I'm doing my presentation titled Troubleshooting Converged VoIP and Data Networks at Interop New York on September 17 at 1:30pm. The session title is Troubleshooting Converged Networks . It has been a well-received topic at prior VoiceCon shows and speaking at Interop gives me the opportunity to...

I recently attended the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association’s annually sponsored event, The Capital Connection ’08 in Baltimore, Maryland. Netcordia was one of 33 companies selected from over 200 in the region to present at this annual event attended by the who’s who of venture capitalist, investment bankers...

There are several key components used by successful IT and networking organizations: People Processes Tools People are the most important assets, followed by proper processes, then the tools to implement and automate those processes. Great people, with the right processes, can overcome the lack of tools...

Today, I was talking to one of Netcordia's university customers in the state of Texas. They have over 40 merchants and store fronts on campus allowing students and others to pay by credit card. And they've started to get audited at least once per year for PCI DSS compliance, as they have obligation...

It is always great to get feedback directly from our customers and I had the privilege of a good exchange of information with Matthew Almand of Texas A&M University. They have a big network, comprised of 25 backbone Catalyst 6500 routers at 10 locations, interconnected by 1G and 10G links. There...

I've been looking at a number of different reports that would be useful to network administrators. One that came up in talking with some people about data centers is a Power and Heating Report . A number of data centers have reached power and heat loading limits, even though there is physical space...

We just announced the NetMRI Event Analysis system, which analyzes syslog and snmp trap events, and is pretty exciting (see the press release ). Most syslog collectors provide forensic analysis (after the fact). Some organizations have created complex scripts to filter out the noise and identify important...

VoIP troubleshooting is a pretty interesting problem. (See my earlier blog entry regarding my talk at VoiceCon Fall 2007.) There are a large number of tools that look at packets on the wire, or look at the RTCP (Real Time Control Protocol) stream from certain phones, or gather data from the call controllers...

When I was in college at Vanderbilt University, and then later at the University of Maryland, computing was done on a central mainframe. (Yes, the dark ages of computing.) In the 1980s, I worked at the U.S. Naval Academy and was able to observe first-hand the initial boom of networks in higher education...

With all the existing network management products on the market, what was the motivation for creating NetMRI? I found in my consulting work that people often had a lot of products, but that they didn’t regularly use them (yes, there are exceptions). The existing systems were difficult to use, weren’t...