Monday, October 10

INTEROP 2005

By Dipendra Bantawa

Interop 2005, the infrastructure trade show, came to New York in the fall. I will not cover each and every exhibitor, or every featured presentation. Instead I will focus on some products exhibited at the show that have good potential for being integrated with current Systems Management products.

Avaya ExpertNet VoIP Assessment Tool is an example of a product for extending Systems Management deployments. Other vendors, such as NetIQ, also have VoIP assessment tools assess the readiness of a network to support voice and video traffic. The reason I liked the product is that there is huge need for pre-SM deployment assessment.

NetQoS uses what it calls SuperAgent to monitor end-to-end performance passively without deploying any desktop or server agents. SuperAgent separates delays due to applications, network and server, enabling more rapid troubleshooting. This product almost acts like “SI”, the performance monitoring product from Netuitive. It generates baselines and compares the metrics that it collects and automatically tries to investigate the cause of the problem, as it gathers data, after it detects a problem by capturing filtered packet data, SNMP polling and traceroutes.

Network Instruments nTAPs provide monitoring devices with access to all network traffic without disrupting or adding any more network traffic. In simple terms, it makes a copy of the traffic that flows in and out that can be fed to any analysis tool or monitoring system. This out of band monitoring approach can be helpful when the network/infrastructure is already severely suffering as the monitoring system will only add more traffic and use already over utilized resources.

We at JMACINC are always interested in serious forums such as Interop that offer a broad range of innovations for optimizing and extending the leading Systems Management products.

Refer to www.JMACINC.com for the rest of the story.