Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with PathSolutions CTO, Tim Titus: Taking Total Network Visibility on the Road
Next to reading (or writing or editing) posts about runts, giant Ethernet frames, and lots of other things that can impact network performance, I enjoy sharing what I’ve learned in more than 20 years of troubleshooting large, medium, and small networks. This week I was in Wisconsin speaking at BrainStorm 14.0, the K20 Technology Conference for IT Personnel, and on my way back to the Bay Area stopped in at Boise to participate in a local Avaya User’s Group meeting (we will be exhibiting at the IAUG’s conference, IAUG CONVERGE2013, in June).
The BrainStorm Conference is sponsored by META (Midwest Educational Technology Association), a group of IT professionals in public and private schools located around the La Crosse, Wisconsin area. This is a great organization and conference that focuses on the network infrastructure and other related technical areas. This year more than 350 schools, ranging from elementary to colleges and universities, attended and more than 75 sessions were offered. My session was on fixing a slow network and it was packed with IT professionals, most of whom were running VoIP and video on their networks. Certainly, supporting VoIP and video can put a strain on your network which is why performance management is so critical.
There are many interesting elements, some much easier to detect than others, that can cause a network to be “slow” and those who attended my session all wanted to learn how to prevent this from happening. This is why our mission is to deliver Total Network Visibility—with this you can quickly and easily identify any network anomaly and as any network professional can tell you, the longer it takes to fix your network problem the more of an impact it can have on critical services. We now live in a digital world and the network that supports it, in my opinion, will either help this world run smoothly or cause it to implode.
Every company and institution also struggles with budgetary constraints—how do you stay within tight budget guidelines without impacting the performance of your network? Again, this is why Total Network Visibility should be a baseline requirement for any network as it can pinpoint weaknesses as well as highlight underperforming devices that can be utilized.
Certainly, my session with the Idaho Avaya User’s Group in Boise focused on how to reduce the time spent on network troubleshooting while, at the same time, increasing the overall performance of their network and productivity of their network staff. The key, again, is complete visibility into the entire network which is what our VoIP and network performance management solutions are designed to deliver. They also significantly reduce the amount of time the network team spends troubleshooting because our solutions collect and analyze the information provided by 18 error counters on every device and then identify and diagnose the root-cause of the network problem in plain-English.
Well, I am now back from taking network visibility on the road. Whenever I travel on business and talk with conference attendees, customers, and partners, I am reminded that our network infrastructures are the cornerstones of businesses, organizations, and educational institutions. This is why our blog covers network issues in so much depth and why all of us at PathSolutions are focused on delivering Total Network Visibility which, in turn, ensures stable, high performing networks. Next up for the PathSolutions team: Enterprise Connect. We hope to see you there!
