The Daily Network Monitor

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.

I will be attending the Cisco Networkers show in Barcelona and will be blogging from over there next week. Should have some interesting insights and news to share from the show floor. If any of our loyal readers are attending, please stop by our booth (E44). Look forward to meeting our loyal readers and customers.

Virtualization continues to spread from beyond its mainframe roots to encompass the network.

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.