One of our customers had an interesting problem recently that caused a network outage in a critical part of the network. An interface blade was inserted into a Cisco Cat6500, but the blade didn't pass diagnostics. The blade had been checked out in a lab switch, but for some reason, perhaps a bent...

I just finished spending two days in San Jose, participating in the Gestalt IT Network Field Day , an event dreamed up by Stephen Foskett and Greg Ferro. Twelve delegates who are independent bloggers gather together to listen to presentations from a short list of interesting companies. The bloggers are...

I've been doing some more reading about network event handling and found some interesting articles and a few facts that I'd like to share. I have my own ideas about handling network events, but am open to learning what other people do and why they prefer their approach. It helps me learn new...

If you are like me, you probably have a long list of projects around the house and many of them in an unfinished state. How does that happen? For me, I'm usually working away when I come to the point where I 1) Don't have the right tool, 2) ran out of something or 3) am interrupted by a phone...

Utility services like DNS, DHCP, NTP, AAA, and network management contribute to a smoothly running network. I'm an advocate for designated utility subnets for these services. Why have utility services subnets? It allows the network administrators to more easily monitor, manage, protect, and provision...

Network Management just moved up another rung on the strategic IT priorities ladder with the announcement from CA that it’s acquiring NetQoS. The biggest message: It’s becoming increasingly clear that getting network management right is critical to building, operating and optimizing next generation IT...

It seems like the pace of virtualization has recently increased - or perhaps I'm becoming more aware of it. Cisco announced their Unified Computing System (UCS) earlier this year and the Nexus 7000 last year. Both have significant virtualization components relative to the data center. Cisco isn't...

Jimmy Ray Purser, a blogger and video blogger for Cisco and Network World, just did a blog with that title . In that blog post, he makes several comments that are right on target with the deficiency of most network management systems: - It is a lot of manual correlation - Correlation, Correlation, Correlation...

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...

I had the privilege of reviewing a neat paper, Network Topology Discovery , by Eric Siegel, a technical analyst at the Burton Group. His paper covers a many aspects of network topology discovery in 30 pages, sprinkled with details on how things work. I found it to be a very well written paper, covering...