Stories about: Fluke

You might believe, and with some real justification, that the term "end to end" is only used by vendors who custom-fit the definition to the scope of their particular product.

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.

SolarWinds is an example of how dramatically lower price points and faster time to value are catching on in a sea of more complex, costly, and albeit usually more richly functional network management products.

Cisco take note: Juniper's new EX 4200 switch not only fills a hole in a leading competitor's product line, but also represents a credible alternative for enterprise access switching.

Symark, late in 2006, broke code development ranks with OEM partner eDMZ Security. The PowerKeeper 2.0 running on HP hardware we tested represents some slight changes in terms of flexibility, operating system and application support between the two offerings. The company plans to release PowerKeeper 3.0 this summer, but that revised code was not ready for us to test.

Privileged IT staffers literally holds the keys to the castle. Access to those keys that open the doors to critical operating system and application resources must be carefully managed and legally audited. Enter the class of products referred to as privilege account management wares.

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.

One day we got a call from somebody having trouble with her mainframe connection. I had started the installation of this workstation some 8 months previous, and then somebody else completed it while I was on vacation. All of our cross-connects were made on 66 blocks; there was no structured cabling in any building. Token-ring was pretty robust in that respect; it usually ran the full 100 meters with no issues.

Douglas Merrill may be the first CIO to have his body fat percentage turned into public information. Can't wait to see how Google's search algorithm indexes that one.

At SunTrust, a major bank with US$182 billion in assets, network executives had the blues. Although mergers and acquisitions had boosted the bank's branch and ATM presence across the Southeast, they had created a network-management morass.

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.