The Packet Scoop

It’s clear that two growing trends by network management tool vendors and the network management system industry is the capability to support VoIP and virtual machines. We have published several posts recently about VoIP, but virtual machine management is as important. PacketTrap’s roadmap is committed to providing our customers with network management tools that support virtual machines.

To demonstrate our commitment to virtual machines we are pleased that Michael Blonsky joined our team from VMware where he led the company’s virtual appliance technical evangelism initiatives globally and was responsible for defining and managing the VMware Certified Virtual Appliance Program. His intimate knowledge of virtual machines and network management generally will help define many of our network management tools and strategies.

Did you know that 100% (yes, that’s 100%) of the Fortune 100 have implemented virtual machine technology, mostly VMware. That’s an amazing statistic. Clearly, there are many reasons for IT departments to adopt virtual machine technology including reduced costs of physical hardware, reduced dependence on farms of servers and, of course, at the enterprise data center level, the millions of dollars in utility expense savings. At the end of the day, however, virtualization is an optimization strategy, allowing for the optimization of running resources and extending hardware lifecycles.

What we also know is that virtual machine technology is being adopted by mid-sized companies at a far faster pace than VoIP. The clear ROI of virtual machine implementation makes it an easy decision.

Denise Dubie of Network Word wrote a piece several months ago proposing that companies ask themselves 10 questions before embarking on a virtual machine implementation project. While the purpose of this post is not to explore each of these 10 questions, it’s clear that IT departments must have reliable network management systems and network management tools that support virtual machines to realize the project’s ROI.