InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 19, 1998
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continued...page 5 of 5
He's not worried that increased usage will drive up bandwidth demand. "In the long run, I'm betting that as my demand goes up, technology will become more available," he says. "By the time I need more bandwidth at the service center locations, XDSL will be out there."Customized Management
Network-management tools--sniffers, and performance monitoring and troubleshooting products--as well as end-to-end network-management platforms such as Tivoli Systems' TME 10, have improved considerably in recent years. Still, gaining a view of the network that is satisfactory in range--so the entire topology can be easily viewed--and in granularity--so a malfunction can be easily detected--isn't easy, users say.
Some companies that have gone with a single networking vendor use that vendor's network-management software throughout the network. Others pull together their own comprehensive package, hoping the extra investment will pay off.
AlliedSignal, for example, is embarking on its network-management initiative with expectations that yearly costs will go down. "We chose to go with a combination of tools," DuBall says. "Nobody is providing a framework solution that is as top-end as the point solutions."
AlliedSignal is installing event correlation and polling stations that provide full visibility of the network and get to the root case of a problem quicker, DuBall says.
Billing For Bytes
New usage-billing products are making it possible to accurately measure and bill for the use of network bandwidth on a departmental basis. As a result, network managers hope to discourage users from squandering bandwidth on nonessentials.
Fidelity uses Apogee Networks' NetCountant, which measures bandwidth use by each IP address in the network. Fidelity started sending out bills to departments in July. "People are seeing their bills and they're starting to reposition servers, starting to inquire about compression software," Fidelity's Esposito says. "Previously, we were billing by head count rather than usage. It didn't matter if you were an effective user or not. But if you cut the head count, it did. We weren't promoting the right behavior."
One result of usage-based billing: Fidelity moved its IBM RS/6000-based SP2 running the marketing database from Merrimac, N.H., to Dallas where the mainframe that the SP2 exchanges data with is located. "Client inquiries against the server weren't consuming that much bandwidth," says Esposito. "Most of it was for keeping the mainframe and the SP2 in sync."
The new system is already causing departments to pause before they implement bandwidth-hogging applications. "Things are so easy now," says Esposito. "Microsoft comes up with NetMeeting, and before you know it, you can do desktop videoconferencing easily. Once it starts to get routed around the network, it gets very expensive. Now, we're making users pay for it."
| Read more about networking, see related story, "Big Pipes: Better Option?." Visit our Networking Resource Center |
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Illustration by David Flaherty
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