More Aggregation Less Aggravation (by Tommy Landry)
Author Profile - Tommy Landry is the Manager of Product Marketing for Anue Systems, joining the company in September of 2008. Tommy brings 18 years of broad marketing experience in the high tech arena, focused on technologies including semiconductors/microprocessors, database integration, embedded databases, CRM, digital warehousing, distributed temperature sensing, and IT Admin tools. Prior to Anue Systems, Tommy was the Director of Worldwide Marketing for SensorTran, the technology leader in fiber optic-based distributed temperature sensing solutions for clean energy applications. Tommy holds an MBA in Information Management and Marketing from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Louisiana State University.
UPDATE: Click below to listen to an audio summary from the author
Introduction
With a down economy comes uncertainty, and that uncertainty is not limited to just your 401k. Layoffs and budget cuts are being announced by the day. At the keynote from the 2008 Gartner Symposium ITexpo, Gartner CEO Gene Hall announced that the company had adjusted their 2009 IT budget expectations downward, from an estimated 3.3% overall growth rate to a 2.5% reduction. Clearly, the economic situation is resonating, and executives are listening.
Gartner now recommends that the industry “use innovation to turn crisis into opportunity.” The savvy technology strategist is already thinking about ways to do “more with less”, searching for low or no cost solutions to existing problems. Regardless, we are faced with the quandary of exactly how to do more with less when application performance and reliability, security enforcement, and other important objectives simply must be achieved.
The Problem
With tighter budgets, organizations are being asked to do “more with less”. At the same time, networks and applications continue to increase in complexity, and monitoring is critical for securely ensuring performance, reliability, and availability metrics are sustained. Technology strategists are challenged to provide the appropriate monitoring coverage with limited budgets.
On the other end of the spectrum, network operations management find themselves with a lack of staff to handle day-to-day activities. Network operators spend a large amount of time troubleshooting, in excess of 75 days per year for nearly a quarter of network operators according to “State of the Network Global Survey”, a research summary released in April, 2008.
Part of the issue lies in a lack of available SPAN ports and TAPs. Troubleshooting tools must frequently be kept offline until a problem arises, and technical staff is forced to temporarily “make & break” connections when problems appear. Not only is this process cumbersome and time consuuming, but removing tools effectively results in a lack of coverage elsewhere.
In summary, IT groups find themselves facing increasing complexity on the network, but with reduced financial and human resources to manage that complexity.
Extend Your Coverage
Tool aggregation helps companies deploy multiple network tools by conveniently linking test and monitoring tools to any traffic on the network. With properly filtered and aggregated network traffic, this technique improves network visibility and maximizes return on investment for monitoring tools.
Tool Aggregation filters and multicasts so that the tool gets only the data it needs.
Aggregation provides many benefits:
- Aggregate traffic so tools can monitor more of the network segments
- Filter traffic so each tool gets only the data it needs, enabling it to operate at full efficiency
- Share SPAN ports and TAPs so more tools can monitor different segments of the same traffic
- Use 1GbE tools to monitor 10GbE links
- Use 100MB tools to monitor 1GbE links
- Reduce costs for deploying, managing, and operating monitoring tools
- Increase efficiency for troubleshooting, resulting in productivity gains and faster MTTR
Anue Tool Aggregator
The Anue 5200 Series Tool Aggregator was designed to address all of these issues. By aggregating SPAN ports and TAPs to a centralized tool farm, all tools have access to the network traffic that each tool needs to perform its assigned task.
The Aggregation Control Panel optimizes tool usage and reduces troubleshooting time.
The Tool Aggregator enables you to aggregate, broadcast, and multicast network traffic to the right tools at full line rates. It provides the ability to filter on a variety of Layer 2/3/4 parameters and protocols, offering significant control over load balancing and tool coverage. The Tool Aggregator is very easy to use, with an intuitive GUI that provides simple, “drag ‘n drop” control over all of these functions, without requiring command line coding or other cumbersome management techniques.
Summary
We can’t control the economy or its current challenges, but we can control how we let it affect our businesses. In these days where technology strategists are being asked to do “more with less,” solutions like tool aggregation become even more important.
Get the most out of your network and application monitoring tools with the Anue 5200 Series Tool Aggregator.
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