There are many solutions to a problem, be it cleaning up your house or tidying up your network. Ok!, not all problems have many solutions!!, but almost all of them do and I’m gonna tell you two such problems now.
Note: While reading this, you might even wonder what this has got to do with your network. Read on..
Problem 1
You go home and find the house very dirty, clothes lying all around, many boxes of pizzas (many days old!), networking magazines, CD’s out of the rack, coffee stains on the cushions… yada yada.. (You get the picture!). You come to the same place everyday but today you realize that it’s dirty because today there is not even enough place to rest your head.
You have two ways to solve the problem:
1. “Let the lying dirt lie” – You can move to a bigger house. On a short term, yes, this solution would be useful. But on a long run, No. It’s still going to get dirty again and eventually you’ll have to move to a much bigger place. This $olution is obviously expen$ive and not a reliable one on a long run.
OR
2. Clean the house – Yea! You might even hire a maid if the idea of you cleaning the house sounds very strange to you. It is a cost effective solution and useful on the long run. You will get a space to sleep and monitor it periodically so that it never gets so dirty again.
Problem 2
You are a network administrator (no, that’s not the problem!). One day you realize that there is not enough bandwidth for your business critical application on your network. The network traffic is chaotic and you wonder how it happened. There is no point pondering “how it happened” but what you should be doing is looking for a solution.
Solutions:
1. You can commission extra bandwidth pipe, say from T1 to T3. Of course, this will solve the problem for a short period. But eventually you will have the same problem and many more sequels which will cost you lots of $$.
OR
2. You can invest on a tool (highly affordable) that will help you find the “trash” applications, top talkers, etc on your network, help you get an in-depth visibility into your network traffic, gives you alerts, generates scheduled reports and the list goes on.
Make the smart choice. And start tidying up your network (and your house, if necessary)!
And if you are at the Interop, visit us at booth 1169!
Cheers
Joe
