For many, Shark Week is a highlight of the summer's months-long TV binge session. For others, it's too much hype on the sensational, not enough on educating the public on some truly specialized and varied animals that are really good at what they do. It's a lot like marketing an advanced out-of-band management platform. Stick [...]
In the run-up to Superbowl XLIX, one of the key story lines has been "Deflategate" - the accusation that the New England Patriots intentionally under-inflated footballs. This situation has more in common with network SLAs than it does with the science of atmospheric pressure and temperature. Network SLAs? Let me explain. In case you don't [...]
MTBF (mean time between faults) and MTTR (mean time to recovery) are important measurements that usually factor into the creation of SLAs (service level agreements). Another important measurement within IT groups when it comes to their management tools should be MTTI, or the mean time to innocence. When there is a problem, this is the [...]
What's a greater risk? Asteroids or network downtime from Level 1 support issues? [UPDATED: 2/15/13 We survived!] While the threat of an asteroid's path bringing it inside the orbit of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites and taking one out is real, it's much less of a concern for most satellite-based managed service providers than meeting [...]
Which side of SLAs do you sit on? Are you gunning to meet required service levels for your customers, or are you watching your provider like a hawk to make sure you get what you pay for? Either way, service level agreements are only as good as: What they measure - are these really the [...]
Bring your own device has become a fairly established concept. But what's next? The network? Well, not quite. Cloud Services Providers, typically by taking advantage of virtualization, have made it easier than ever for Line of Business users to rapidly and inexpensively source computing infrastructure, storage, hosted development platforms and enterprise class business applications over [...]
Uplogix Local Managers (LMs) monitor, measure and manage the performance of critical network services and applications from the end-user’s perspective. This is done in two ways. First, the LMs can use Layer 2 visibility to collect 36 values from managed network devices such as Rx, Tx, CRC, Load, Line Protocol Status and more. Second, by [...]
How hard/expensive can 0.99% be? A recent two-part article in Network World gave a clear analysis of the basic networking and economic drivers of WAN service history over the last 30 years up to the present day where many enterprises continue to pay much more for MPLS connections than cheaper broadband options.It's about reliability, but [...]
One in five data centers are soaring at peak efficiency. A January 2012 global study of CIOs and IT managers by IBM concluded that only about one in five data centers have reached the peak of efficiency. How exactly do they define peak efficiency? Like many things -- it depends. For some data centers it [...]
Here is a peek at the new white paper from Uplogix: Meeting the Network Requirements of Cloud and Virtual Computing with Local Management. Don't let the catchy title fool you -- this paper could be the plot of a movie. There is the introduction of characters, introduction of the conflict, rising action, heroes, villains... but [...]
