It's 9 a.m. and it seems every user across the enterprise is accessing their e-mail. Might be tempting to do some load-balancing; maybe bring that big server from accounting up to handle some of this traffic.
But wait! It's the last day of the month: Everybody will shortly start working on their monthly expense reports -- and filing them on the accounting' network. What's a network administrator to do? Find some more capacity, that's for sure. But you need a clear view of your network to make some intelligent choices in resource reallocation. Check your well-mapped domains and workgroups. You know what traffic patterns to expect. You have the smart routers and managed switches to bridge performance gaps.
Everyone fondly recalls the free-flowing budgets of yesteryear (or the year before) when you just installed capacity to match your peak expectations. No more. Today you learn to do more with less -- or someone finds ways to do without you. You need tools to manage the network -- workgroup by workgroup, bridging unrelated sectors, shifting low-usage, or non-critical applications to electronic backwaters until demands settle.
A clear image of what's going on in your network infrastructure is critical. Add new components or domains or reconfigure existing setups and the suites of mapping/discovery tools become even more important for any group larger than five nodes or so, where you can physically see every station in the room. For this benchmark test of network management tools we solicited a number of software packages for testing.
Reviews centred on programs to handle workgroup-size configurations of five to 50 nodes -- although most scale up to cater to larger enterprise sizes. (Keep in mind upstream reporting is implied in corporate settings, which typically require huge networks to be broken into functional groups -- sizes that fit our test simulations.)
We had significant industry input, notably from a number of vendors whose software we put through our evaluation facilities, as well as from industry consultants and other experts.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Plesman Publications
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
