By WUG Team
Join Our 14.2 and WhatsVirtual TTP
Ipswitch’s network management division takes pride in developing software that keeps our users on the cutting edge of industry standards. You need a network management solution that will continue to evolve as the industry evolves.
The latest product we’ve been developing, WhatsVirtual, is an answer to the growing industry trend toward virtualization. It is now essential for IT professionals to have a tool that allows them to effectively monitor and manage their virtualized environments.
Join our WhatsVirtual Technical Preview Program and be the first to give us feedback on this new tool. We view our TPP participants as an integral part of WhatsUp Gold’s product developement.
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The success of WhatsUp Gold’s Traffic Analysis tool late last year was without doubt due in part to your feedback and participation in our Flow Publisher TPP.
Flow Publisher is a lightweight complement to WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor (Flow Monitor provides detailed insight into how your network bandwidth is utilized by collecting NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow data) designed for those networks that don’t support flow data.
So cross Budget For Costly Upgrades and New Hardware off your To Do List: Flow Publisher; enables flow monitoring for every network segment and for every device whether or not they natively support flow monitoring. Flow Publisher captures raw network traffic and converts it into standard NetFlow records.
Here’s a quick 101 of network traffic analysis terms you should be familiar with in order to effectively get a handle on your network’s performance
* Top Offenders: The top offenders are those users, applications or hosts that are consuming your network bandwidth.
* BitTorrent: This is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data, which allows large files to be downloaded without affecting the performance of the network.
* WAN Data Traffic: This refers to traffic slowing down the performance of the wireless environments, usually consisting of FTP or copying files between sites.
* Security: Proper network traffic and performance monitoring allows you to detect DOS attacks and other rogue activity directed at your network.
Popularity: 34% [?]
By WUG Team
New plug-ins provide valuable new functionality in NetFlow monitoring, VoIP monitoring and advanced network discovery and mapping for layer 2 and layer 3.
Introducing WhatsUp Gold Version 12.3 and Netflow Network Traffic Monitoring Plug-In (Announced October 1, 2008)
Version 12.3 extends the WhatsUp Gold network management software product family architecture with new core features and a new NetFlow Monitor plug-in module to increase your visibility into, intelligence about and control over your network infrastructure.
New core features in v12.3 include functionality to automate the migration of an existing WhatsUp Gold database from v11.X, support for Windows Server 2008, and the extension of the licensing facility introduced in v12.0 to ensure compliance with software license device levels.
The new WhatsUp Gold Netflow Network Traffic Monitoring plug-in module gathers information from NetFlow enabled switches and routers allowing you to analyze and report on network traffic patterns. It provides instant insight into how efficiently your network is performing and how bandwidth is utilized. Misbehaving applications and users that are inappropriately consuming bandwidth can be rapidly identified. WhatsUp Gold NetFlow Monitor presents detailed information to assess network quality of service and quickly resolve traffic bottlenecks.
WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor (Announced June 23, 2008)
Now you can accurately assess or measure a live network and ensure that it is capable of supporting or maintaining adequate VoIP call quality using the WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor. Offered as an integrated plug-in to all editions of WhatsUp Gold (Standard, Premium, Distributed and MSP – v12.0 or above), the WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor provides detailed information on MOS and ICPIF voice quality scoring along with latency, jitter and packet loss. MOS threshold alerting is provided with an active SNMP monitor.
V12.0 New Features (Announced May 6, 2008)
WhatsUp Gold v12 introduces 20 powerful new features and enhancements designed to give you 360° visibility, actionable intelligence and complete control of your network infrastructure.
Press Release | digg story
Technorati Profile
Popularity: 1% [?]
By Peter Christensen
Talk about VoIP for the masses, Costco announced yesterday that the Syspine Digital Operator from Quanta Computer wil be available from Costco.com immediately. Focused on small businesses of under 50 employees, the Syspine Digital Operator A50 is a single-solution device that will connect up to eight standard telephone lines. It features a high-end, server-grade, fan-less design and can be installed anywhere. Businesses can add up to 50 individual Syspine IP310 business phones to create a complete, integrated small business phone system with no additional licensing fees.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1406182/
syspine_voip_phone_system_now_available_at_costcocom/
index.html?source=r_technology
Very interesting, but does raise some questions. Specifically, how does an SMB manage the system in an integrated fashion and make sure that the network is able to handle the additional VoIP traffic on an ongoing basis? Network management and monitoring are now even more critical to business success especially if all voice communications are now network based.
SMB IT personnel need effective network management and monitoring to provide visibility into what is going on on the network to ensure that the combination of data and voice do not degrade network performance and impact business continuity.
Popularity: 1% [?]
By Peter Christensen
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.
Popularity: unranked [?]
By Peter Christensen
In an earlier entry, Back into the Fray, I listed what has changed and has not changed after I left enterprise networking and I joined Ipswitch. One of the items that changed was VoIP. VoIP seems to have fallen under what is now termed unified communications.
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.
Popularity: 1% [?]
By Greg Paul
Cisco over the next five years plans to radically change how it sells and delivers router and switch software, in part by making that software more virtualized and modular.
Cisco’s intention is to decouple IOS software from the hardware it sells, which could let users add enhancements such as security or VoIP more quickly, without having to reinstall IOS images on routers and switches. The vendor also plans to virtualize many of its network services and applications, which currently are tied to hardware-specific modules or appliances.
This shift would make network gear operate more like a virtualized server, running multiple operating systems and applications on top of a VMware-like layer, as opposed to a router with a closed operating system, in which applications are run on hardware-based blades and modules. Ultimately, these changes will make it less expensive to deploy and manage services that run on top of IP networks, such as security, VoIP and management features, Cisco says.
High-level details of the road map were delivered in a session at Cisco’s C-Scape analyst conference last week in San Jose by Cliff Metzler, senior vice president of the company’s Network Management Technology Group.
Read the whole story here.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Flow Publisher is a lightweight complement to WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor (Flow Monitor provides detailed insight into how your network bandwidth is utilized by collecting NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow data) designed for those networks that don’t support flow data.
