing Research and Development team down in the Atlanta office-

This is classic Apple. They didn’t invent the category or particularly innovate the technology, but they put together a set of existing technologies in a beautiful package that’s beautifully integrated with their other offerings. The Time Capsule is a wifi base station (seen those before) that allows USB print sharing (been there done that) and boasts up to a terabyte of network storage (yawn). So what makes this more appealing than, for example, Iomega’s StorCenter? How about out of the box integration with Apple’s Time Machine, a Vista-busting backup feature of the latest cat-themed Mac OS X? (Also, the StorCenter costs a little more, has one more USB port and RAID, and is very, very ugly.)

Sure, home network storage and backup are child’s play (sometimes literally) to the average networking pro. But ask yourself, network dudes, why can’t it be this elegant and easy at work, too?

Cisco announced a new management blade for their 6500 router last month that evidently kicks butt; doubles throughput, eliminates antiquated redundancy protocols and enables 20 times faster failover. It also eliminates the need for complex network architectural designs, multi-homing and multiple IP addresses for redundant standby equipment.

However, it still does require a significant hardware investment, but if you already have a redundant architecture in place, which is already proven to be slower, then a $32K investment may be worth the investigation to improve throughput by 20x and decrease failover times.

Expensive, but still cool stuff.

With CES firing up in Vegas this week, our thoughts turn from the cool tools at work to the cool toys at home.  Whatever Santa didn’t bring you can be seen – if not purchased – at CES.   On the home front, check out this news of home networking from CES – does your wired home do this?

In the HANA Home, consumers will be able to watch TV, time-shift their viewing, record live TV and push content from room to room within the home by using the HANA menus on any wired to wireless connected HDTV — all with guaranteed 400 Mbps guaranteed quality of service. The demo will illustrate how HANA uses whatever cabling they have in their home, be it coax, CAT5 or plastic optical fiber (POF), to interconnect their entertainment systems. Additionally, HD content will be transmitted wirelessly via a Wireless HDMI solution — with no loss of quality and full use of the HANA menus.The HANA Home at CES is sponsored by Samsung, Pulse-LINK, Oxford Semiconductor, Newnex, Firecomms and the 1394 Trade Association. These companies will showcase their home networking technology during the show.

That’s a lot of HD, with QoS, too no less!

Both Microsoft and Cisco have staked places at the unified communications table. But what does unified communications really mean. Is it VoIP? Is it IM? Is it collaboration? Is it email? Or is it all of these things melded into one?

What ever it is, it means only one thing to network managers. How much effort is it going to take to manage?

From this one question we can deduce a number of other implications to an already saturated infrastructure and the ability to manage yet another cool technology someone just had to have.

If it is server centric, read Microsoft, this means more server focused hardware to manage. How will this server based infrastructure be managed? Not only is there additional server hardware to manage, but also license management (read CALs) to ensure EULA compliance. 4000 IP phones, means 4000 CALs, unless Microsoft is changing their licensing model.

Or networking gear centric, read Cisco, this fits nicely with most existing installed infrastructures and most of the management capabilities are already in place.

QoS management for VoIP is key to the whole effort of unified communications, QoS is network centric not server centric.

I’m not trying to take a slanted view of one company over another, just what make sense for an organization. If it was a network that I was responsible for, I would choose the network centric approach over the application centric approach every time.

Solera Networks, Inc., has introduced a new hardware product; for managing packet recorders distributed throughout a network. Here is an excerpted version of the press release that announced the product.

Control Center software for its packet recorder appliances. This initial release of the web-based interface software allows network administrators and security analysts to:

- Select, start, and stop physical capture, virtual replay, and/or regeneration processes
- Create and apply filters to the network data stream before capture or upon replay
- View graphical and numerical status of key system metrics
- Navigate and download PCAP files or PCAP header files of stored network data
- Create custom PCAP files selected by date-time or file size from the stored data
- Issue console commands to the appliance
- Add and manage users and user rights

Based on proprietary system software and the DS infinite storage file system, Solera Networks DS appliances achieve over 2X the sustainable capture and stream to disk rates of competitive products and can directly address disk storage in excess of 240 TB.

The DS series appliances capture LAN and WAN traffic of all types including T1, E1, digital, T3, DS3, E3, VoIP, HSSI, and all other packetized transport protocols. Up to 10 capture or regeneration ports can be configured on each device with 10/100, GigE, 10GbE, or Fiber Channel adapters.”

Under the new arrangement, PCMall will provide Netmon products to its large base of corporate, government and institutional customers through its various web properties, which include www.pcmall.com, www.pcmallgov.com, and www.onsale.com.

“Our appliances provide network administrators with a comprehensive view of their critical infrastructure,” according to Jason Pomerleau, Product Manager for Netmon Inc, “Imagine adding hundreds of pairs of eyes to your network, each working 24 hours a day to monitor key performance and operational metrics.” A built-in email and pager alert system is designed to keep administrators informed of important events which require attention or intervention.

Describing the new partnership as a “win-win proposition for all parties” Netmon President Eric Lamoureux states, “PCMall customers will now be able to purchase our products through a vendor they already know and trust, and we in turn are able to make our products accessible to a larger audience.”

Siemens said in a statement that it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second–roughly two full DVDs per second–and sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100-mile U.S. network, the first time outside of a laboratory.

Online games, music and video downloads are generating increasing amounts of Internet traffic, creating a need for ever-faster and affordable transmission.

The test, two-and-a-half times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany’s Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology.

Siemens said the advantage of its method of using electrical processing only was that it removed the need to split signals into multiple signals of lower data rates to avoid bottlenecks. Such bottlenecks make transmissions slower and more expensive.

“Such a system would be particularly interesting for the future 100-Gigabit Ethernet, on which the telecommunication providers are currently working,” Siemens said.

See the whole story here.

Solera Networks, Inc., has introduced a new hardware product; for managing packet recorders distributed throughout a network. Here is an excerpted version of the press release that announced the product.

Control Center software for its packet recorder appliances. This initial release of the web-based interface software allows network administrators and security analysts to:

- Select, start, and stop physical capture, virtual replay, and/or regeneration processes
- Create and apply filters to the network data stream before capture or upon replay
- View graphical and numerical status of key system metrics
- Navigate and download PCAP files or PCAP header files of stored network data
- Create custom PCAP files selected by date-time or file size from the stored data
- Issue console commands to the appliance
- Add and manage users and user rights

Based on proprietary system software and the DS infinite storage file system, Solera Networks DS appliances achieve over 2X the sustainable capture and stream to disk rates of competitive products and can directly address disk storage in excess of 240 TB.

The DS series appliances capture LAN and WAN traffic of all types including T1, E1, digital, T3, DS3, E3, VoIP, HSSI, and all other packetized transport protocols. Up to 10 capture or regeneration ports can be configured on each device with 10/100, GigE, 10GbE, or Fiber Channel adapters.”