Stories about: Network General

Network performance-management vendor Fluke Networks this week expanded its product portfolio when it acquired for an undisclosed sum the intellectual property of VoIP management player Viola Networks.

Ten great free network management tools were recently showcased. Readers responded with some of their own favorites, so I'm going to take a look at those tools and report on their capabilities and usage from my perspective as an experienced network manager.

Enterprise Management Associates is back again after a year of absence, this time on a monthly basis. We've really missed your dialog and comments, and hopefully we've been missed as well. As before, this column will focus on network management trends as they fit into the bigger IT management landscape - focusing from time to time on application performance, or SLM versus BSM, or new approaches to asset management, or trends like CMDB adoption as they may affect the NOC.

Virtualization can help IT managers allocate more resources with less hardware, but not without introducing a slew of management challenges.

Fluke Networks this week unveiled the fruit of two acquisitions and quite a bit of integration work when it shared details around its unified performance management software, which the vendor says will help customers better manage application performance while tapping knowledge of the underlying network.

Network management vendor Opnet announced this week it has acquired Network Physics for US$10 million in a deal that will give Opnet the tools it needs to manage end-to-end application performance.

NetScout is to buy Network General, the company behind the legendary Sniffer, for around US$205 million in cash, stock and debt.

For years, Inttra, an e-commerce logistics provider to the world's largest cargo-shipping organizations, has been using virtualization on its back-end IBM mainframe and Citrix Systems servers in a secure environment. Now the Parsippany, N.J., company primarily uses IBM blade servers running virtual Linux machines. VMware's virtualization technology on an Intel platform powers this New Data Center infrastructure.

Everybody knows virtualization isn't just about VMware anymore. Many users are past the rush to server virtualization and now need to increase the benefits of the move. They need not only to improve efficiency, performance and management, but also to find ways to extend the technology to their desktop, storage and mobile environments. That's a heavy burden. Product choices can be overwhelming, and a starting point difficult to find. Get on your way with promising products from these 10 companies:

With speculation that Avaya is in play for an [[ArtId:2028075792|acquisition|new]], things will be different for VOIP users or the overall market, analysts and observers say, no matter what happens.

Network General this week announced three new products the company says will help network managers better track NetFlow data, provide insight into virtual environments and monitor application performance across distributed networks down to the user device.