The Packet Scoop

I am constantly amazed how Les Stroud of Discovery Channel’s Survivor Man can overcome extreme conditions with nothing more than basic tools. No food, no water, just his instincts and creativity. This makes me think of today’s network administrators trying to survive extremely complex networks with old, outdated network management systems (NMS).

A recent article in ComputerWorld discussed how many companies do not have appropriate business continuity plans in place to survive a network outage more than 8 days without having a crippling impact on the business. Based on research from Gartner, the article recommends companies should have a plan for 30 day outages, noting the disaster events that have occurred over the past few years.

In almost every discussion I have with customers, they always professs how a few hours of network and application downtime (and many times a lot less) can have severe consequences on businesses. It does not require days of network downtime to impact revenue,  disappoint customers, disgruntle employees, or swallow the bottom line.

Scott Kierns, CEO of Juniper, said it perfectly in a recent interview: “What used to be networks simply for the sake of connectivity are now networks for the sake of survival. In that scenario, the performance of the network matters more, and the criteria for buying and operating a network changes from what it was to what it needs to be.”

Game changing trends like SaaS, VoIP, wireless, virtualization, and highly distributed networks, have outpaced the innovations to existing NMS solutions. Thus IT departments are trying to monitor and manage networks with common, archiac tools. Network administrators don’t want to play this survival game with their company’s networks anymore and are looking for NMS solutions for today’s environment…but Survivor Man does make for great television.