Resources - Park Place Technologies

Webinar: Critical Software Support is only a CLICK away: View our Recorded Webinar!

Jessica Rabil — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 17:40:51 +0000

Is your current third-party software technical support falling short?

Struggling with response times, inconsistent remediation, increasing service costs, or an overburdened internal IT team? You’re not alone, … there’s a better solution.

Our L1-L3 engineers have 15+ years of direct OEM experience and carry multiple software support certifications.

On top of that, we can save you 30-40% on your: VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, VxRail, and Microsoft Windows Server tech support.

As a webinar exclusive bonus, we’ll provide a FREE Software Environment Assessment to see how we can best support your IT Infrastructure platforms. Just ask and we’ll schedule the free consult.

This Video Highlights:

1. Defining Software Technical Support:

What does “Software Technical Support” really mean? We’ll walk through various industry definitions and share Park Place Technologies’ approach — explaining how it’s different, and more importantly, why that difference matters for you.

2. When to Leverage Remote Software Support:

Learn when it makes sense to call in external support.

3. Finding the Right Technical Support Partner:

Discover the key qualities of a reliable support partner.
Platforms: VMware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Nutanix, Dell VxRail, Microsoft Windows Server, and more!

4. Beyond Technical Support:

Learn about Park Place Technologies’ full range of services, from Hardware Maintenance to Infrastructure Managed Services, to see how we go above-and-beyond standard tech support.
Simplify your entire data center support with one partner who understands your data center inside and out.

Who Should Attend?

IT leaders, technical managers, and anyone responsible for making software support decisions within their organization.

Don’t miss this opportunity to explore how Park Place Technologies can enhance your software support experience — and improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase Uptime.

Optimizing Data Center Efficiency with Liquid Cooling

Goran Jevtovic — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:02:05 +0000

The Looming Power and Cooling Challenge for Data Centers and Liquid Cooling Solutions from Park Place Technologies

Goran Jevtovic — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 13:14:29 +0000

As data centers face rising power demands from AI, high-performance computing, and IoT, traditional cooling methods are struggling to keep up. This white paper explores:

Why cooling is a growing challenge

AI, machine learning, and high-density computing are increasing heat loads.
Traditional air cooling is inefficient and consumes excessive energy and water.

Liquid cooling as the future solution

Overview of three key liquid cooling technologies:
- Direct-to-chip cooling – Targets high-heat components.
- Immersion cooling – Fully submerges servers for maximum efficiency.

Benefits of liquid cooling

Energy savings – Reduces cooling power consumption by up to 50%.
Higher server density – Supports AI and HPC workloads more efficiently.
Lower environmental impact – Reduces water usage and carbon footprint.

Park Place Technologies’ liquid cooling solutions

Comprehensive offerings including design, installation, and ongoing support.
Expertise in seamless integration with existing data center infrastructure.

Download now to learn how liquid cooling can future-proof your data center!

InContext by Bloor
Author: Paul Bevan
February 2025

Enhancing Application Monitoring | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 19:38:54 +0000

As more business services are delivered via web-based applications, ensuring their performance and reliability becomes increasingly critical. In our latest Entuity TechTalk, we highlight the use cases of Entuity Software for application monitoring, including:

SurePath: Discover its role in identifying and resolving network issues, ensuring smooth data flow between the cloud and end users.
Certificate Monitoring: Covering best practices for monitoring SSL/TLS certificates to prevent unexpected expirations and security vulnerabilities.
Application Webhooks: See how to leverage application webhooks for real-time notifications and monitoring of application specific metrics.
User-Defined REST Poller: Learn about the User-Defined REST API Poller capabilities that allow for customizable integrations and extended functionality tailored to your specific application monitoring needs.
Flow Analysis and NBAR: Confirm usage of specific web applications are being utilized by your team across the network, how much data are they using, and how that usage might be causing congestion.

Watch now for an engaging and informative session designed to help you get the most out of Entuity’s advanced monitoring capabilities.

How Liquid Cooling is Helping to Manage Growing Data Center Cooling Challenges

Goran Jevtovic — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 14:14:00 +0000

As data centers face increasing demands from AI, cloud computing, and high-performance workloads, traditional cooling methods are becoming less effective. This report explores how liquid cooling is transforming data center operations by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and supporting sustainability initiatives.

Key Insights from the Report:

Energy Efficiency – Liquid cooling can reduce energy consumption by up to 40% compared to traditional HVAC systems.
Increased Computing Power – Supports higher-density workloads required for AI, 5G, and big data analytics.
Cost Savings and ROI – Potential for a strong return on investment (ROI) within the first year.
Liquid Cooling Technologies:
- Direct-to-Chip Cooling – Transfers heat away from processors through liquid-cooled plates.
- Immersion Cooling – Submerges entire servers in a dielectric liquid for maximum thermal management.
Market Growth – The global liquid cooling market is projected to reach $8.45 billion by 2032, with a 19% CAGR.

Download the full report to explore how liquid cooling can drive efficiency, sustainability, and cost savings in your data center.

Spotlight by Bloor
Author: Paul Bevan
January 2025

Global Customer Experience Company Gains Operational Efficiency and Improves Compliance Reporting with Entuity Software™

Jessica Rabil — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 13:37:13 +0000

Foundever, a global customer experience company with more than 120,000 employees, recently migrated from a legacy network monitoring tool to Entuity Software, a network observability solution from Park Place Technologies. Entuity delivered better platform performance and superior customer support with no disruption to Foundever’s network operations.

Welcome to Park Place Technologies

Goran Jevtovic — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:14:33 +0000

At Park Place Technologies, we are committed to making IT infrastructure management more efficient, cost-effective, and seamless. Whether you’re setting up your account, accessing our Central Park Customer Portal, or exploring our suite of services, this Customer Onboarding Guide will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need for a smooth experience.

What You’ll Find Inside:

Central Park Customer Portal – Learn how to register, log in, and manage your account seamlessly
Comprehensive Services – Explore our full range of IT solutions
Next Steps – Key actions to take in your first 30 days to ensure a smooth onboarding experience
Additional Resources – Quick links, FAQs, and best practices for optimizing your IT operations
Contact Information – Connect with the right teams for support, service requests, and account management

By leveraging Park Place’s innovative solutions, you can enhance uptime, optimize performance, and drive IT transformation with confidence.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to your Park Place representative or visit our Support Page.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Network Observability Report: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 08:00:51 +0000

“Network observability” has emerged as a mainstream term for describing the tools that IT organizations use to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their networks. But what does it mean? How can IT decision-makers use this concept to push their vendors to deliver better solutions? After all, only 42% of IT organizations are completely successful with their network observability tools today.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has published new market research that explores this issue. Based on a survey of 351 IT decision-makers, this research defines network observability, identifies the key capabilities that buyers expect from such solutions, and explores the challenges that IT organizations are encountering with their existing toolsets.

This report is sponsored by Park Place Technologies.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Network Observability Report: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

Goran Jevtovic — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 08:00:42 +0000

This report is sponsored by Park Place Technologies.

Winter 2025 Network Monitoring Grid® Report from G2

Jessica Rabil — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 18:29:01 +0000

The results are in, and Entuity Software has earned one of the top positions in the Network Monitoring Grid® Report from G2 for 2025.

See how Entuity compares with LogicMonitor, SolarWinds, PRTG, and other solutions including:

Ease of implementation (deployment, implementation time, and more)
Feature comparison (functionality and management)
Relationship ratings (ease of doing business, quality of support, and more)

The product set has been ranked by market presence and customer satisfaction – all based on user reviews, market share, company size, and social impact.

Download your copy of the Grid® Report today to discover why users have established Entuity in the Leader quadrant! Fill out the form and the white paper will be sent to you via email.

Webinar: Next-Gen Network Monitoring: An In-Depth Look at Entuity Software™ in Action

Jessica Rabil — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:16:08 +0000

Are you ready to transform the way you manage your infrastructure? Watch an exclusive live demo of Entuity, the leading infrastructure management software designed to simplify, optimize, and secure your IT operations.

This Video Highlights:

Comprehensive Infrastructure Monitoring: Discover how Entuity provides comprehensive visibility into your infrastructure’s performance, from core to edge.
Proactive Issue Resolution: See how advanced analytics and intelligent alerts help you identify and resolve issues before they impact your business.
Seamless Integrations: Explore how Entuity integrates with your existing IT systems and tools to provide a unified and streamlined infrastructure observability and management experience.
Automated Workflows: Experience the power of automation in reducing manual tasks and enhancing operational efficiency.
Customizable Dashboards: Learn how to tailor dashboards and reports to meet your specific needs and share critical insights with your team.
Scalability and Flexibility: Understand how Entuity can grow with your organization, ensuring robust infrastructure management regardless of your environment’s size or complexity.

Don’t miss this opportunity to revolutionize your infrastructure management approach with Entuity. Register now to secure your spot and take the first step towards a more efficient and reliable IT estate.

Links Mentioned in the Webinar:

Entuity Software V22 Overview Video

Entuity Software Reviews on G2

Liquid Cooling Guide

Jessica Rabil — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 20:15:09 +0000

Download our Liquid Cooling Guide to explore the top 10 benefits of liquid cooling, compare leading data center cooling technologies, and discover a complete, turn-key liquid cooling solution. This comprehensive guide is designed to help you optimize your IT infrastructure for efficiency and performance.

Entuity Software™ V22.0 Overview [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 12:59:44 +0000

Join Solutions Architects Peter Bartz and John Diamond as they showcase the latest features and enhancements of Entuity Software version 22.0. Specific enhancements to the software include:

What you’ll learn:

Vulnerability Monitoring – 00:49
AWS and Azure Monitoring – 11:49
Configuration Management – 14:54
Maintenance Window Alerting – 20:42
Web Application Management – 24:10
Server and Storage Management – 27:30

Webinar: 【新しい保守サイクルの考え方】〜ITをもっと自由に　かつてない顧客体験を（メンテナンスジャーニー [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 16:01:48 +0000

ITインフラ（ストレージ、サーバー、ネットワーク）の保証や保守が切れたときにどうするかという決断に迫られていませんか？今ある環境を必要な限りサポートし続けることができる選択肢をご紹介します。
特別限定ウェビナーにご参加いただき、Park Place Technologiesの新しい保守の考え方により、ITの自由度を高め、ハードウェア資産のライフサイクルを管理し、かつてない顧客体験を実現する方法をご覧ください。 Day1（初日）、保証終了後、サービス終了（EoSL）と、いつどのタイミングでも当社のサードパーティメンテナンス（TPM）のライフサイクルが、メーカーのサポートおよびメンテナンスコストと比較して30～40％のコスト削減を実現します。IT予算を他の重要なITプロジェクトに費やすことができることをご説明します。
パークプレイステクノロジーズは、30年以上にわたり、ストレージ、サーバー、ネットワークハードウェアの専門家によるサードパーティメンテナンス（TPM）を提供しています。
このウェビナーでは、以下について詳しくご紹介します：

Day1サポート
IT環境を問わず、ITをより効率的かつ俊敏にするための戦略的アプローチの一環として、サードパーティメンテナンスをどのように活用できるか
既存の運用から新たなサービスにより環境をどのように監視し、自動化できるか

Webinar: Data Centre Cooling Technology – How Liquid Cooling can help organisations deliver sustainable data centres. [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 17:30:54 +0000

With more organisations looking to implement AI and IoT technology into their IT operations, the need for additional on-prem computing power is resulting in a host of challenges for businesses and data centre operators, notably; increased energy costs, running out of space in the data centre, power limitations from the energy grid and data centre sustainability.

As a potential solution to these challenges, more and more organisations are exploring the viability of data centre cooling technologies and solutions and specifically liquid cooling, to help optimise their IT, while reducing energy costs, increase Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and rack density, and helping drive sustainability in the data centre with their IT choices.

Watch this webinar, where we will unpack the various data centre cooling solutions in the market, and help you understand how liquid cooling technology can help organisations reduce their carbon footprint while also contributing to energy efficiency.

Key Takeaways:

What liquid cooling is, the different types of liquid cooling solutions (immersion, direct-to-chip, cold plate etc) and why liquid cooling is important for data centres.
Current market trends, technologies and future innovations in liquid cooling for data centres.
Case studies from leading data centres implementing cutting edge data centre cooling solutions.
How liquid cooling contributes to energy efficiency and reduces carbon footprint including real-world examples of sustainable data centres using liquid cooling.
Key considerations for planning, designing, and deploying liquid cooling solutions including common challenges when integrating liquid cooling into existing data centres.
How to calculate ROI for liquid cooling investments including financial benefits beyond energy savings (e.g., increased density, reduced space requirements).
How liquid cooling is changing data centre design and layout including the role of AI and machine learning in optimising liquid cooling.

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 13 – The Future of Liquid Cooling for Data Centers

Jack Kauter — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:39:19 +0000

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions is our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place CTO Chris Carreiro discusses the latest developments in Liquid Cooling with My Truong of ZutaCore.

Listen to our previous episode, covering Professional Services, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

Webinar: Unlocking the Benefits of Outsourced NOC Services [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:33:45 +0000

View our in-depth recorded webinar where we explore the increasingly popular strategy of outsourcing Network Operations Center (NOC) services to enhance business IT infrastructure. We dive into the nuts and bolts of NOC, dissecting its critical role in ensuring network stability and efficiency, and how an outsourced model can significantly benefit your organization.

Key Takeaways:

Top 5 NOC Monitoring Challenges: Gain insights into the common hurdles faced in NOC monitoring, including alert fatigue, resource allocation, and process management.
In-House vs. Outsourced NOC: Weigh the pros and cons between maintaining an in-house NOC team and opting for outsourced NOC services, considering factors like organization size, staff skills, and costs.
Benefits of Outsourced NOC Services: Discover how NOC as a service (NOCaaS) can streamline operations, mitigate the risk of network downtime, and address the challenge of managing legacy systems like Unix.
Selecting the Right NOC Partner: Delve into the critical aspects of choosing a NOC service provider, including the importance of aligning with specific organizational requirements, toolset adaptability, and cost-effectiveness.
Onboarding Best Practices: Understand what to expect before, during, and after onboarding outsourced NOC services to ensure a smooth transition and continued support.
Real-World Application: Hear about Park Place Managed Services from Park Place Technologies and how their NOC solutions can help your organization tackle network challenges head-on.

Whether you’re a CTO, IT manager, or network engineer, this webinar will provide you with the knowledge needed to make an informed decision on whether outsourced NOC services are the right move for your business. We’ll also share expert advice on picking the right partner to create an efficient, resilient, and cost-effective network management strategy.

ISG Provider Lens™ – Private/Hybrid Cloud – Data Center Services Report

Jessica Rabil — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:11:17 +0000

A research report comparing provider strengths, challenges and competitive differentiators.

Webinar Presentation: Unlock Savings on VMware Support: Your Alternative Guide

Jessica Rabil — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 19:05:27 +0000

Download the presentation from Park Place’s webinar on “Unlock Savings on VMware Support: Your Alternative Guide.” If you’d like to view the event, visit the event recording page.

Webinar: Unlock Savings on VMware Support: Your Alternative Guide [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 18:24:52 +0000

Enhance your strategy and cut unnecessary costs with our exclusive webinar, “Unlock Savings on VMware Support: Your Alternative Guide.” Given the numerous changes following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many customers are confronting soaring support costs paired with a decline in service quality. So much so that Forrester is projecting that nearly 20% of VMware clients will transition to competitors such as Nutanix or Microsoft Hyper-V. Those who remain are on the hunt for more cost-effective support solutions.

This recorded webinar allows you to discover how Park Place Technologies stands as a valuable alternative, offering superior VMware support at a fraction of the cost. Learn from industry experts about:

Cost-efficient, high-quality VMware support through Park Place Technologies that doesn’t sacrifice expertise.
A comprehensive portfolio of VMware-related services tailored to your needs.
A deep dive into finding the optimal level of VMware support that aligns with your organization’s unique demands.

Whether you’re considering a switch or seeking to optimize your current VMware support, this webinar will equip you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and achieve significant savings.

Prepare to transform how you manage VMware support without compromising on quality and take control of your VMware investments.

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 12 – Holistic Professional Services

Jack Kauter — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 06:00:56 +0000

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions is our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Patrick Keuller, Park Place Technologies VP, Professional Services, discusses holistic approaches to Professional Services with IDC Research Vice President, Network Life Cycle Services and Infrastructure Services, Leslie Rosenberg.

Listen to our previous episode, covering cybersecurity trends, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

Webinar: Not Just for EOSL Support [VIDEO]

Jessica Rabil — Tue, 21 May 2024 18:01:24 +0000

Traditionally, Third-Party Maintenance (TPM) has only been thought of as an option once a device has reached its EOSL (End of Service Life) milestone. But have you considered what TPM can do for you before you receive that EOSL notice – even as soon as your original OEM warranty expires? In a world where technology evolves at lightning speed, maintaining a proactive approach to hardware lifecycle management is not just smart—it’s essential for business continuity and maximizing ROI.

View this informative recorded webinar that will transform the way you perceive post-warranty hardware support. This video is designed to provide IT decision-makers with strategic insights into the benefits of considering a third-party hardware maintainer before the EOSL clock starts ticking.

Key Takeaways:

Understanding EOSL: We’ll start by demystifying what EOSL means for your business and how it impacts your IT operations.
Advantages of Customized Support: Learn about the flexibility and tailored support that TPMs offer, ensuring that your unique infrastructure and business needs are met without the one-size-fits-all approach of OEMs.
Cost Savings: Discover how TPM can lead to significant cost reductions, often slashing support expenses by 30-40% compared to OEM contracts.
Extended Lifespan: Find out how TPMs help extend the life of your hardware well beyond the manufacturer’s EOSL date, allowing for more strategic and budget-friendly upgrade cycles.
Expertise and Reliability: Hear how TPMs employ specialized engineers with cross-platform expertise that often surpasses the knowledge base of OEMs, leading to quicker and more reliable resolutions.
Eco-Friendly Practices: Gain insight into how using TPMs contributes to sustainability by prolonging the usability of equipment and reducing e-waste.

Device Management Best Practices | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Jack Kauter — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 13:01:47 +0000

Entuity Software allows you to create views based on dynamic rules, perform auto discovery, generate reports, and more to assist with your asset and configuration management strategies.

In this Tech Talk our team shares use cases from different partners as to how Entuity can be best utilized as a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), or with an existing solution.

View our Entuity page for more information about our enterprise network monitoring software.

IT as a Growth Accelerator: How Managed IT Can Free Up Resources for Innovation [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 19:41:39 +0000

Balancing the demands of “traditional infrastructure” management with the energy and resources needed to further cloud and digital transformation initiatives is a real challenge for today’s IT teams.

And with the trends of data center repatriation, IoT and AI bringing more computing power on-prem, this dynamic promises to remain an issue for the foreseeable future.

View our webinar to hear why more organizations are turning to managed IT partners to complement their internal teams – and unlock time and budget they can dedicate to digital acceleration.

What you’ll learn:

Why the current dynamic is stressing budgets and exacerbating internal skills gaps
How a managed IT partner can improve your operational efficiencies
The level of support that might be right for your team

Liquid Immersion Cooling Solutions from Park Place Technologies [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 21:55:13 +0000

Hear from Chris Carreiro, the Chief Technology Officer at Park Place Technologies, about how immersion cooling works and the many benefits of liquid immersion cooling. Then discover why the Park Place Immersion Cooling solution is the turnkey solution you’ve been waiting for!

Enterprise Monitoring Usability Index from G2

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 21:24:47 +0000

The results are in, and Entuity Software has earned THE TOP position in the Enterprise Monitoring Usability Index from G2 for 2024.

According to G2, “A product’s Usability score is calculated by a proprietary algorithm that factors in real-user satisfaction ratings for a number of use-related review
questions. To qualify for inclusion in the Enterprise Monitoring category, a product must:

Monitor activity and performance for several IT systems (e.g., servers, databases, and networks)
Generate real-time analytics regarding monitored systems activity
Create and distribute detailed alerts via email, phone, and messaging for potential and active failures and errors
Offer pre-built and custom reporting and dashboards for quick insights into system states

The usability scores in this index highlight factors such as ease of use, administration, and adoption data (all pulled from user reviews).

Download your copy of the Usability Index today to discover why users have established Entuity the category leader! Fill out the form and the white paper will be sent to you via email.

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 11 – Risk and Governance of Cybersecurity

Jack Kauter — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 13:21:50 +0000

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions is our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place Technologies CISO John Parlee and Phil Harris, Director of Governance, Risk and Compliance Services and Software, IDC Research, discuss cybersecurity trends including monitoring, risk management and AI.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

From Speeds and Feeds to Business Intelligence | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 20:23:21 +0000

You have a ton of data about your network… but how do you take it to the next level to really understand how your network is performing? Follow us through an Entuity tech demo, then listen to Solution Architect, Pete Bartz, and Park Place CIO, Michael Cantor, talk about contextualizing your data in a meaningful way.

Check out the Entuity page for more information about our enterprise network performance monitoring software.

Empowering Security Success: How the Channel Can Add Value to Existing Investments

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 18:06:56 +0000

Gain exclusive access to a groundbreaking white paper, created by Park Place Technologies in collaboration with CRN (UK), which explores the role that partners and the wider channel community can play in adding value to strategic partnerships to help enable organisations to deliver the business-as-usual ‘run and operate’ services.

The white paper examines the scope of challenges facing organisations today; how IT leaders view demands currently placed on IT and CIOs, as well as the vital role of the channel in supporting agility and security.

By downloading our white paper, you will gain commentary and insights into survey findings broaching key topics, such as:

Digital capabilities
Technology strategy challenges
The rising pressure on IT and CIOs
The role of partners
Strategic importance of selecting channel partners
Attitudes to cloud/on-prem/aaS
IT & Sustainability

Download your copy of our white paper today! Fill out the form and the white paper will be sent to you via email.

The Sustainable Data Center Transformation

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 14:43:10 +0000

Mission critical data centers continue to be a major requirement for businesses today. Unfortunately, the carbon footprint of these critical assets is growing with their demand. As you’ll see in this resource, “There is growing demand from both the public and industry to reduce the environmental impact of all businesses — sustainability has moved into the corporate domain and, due to regulations and the cost implications of reducing a carbon footprint, it can be a hot button issue.” These political and economic pressures have been motivating data center operators to search for alternatives to traditional facility design.

You’ll learn that, “Globally, data centers currently use approximately 1.5 – 2% of the world’s electricity. Several models suggest that data center energy use will only increase, accounting for up to 13% of global electricity use in the next decade. Up to 40% of a data center’s energy consumption goes into cooling, since dozens of servers stacked on top of each other get very hot. And, as the power density of processors continues to increase, server platforms are pushing the limits of what you can cool with air.”

Data center owners and operators have been exploring liquid immersion cooling as a means to reduce power consumption and drive sustainability.

According to Marc Bhuyan, from Google’s Machine Learning Infrastructure team, “There’s a fair amount of consensus that the end game is using immersion cooling.”

Download this immersion cooling whitepaper today, and learn about its benefits and how you can introduce this liquid cooling method to your data center operations!

Dealing with the Density Dilemma

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:58:30 +0000

The industry is undergoing a massive shift in data center infrastructure requirements driven by, “the advancement of next-generation application architectures in AI, IoT, AR as well as microservices.” Running these advanced services is a challenge in itself, but doing it without latency could require, “combining the raw power of GPUs with today’s more powerful CPUs, a single 1U GPU-centric server can in fact drive 1500-2000 watts by itself.” With denser processors comes more heat – is your organization in a position to solve the cooling issue within the physical parameters of your existing data center?

Can your data center take the heat?

This GRC and Park Place Technologies whitepaper asserts, “The necessity for more densely packed processors and co-processors presents a dual challenge for data center operators: these new compute requirements consume more power and generate more heat than most existing centers were designed to handle.”

Download this resource today to explore four potential scenarios that can help you tackle the density problem at your organization!

Entuity Tech Talk EXTRA Edition: Cisco IOS-XE Device Vulnerabilities

Jack Kauter — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:16:39 +0000

Following up on the recent Cisco IOS-XE vulnerability, we’ve produced an EXTRA, pre-recorded edition of our Tech Talk series to expand on the subject. In this episode, Solutions Architect Pete Bartz and Director of Product Operations, Jordan MacPherson, share how they’re using Entuity to efficiently identify impacted devices under management.

Telling Stories with Your Network Monitoring Dashboard | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 14:09:56 +0000

Learn how to configure your Entuity network monitoring dashboard to tell the story hidden within your network. Discover different ways to understand and visualize status and availability, operations views for service teams and NOCs, or to simplify troubleshooting. Continue watching to discover why Entuity is a leading enterprise network management software today!

Dashboards for Network Monitoring (Transcript Teaser)

How do we use Entuity to solve a business challenge or technical problem within our work? Joining me today from our Solutions Architect group are both Pete Bartz and John Diamond. Some of you guys might have worked with them in the past, or maybe even when you were deploying Entuity.

Today we want to talk about network monitoring dashboards. Last year, we spent a lot of time on user-defined polling and custom integrations, and third party integrations using web hooks – addressing how we get better, richer data into Entuity. We’ve got all this data – now what? How do you use that data to tell a story beyond just event management?

When you are using Entuity dashboards for network monitoring today, what are you using them to do? Is it communicating status or availability to leadership or business groups? Or is it more of an operations view – something like a service team or a NOC is primarily using it. Is it a troubleshooting thing – you’ve got a ticket or somebody reported a problem?

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 10 – A Cloudy Future

Jack Kauter — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 11:21:55 +0000

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions is our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place’s Senior Director of Marketing for EMEA and APAC, Simon Bitton, and Bloor Research Analyst, Paul Bevan, discuss the benefits and risks of moving to the Cloud.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

Integrated Infrastructure Services – Park Place Technologies [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 20:57:21 +0000

Learn more about our IT infrastructure management services, enterprise network management software, data center professional services, and third party hardware maintenance services today!

They’re not just NOCs. Our enterprise operations centers are command central for your infrastructure. A multi-disciplinary team monitoring, triaging, and escalating issues quickly and to the right teams – even dispatching onsite assistance when and where you need it.

Calling on a team of global engineers for hands-on help. Bandwidth issue in Barcelona? Drive down in Denver? Blue screen in Belize? We’ve got you covered. We’re a single-source for infrastructure services, seemlessly connected, streamlining infrastructure management and keeping your team focused on what really matters.

It starts with Entuity, and in-house developed monitoring tool, enhanced and configured to serve our customers best. Powering our 365 always-on visibility.

We’re there when you can’t be. Filtered-through monitoring templates built on 30 years of industry experience with thresholds and processes customized to each customer’s environment. So, you’ll only be notified for actionable events. One partner for all your needs. From rack-and-stack, to monitoring, management, maintenance, and decommissioning.

Are you ready for a better way to manage your infrastructure? Then you’re ready for Park Place Technologies.

15-Minute Introduction to ParkView Managed Services™ [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 13:11:55 +0000

IT teams are increasingly turning to IT Infrastructure Managed Service providers to help optimize their operations. Limited bandwidth, skills gaps, and the time needed for day-to-day management combine to create a variety of issues including:

Inadequate planning/management to avoid outages
Delays in recognizing outages
Difficulty identifying the source of issues
A lack of in-house skills to remediate them
Not enough time to focus on operational change

What You Will Learn:

What’s included in our ParkView Managed Services offering
What makes our IT infrastructure management services unique
Relatable use cases that demonstrate how they can help you!

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 9 – Trends from the Data Center to the Cloud

Jack Kauter — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 14:56:11 +0000

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions is our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place’s Director of Product Operations Jordan MacPherson, and Enterprise Management Associates’ Analyst Shamus McGillicuddy, discuss a range of topics ranging from managing NetOps teams to Cloud repatriation.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

Entuity v21.0 Release Details | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 23 May 2023 18:39:00 +0000

Learn about the Entuity v21.0 release details including IPAM, multi-server admin and topology enhancements, VMware monitoring enhancements, and more. Most importantly, rediscover why Entuity is a leading enterprise network monitoring software today!

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 8 – Head in the Cloud

Jack Kauter — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 11:53:14 +0000

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions is our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place President and CEO Chris Adams, and Omdia Analyst Roy Illsley, soar through a conversation about the latest experiences and trends in the Cloud.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

Entuity Software™ Product Tour

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:44:01 +0000

Designed for today’s complex estates – Entuity empowers ITOps team to more efficiently and effectively monitor, visualize, and manage their infrastructure. Learn more about Entuity Software today!

Watch the video now to gain a better understanding of this powerful tool!

Network Monitoring Software Integrations | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 15:57:56 +0000

Learn where Entuity integrations can be framed in your greater networking stack today! Solutions Architects Pete Bartz and Matt Miller join Product Operations Director, Jordan MacPherson, to discuss Entuity integrations, common use cases, and how Entuity network performance monitoring software integrates with other tools.

IT Infrastructure Management – How to Stay on Budget & Innovate [WEBINAR]

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 19:30:54 +0000

Duration: 45 minutes

Managing your traditional enterprise IT infrastructure — while simultaneously navigating your company’s digital transformation and planning for the future — can be overwhelming.

This webinar from Park Place Technologies outlines new strategies that can drive meaningful change in your IT infrastructure while significantly reducing spend and minimizing interruptions. Time and money that can be reinvested in moving your business forward.

What you’ll learn:

How to drastically reduce OPEX (and total cost of ownership)
How to defer capex by sweating assets longer
How this strategy can reduce downtime

Join us for a one-hour discussion with John Stock and Sachi Thompson about IT Infrastructure Management – How to Stay on Budget & Innovate.

How to Architect Your IT Department To Deliver Agility [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 21:54:21 +0000

Join Roy Illsley, Chief Analyst, Cloud and Data Center at Omdia, and Phil Godfrey, Solutions Architect at Park Place Technologies to discover how to architect your IT department to deliver agility in the digital era.

Watch the video now to learn how to become more agile today!

We Solve Problems – Park Place Technologies [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:24:56 +0000

This is our opportunity to help you do more with less, get the most out of your team, overcome supply chain challenges, and run a more sustainable IT practice so you can focus on digital transformation and drive your business forward.

Watch the video now to learn how Park Place Technologies solves your IT problems!

Curvature Hardware – IT Hardware Sales [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:34:25 +0000

Learn how incorporating preowned hardware into your IT strategy can help you reap big cost savings on hardware procurement.

Watch the video now to learn about Curvature Hardware!

User-Defined REST API Polling – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:33:11 +0000

Learn how Entuity handles user-defined REST API Polling today! Solutions Architects Pete Bartz and John Diamond (JD) join Product Operations Director, Jordan MacPherson, to discuss what Rest API polling is, common use cases, and how to perform this in the Entuity network performance monitoring software.

Ep. 7 – Trends in IT Security Risks

Jack Kauter — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 16:08:16 +0000

Welcome to The Blue Couch Tech Sessions, our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place Technologies CISO John Parlee, interviews IDC’s Phillip Harris on trends in security risk, advisory and privacy services.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

ClearView™ Network Support Assessment

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 15:21:25 +0000

Network maintenance and support costs can really add up. Find out how much you could save with Park Place Technologies’ proprietary ClearView assessment. ClearView provides an objective recommendation on how to optimize network support down to the device level.

Entuity Webhooks & Use Cases – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 20:05:35 +0000

Learn how Entuity handles webhooks today! Solutions Architects Pete Bartz and Matt Miller join Product Operations Director to discuss what webhooks are, common use cases, and how they are used with the Entuity network performance monitoring software.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Sustainability & the Circular Economy in IT

Anthony Mastri — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 17:51:15 +0000

Duration: 1 hour

According to IDC, by 2023 40% of the world’s largest companies will have completely embedded sustainability into their operations.*

Join us for this live webinar to learn about the latest trends in IT sustainability and strategies for making your practice as sustainable as possible.

You will hear directly from Guest Speaker, IDC Data Center and Support Services analyst, Rob Brothers – as well as Park Place Technologies practice leaders for third-party data center hardware maintenance, professional services, and hardware sales.

In this webinar you will learn:

The latest in sustainability strategies and technologies
Predictions for sustainability services
How more companies are turning to used hardware
SITAD and Circular Economy Key Findings
How a key service provider and can help your company achieve its sustainability goals

Join us for a one-hour discussion with Rob Brothers, John Stock, Mike Nicholis, and Sachi Thompson.

Network Management Megatrends in 2022

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 20:32:52 +0000

According to EMA research, “The effectiveness of network operations teams is declining.” In fact, the number of network operations organizations that rate themselves as effective has decreased 22 percentage points since 2016.

The 2022 Network Management Megatrends summary will cover:

The network technology investments that have been influencing operational strategy this year
How network technology leaders are identifying issues and identifying root causes in 2022
Strategies for building a network monitoring tech stack to support increasingly complex and connected global networks
How to leverage network management tools to mitigate employment changes
Advice on cloud adoption and monitoring your network regardless of server configuration
How NetOps and DevOps can collaborate in an optimal fashion
How IoT and Private 5G impact your network operations
New data types that your network monitoring tools must be able to ingest and analyze

Get access to the full Network Management Megatrends 2022 summary by filling out this form, and the whitepaper will be sent to your email!

Navigating the Great Cloud Acceleration

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 14:08:08 +0000

Is your organization hoping to avoid technology debt by pushing for a “cloud-first” or “cloud-native” environment?

Over the past two years, the world has witnessed an accelerated cloud migration as enterprises aim to embrace the benefits of cloud technology. However, Computing points out that the, “rush to the cloud – often as matter of survival or transformation – has left many enterprises with difficulties, including security issues from poor configuration, inadequate monitoring, and an ongoing resource drain from constant troubleshooting.”

The original Computing research in this white paper, sponsored by Park Place Technologies, analyzes cloud journeys, the difficulties of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and pain points surrounding interoperability, management, and monitoring of IT environments. You will also learn about the IT skills gap and lessons from security oversights while considering how to migrate quickly without compromising on security requirements.

Some Key Findings

According to Computing…

“93 percent of organizations are at least considering cloud transformation.”
“67 percent define their infrastructure model as ‘hybrid cloud’.”
“59 percent believe cloud adoption is key to their organization keeping pace with competitors.”
Fill out the form to access further insights! →

GigaOm Radar for Network Observability [REPORT]

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 12:45:54 +0000

“Network observability is a category of platforms and tools that go beyond device-centric network monitoring to provide truly relevant, end-to-end visibility and intelligence for all the traffic in your network, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else,” as stated by GigaOm.

GigaOm continues, “This report looks at key vendors in the emerging network observability space and aims to equip IT decision-makers with the required information to select suitable providers according to their specific needs.” GigaOm analyzes the vendors on a set of key criteria and evaluation metrics.

Fill out the form on this page to access the GigaOm Network Observability Radar Report now!

Network Management Megatrends Research Insights: How to Optimize NetOps

Anthony Mastri — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 13:45:20 +0000

Date: Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Time: 16:00 PM BST / 11:00 AM EST

Duration: 1 hour

The percentage of network team members who believe their network operations groups are completely successful has dropped dramatically – from 49% in 2016 to just 27% today!

Our webinar will detail the key findings of the 2022 Network Management MegaTrends report including what’s driving this drop in confidence amongst network teams. Feeling reactive vs. proactive, staffing challenges, struggles with legacy tools and more.

We’ll also discuss strategies for improving your network operations with best-in- class monitoring tools and managed services.

In this webinar you will learn:

The latest trends in network operations
The key challenges network teams are facing in 2022
Strategies for overcoming these challenges and optimizing network operations

Join us for a one-hour discussion with Shamus McGillicuddy, Lee Walker, and Jordan MacPherson.

Multi-tenant Network Monitoring – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 14:15:52 +0000

Learn how how Entuity handles Multi-tenant Network Monitoring today! Solutions Architects John Diamond and James Denmon demonstrate how Entuity can be a powerful hosting or MSP network monitoring software that provides segmented permissions for all your multitenancy needs.

User-defined REST Polling – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 11:00:02 +0000

Learn about user-defined REST polling in Entuity today! Solutions Architects John Diamond and Matt Miller join Product Operations Director Jordan MacPherson from Park Place Technologies to demonstrate how the Entuity enterprise network monitoring software handles and facilitates user-defined REST polling.

Five Unexpected Enemies of Your Data Center

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 13 May 2022 14:37:17 +0000

Date: Thursday, May 26, 2022

Time: 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Duration: 1 hour

Every data center admin knows about the myriad ways to take a data center down: fires, power and network equipment failures, and the activities of hackers and cyber criminals.

And many of those risks are already accounted for in data center design, site selection and redundant equipment. But the real nightmare fuel comes from data center outages caused by the weird stuff – things like electrostatic discharge, ‘zinc whiskers’ or even a local raccoon that has decided that your NOC is an excellent place to raise its growing family.

When you deal with incredibly complex buildings with unlimited points of failure, life gets messy. With outages causing financial losses, SLA breaches and customer churn, no data center operator can ignore the physical security of their fragile systems, even when things get freaky.

We’ll take a deep dive into the five unexpected sources of data center outages that you might not be guarding against – what they are, why they happen and how to monitor and prevent those critical failure points when possible.

Our experts will arm you with the secrets behind the dark arts of data fail points and reduce the threats to your uptime. In this deep dive, we’ll look at the lesser-known causes of data center outages and find out how you can protect against them.

In this webinar you will:

Discover five causes of unpredictable data center outages
Learn from case studies of real-world data center outages caused by things you’d never expect
Understand how to protect your data center against those lesser-known threats
Prepare against outages in your own data center
Recognize other practical ways to improve uptime

Join us for a one-hour discussion as we explore the unintended catastrophes that can affect any data center at any moment. Our experts will be available for a live Q&A for your critical questions.

Jewelry Retailer Receives Hardware Maintenance from Park Place

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 04 May 2022 20:36:22 +0000

THE CHALLENGE

Pressure makes diamonds—and sometimes forges lasting relationships.

When a large Midwestern jewelry retailer fell on hard financial times, its cost-cutting needs began to alienate many of its vendors.

“They had large turnover within their organization, and communication was getting lost,” a Park Place Account Manager said. “They had many vendors telling them to ‘kick rocks’ because they weren’t able to get ahead on their renewals.”

As the jeweler struggled, it realized one company was there for them. The retailer’s main storage engineer continued to open support tickets through Park Place Technologies. Park Place fulfilled these tickets despite a pending deadline to renew support. Park Place’s “Service First” policy means serving a customer’s equipment to keep their data center up and running, even if the equipment isn’t under contract.

“We were there for them, from point A to point Z. They really relied on us,” their Park Place Account Manager said.

THE OPPORTUNITY

During the pandemic, the Jewelry retailer’s business increased, and the financial wellness of the company improved.

“They realized that Park Place had been a true asset. The main storage engineer remembered that Park Place had always been there for them,” their Account Manager said. “I would take calls with the storage manager, often at 9 o’clock at night, putting out fires, even with equipment not yet under contract. He was so thankful.”

When the client’s EMC equipment reached EOSL, and its needs grew beyond cost savings, the storage manager became an internal advocate for Park Place Technologies.

As it came time to discuss support for the retailer’s EOSL equipment, the Park Place Account Manager said the storage manager reported, “Park Place was really the only company there for us, that would still assist us. They were very responsive.”

Park Place understands that every organization has unique needs, especially when it comes to IT infrastructure support. “We’re truly a Service First company,” the Account Manager said. “When somebody is in in a pinch, we’re here to help them out. A lot of organizations don’t provide that right away. They want to get paid first before they service you.”

HOW WE OPTIMIZED IT

In addition to renewing its contracts and adding many more pieces of equipment, the jewelry retailer is now in the process of looking at ways to further optimize its IT infrastructure.

“Their growth kind of overwhelmed their IT team,” the Account Manager said. “Our goal is to implement Managed Services. The initiative is there. We are now talking about server and storage management, and they love the idea of monitoring.

“We stuck with our client during tough times … they trust us and they’ll always listen to us. As they told us, “We know that Park Place is going to take care of us, no matter what.”

Are you looking for a trusted partner to help you turn the pressure of optimizing your hardware maintenance and IT support into diamond-level service? Contact your account manager or complete the form below to get started.

Medical Supplier Receives Hardware Maintenance and Operating System Support

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 19:38:18 +0000

THE OPPORTUNITY

In 2015, a medical supply company had a goal of having 85% of its applications in the cloud by 2018. Like many customers, however, it continued to rely on mission-critical applications being run on in-house HP-UX devices, which could not be migrated to the Cloud. These systems contained years of research and clinical trial data and were responsible for 50-60% of the company’s revenue, so the applications needed to stay on these systems.

It became evident that the CIO’S plans, as well as his timetable for moving off these systems, was not in sync, or as aggressive, as the OEM’s plan to EOL/EOS these HP-UX systems. The OEM, caught up in cloud migration, had been investing heavily in Cloud computing technologies and, as a result, was quickly moving resources and investing less in the support and development of the HP-UX systems.

The CIO needed to develop a partnership with a proven expert in maintaining legacy systems,
a company that was knowledgeable about HP-UX OS support, and
a business that could maintain these legacy systems well after the OEM’s EOS announcement.

This would allow the medical supply company the time necessary to migrate the applications to a different platform. The company turned to Park Place Technologies for help in 2016.

“They wanted the ability to have an annual contract, but make changes on a monthly basis,” PPT’s Account Manager shared.
“They wanted flexibility to decommission gear as they move to the cloud without being locked into long-term agreements.”

HOW WE OPTIMIZED IT

With Park Place Technologies, the CIO found a company that could provide the hardware maintenance and operating system support required. This was critically important to the CIO because the company did not want to consider any vendor other than HP.

They were originally not open to the idea of a Third Party Maintenance provider, preferring the support of the OEM. Our Enterprise Account Manager knew that Park Place could meet the mixed SLA requirements of the client’s multiple global manufacturing sites in 50 different countries and could address the technical requirements of these mission critical systems, through Park Place’s on-site field engineers, Advanced Engineering Team, and a dedicated Service Delivery Manager.

Park Place could also provide the CIO with the contract flexibilities he required. The CIO knew, with his timetable to migrate to the Cloud, he couldn’t be locked into a long-term contract with penalties for early termination or asset removals. “They wanted the ability to have an annual contract, but make changes on a monthly basis,” PPT’s Account Manager shared. “They wanted flexibility to decommission gear as they move to the cloud without being locked into long-term agreements.

RESULTS

How Park Place is delivering:

One partner for global multi-vendor support
Exceptional service delivery and expertise on supporting HP Integrity servers, HP 3Par, EMC Data Domain, NetApp Filers, and HP9500s
Proactively monitoring
Dedicated Service Delivery Manager
HP–UX SW and operating system support and expertise
Competitive pricing
Flexible contract terms
Working through channel partner SHI International

Large North American Beverage Maker Extends Hardware Life

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 18:59:57 +0000

THE RELATIONSHIP

Park Place Technologies’ relationship with this multi-million-dollar beverage maker has a several-year history of server and storage management. The relationship of the Park Place account manager has been key in solidifying the expansion of services.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The partnership recently expanded when the company underwent an extensive reorganization. Its OEM proved inflexible for covering End of Life equipment, but the beverage maker knew it had many years left on its massive IT inventory, so it began to look for hardware support beyond what the OEM could offer.

HOW WE OPTIMIZED IT

Extended life of server and storage equipment well beyond what the inflexible OEM would offer
24/7/365 Global support
Access to global parts inventory
Service by an experienced team of engineers capable of maintaining a complex environment beyond what an in-house IT team could provide
30-40% in cost savings
Flexible Support Options based on SLAs
Short-Term Support not found with the OEM

In addition to its long-term server and storage contracts, the beverage maker is taking full advantage of Park Place’s ClearView offering. The ClearView Assessment projects potential costs savings for maintenance considering a number of key factors including the customer experience, the hardware’s place in the workflow, compliance issues and associated risks. It also provides an objective recommendation on which devices should:

Stay with OEM support
Which should be moved to Park Place Hardware Maintenance support
Which are good candidates for NetSure+ support, which leverages customer-owned and entitled spares purchased by the customer through Cisco’s authorized VAR channel (and are 100% compliant with Cisco policies).

The ClearView contract analyzer is helping the beverage maker determine its support strategies, minimize risks and maximize savings.

PARK PLACE TECHNOLOGIES

Park Place Technologies values the relationships we have with all of our partners. Park Place can provide you with a wealth of resources to help your business:

Access to our L3 engineers
Strengthened Professional Services portfolio
Central Park all-access portal and PPTech mobile app
A comprehensive portfolio of services and products:

NEXT STEPS

The beverage maker recognizes that more and more services are being automated, and while exploring and looking to add and develop automated services to their own portfolio, they are keen to explore Park Place’s portfolio of automated services and managed services.

The company is committed to further expanding its relationship with Park Place and increasing support synergies by implementing Managed Services and Park Place’s Professional Service offerings, which include:

Please contact us today to discover how we can be your global data center and networking optimization firm.

Procurement Foundry Webinar – IT Skills Gap Strategies

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 12:00:05 +0000

Kathy Lyons and Michael Nicholis of Park Place Technologies sit down with Michael Cadieux of Procurement Foundry to share insights on IT skills gap strategies to overcome the ever-widening gap in IT talent and organizational needs.

Learn how professional services for your data center can supplement growing IT skills demand.

Procurement Foundry Webinar – IT Procurement Strategies for Managing Tech Supply Chain Issues

Anthony Mastri — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 21:49:21 +0000

Sachi Thompson and Joe Spiewak of Park Place Technologies sit down with Michael Cadieux of Procurement Foundry to share insights on IT procurement strategies to overcome supply chain constraints.

Procurement Foundry Webinar – IT Infrastructure Cost Management Strategies

Anthony Mastri — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 21:45:13 +0000

Kathie Lyons and Michael Vedda of Park Place Technologies sit with Procurement Foundry’s Michael Cadieux to share insights on boosting IT infrastructure performance while maximizing your budget. Watch the video, then learn more about our IT infrastructure managed services today!

Ep. 6 – Mike Nicholis on Engaging Professional Services

Jack Kauter — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 16:12:16 +0000

Welcome to The Blue Couch Tech Sessions, our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place Technologies VP of Professional Services, Mike Nicholis, interviews IDC’s Leslie Rosenberg on best practices for engaging a Professional Services team for your data center.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

How to Build and Manage a Hybrid Cloud Environment [Webinar]

Anthony Mastri — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 15:46:04 +0000

Learn how to build and manage a hybrid cloud environment with Kathie Lyons and Jim Dowson from Park Place Technologies.

Hybrid clouds have become predominant at organizations large and small, but no two hybrid clouds are alike. Some include a simple on-premises environment and extensive use of public cloud services, while others are just the opposite. Some include large amounts of legacy equipment, others very little.

One thing remains the same for all hybrid clouds: the need to optimize the underlying infrastructure, whether through advanced enterprise network monitoring tools or managed IT infrastructure services, to achieve the fastest performance, greatest economy, and most efficient use of staff.

Central Park – Tool for Managing Data Center Maintenance and Monitoring

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 22:02:37 +0000

Learn how Central Park, from Park Place Technologies, makes managing data center maintenance and monitoring simple!

With Hubs for Tickets, Asset Management, Contract Management, Park Place Monitoring, User Management, Account Details, and Support Details – you can manage your data center support through a single pane of glass.

Women in Tech – STEM Program Announcement at CRN Festival

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 19:01:25 +0000

Learn how Park Place Technologies is empowering Women in Tech by supporting programs like Code Club, CoderDojo, I WISH, Girl Scouts of North East Ohio, and WPI to provide STEM opportunities for women across the world.

eBook: 7 Network Monitoring Use Cases

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 16:13:49 +0000

eBook Table of Contents

The Purpose of Network Monitoring – Preventing Network Downtime

How to prevent network downtime with these proactive tools.

7 Network Monitoring Use Cases

Network Device Discovery
Inventory Cataloguing
Resource Monitoring
… And four more!

Types of Network Monitoring Technologies

Explore the three types of network monitoring and how they differ

How to Simplify IT Infrastructure Management with Managed Services

Anthony Mastri — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 11:00:22 +0000

Managing digital infrastructures is becoming increasingly difficult all the time resulting in more partners and more tools to oversee, and higher costs – likely with less resources (staff and budget).

Companies are becoming more reliant on not just employees but outside resources to help augment their teams and ever-expanding digital transformation projects. According to Mordor Research, the managed services market will grow to $274 billion by 2026, up from $152 billion in 2020, lifted by many companies turning to MSPs to mitigate the impact of the pandemic in the past year.

There are over 150,000 Managed Service Providers operating around the world, covering a wide range of specific services to broad one-stop shops. How do you select the right provider? Does your provider operate as a consultant or are they purely focused on metric-driven results?

It’s time to think differently.

Join Park Place Technologies at this webinar to learn about:

The realities of IT infrastructure management today is More partners, more platforms, less people, less money

Make your IT more efficient and agile, irrespective of your environment (on-prem, off-prem or hybrid)

The Park Place Technologies approach to Infrastructure Managed Services:

Simplification of your support network through Maintenance and Managed Services
What’s the benefit of combining your hardware maintenance needs with a Managed Service Provider?

The Park Place Philosophy:

How we approach our service models
How we deliver with our Enterprise Operations Center

ParkView Hardware Monitoring™ – Halloween

Ryan Platten — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:00:16 +0000

With ParkView Hardware Monitoring from Park Place Technologies, hardware events are a lot less spooky.

Introducing Park Place Technologies’ Uptime Partner Portal and Program

Anthony Mastri — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 11:00:23 +0000

Living in a digital world, evolving technology to meet the needs of our partners and their customers is our #1 priority. Join the Park Place Channel leadership team as they unveil The Uptime Partner Program and Portal, Park Place Technologies’ first ever global partner framework. Designed with our partners in mind, this portal provides the information needed to maximize daily operations and profits in a single, easy-to-use platform.

What You’ll Learn:

How the Uptime Partner Program will facilitate more collaboration with Park Place
How to drive more profitability through key features such as deal registration and dashboard KPIs
How the portal can make doing business with Park Place easier and seamless
How our growing portfolio equips partners with choices to help their customers solve the toughest of IT challenges

In addition to reviewing the new Uptime Partner Program, we also provide a demonstration of the Uptime Partner Portal, covering key features such as deal registration, co-branding an asset, and dashboard functionality, all created to help our partners move up – up in sales, up in margin and up in opportunities.

Energy Company Receives Global Support and Savings

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 11:00:52 +0000

OVERVIEW

“We have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to the oil and gas industry, with our overriding vision being to enhance the performance of the world’s energy industry,” the company’s data manager said. “We provide quite a bit of support for the oil and gas industry around the world. Large companies depend on us to produce products and design processes for chemical plant separation facilities.”

With so much global service at stake, the firm cannot afford downtime in its data centers.

“We want a partner that can do the work that we have at hand and not have to have one vendor in this country, another vendor in that country, and always worry about who we are supposed to call when something breaks,” the data manager said. “Park Place gives us the opportunity to have one point of contact, one phone number to call, one portal to go in and submit a ticket, and in a very simplified means to get all of our traditional break/fix issues taken care of. In addition to global reach, Park Place provides us with significant cost savings.

“It’s really straightforward when it comes to the difference in cost of maintenance contracts for OEM support compared to the cost of Park Place support. I’d say pretty much in every case that we’ve had an opportunity to evaluate cost, we easily save 50 percent from the OEM cost, and in some cases, even more.”

CONVENIENCE AND SERVICE

Cost savings and global reach are important, but the data manager said an equally critical factor is the convenience and customer service Park Place offers.

“The onboarding process with Park Place is very simple. We have a great account team that takes care of us and anytime we need to bring new equipment into a support contract, all of those things happen really fast,” the data manager said. “Park Place is extremely flexible and gives us the opportunity to drive our own cost models for locations and assets. We have never had any bottlenecks or slowdowns from the Park Place team. The experience is consistent. The Park Place leadership team has been very thoughtful in how they’ve orchestrated the organization and has been very deliberate in making sure that every employee that works for Park Place understands their purpose and the importance of customer service. It really makes it very pleasant from a customer perspective. Every time we’ve had to interact with any member of the Park Place family, it’s the same, no matter what; we get the same level of experience, which is great.”

PARKVIEW’S SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

The firm utilizes ParkView Hardware Monitoring, which identifies hardware events, opens tickets and triages the issue.

“We’ve been using ParkView, predominantly supporting our storage subsystems with NetApp and EMC, our two dominant storage providers. ParkView is the proactive monitoring that gives us a single pane of glass for all of our systems that are under third party support,” the data manager said. “Park Place will notify us for issues with systems that are being monitored through ParkView. Generally, in those cases we find out about problems that we didn’t know about. No matter what mechanism we use, whether it’s through the online Central Park portal tickets, or admission escalations through our account management team, the support is always fast and very consistent.”

AN EVOLVING RELATIONSHIP

The data manager said if a peer was looking for a reference on third party maintenance, he would stress how Park Place is evolving to meet client needs.

“Park Place has been in a constant position of evolving over the time that we’ve been doing business, constantly looking at the areas they support, and have been expanding globally to make sure that they have complete coverage for all their customers across the globe,” he said. “Park Place has been very thoughtful and deliberate about continuing to grow what they do for the marketplace, things like additional monitoring tools and capabilities extending beyond traditional break/fix hardware, really moving into application dependencies, operating system support, any number of things that really help with the full life cycle of management and operation. They are moving way past third-party support and really focusing on discovery, monitoring and optimization in addition to the support components they currently offer.

“It’s been a fantastic opportunity for me to work with Park Place and to experience true customer service. So many companies today really give up on that and it’s great to see Park Place continue to keep customer service in the crosshairs. It is a pleasure to do business with Park Place.”

There’s Only One Place

Anthony Mastri — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 14:19:32 +0000

Learn why there’s only one place that makes managing your IT infrastructure more streamlined, seamless, simple – helping you turn chaos into order, and freeing time so you can think bigger.

Park Place Professional Services – Data Center Professional Services Providers

Anthony Mastri — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 16:10:13 +0000

Learn more about our data center professional services today!

NetSure+ at a Glance

Ryan Platten — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 17:08:02 +0000

Global 24/7 support of routing, switching, security, and wireless network devices including parts, labor, and remote technical support. Combine the benefits of Third-Party Maintenance (TPM) with Third-Party Logistics (3PL) of spares and replacement parts you own.

How DMSO Helps Park Place Partners

Ryan Platten — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 13:35:00 +0000

DMSO Eliminates Data Center Outages in a Changing Landscape

Ryan Platten — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 13:33:20 +0000

Global adversity has forced organizations to adjust IT strategies to ensure business moves forward and productivity remains at a high level, while preventing interruptions. Doing so takes a significant amount of work in a short period of time, and it forces many businesses to consider if it makes financial sense to upgrade their data centers. This trend doesn’t show any signs of stopping, and data center managers will need to further pivot to stay ahead of the curve and ensure their businesses are not negatively affected by service disruptions or a lack of visibility across the system.

Overall, the data center market should increase by nearly 14 percent in 2021, according to ABB’s report “Data Overload: Powering Data Centers in the New Normal.” This rebound makes sense when you consider how the pandemic impacted businesses in 2020 and the further, gradual push to switch to cloud compute and storage. However, despite the adjustments made in the past year,
there are differing opinions on how to deal with increased data use and a potential space crunch in the physical data center.

Specifically, 53 percent of data center managers noted they would consider upgrading their power system, while 49 percent would consider creating more data center space to meet the increasing demand for data. This isn’t a surprise, as 96 percent of those surveyed noted they experienced an increase in data center demand during 2020.

APAC: Next Gen Data Centre Maintenance: All You Need to Know

Ryan Platten — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 16:00:11 +0000

As businesses evolve, so does the demands on the technology and IT we use in our infrastructure – they need to be efficient, resilient and agile to meet the demands of today’s fast paced world.

With IT infrastructures being critical to business operations, you need to be confident that your IT is fit for purpose, and in the event of system downtime, that you are up and running as fast as possible, which is why your maintenance strategy is a crucial component of your overall IT strategy.

When the OEM warranty on your storage, server and networking hardware expires, what option do you take?

Do you extend the warranty for one year, accepting the OEM price hike for support?
Or do you refresh the hardware, despite knowing that your existing hardware could be supported for many years, even beyond End of Service Life (EOSL)?
Do you leave your IT hardware unsupported, taking the risk that your own internal team may be able to resolve any issues?

What if there was a different way, a next-gen alternative to the usual traditional maintenance routes for your IT?

In this webinar we’ll let you know how you can do IT maintenance for storage, servers and networking hardware, differently with Park Place Technologies. You’ll learn:

How you can use third-party maintenance as part of a strategic approach to making your IT more efficient and agile, irrespective of your IT environment.
How maintenance for your storage, servers and networking hardware can be monitored and automated, leaving you with one less task to think about.
How we have helped customers make strategic value-added decisions on their IT maintenance and how they have benefitted.
About our First-Time Fix Guarantee, giving you peace of mind, that we’ll fix your hardware right the first time – guaranteed!

Network Monitoring Tools – Why You Need Them and How to Choose the Right Tool

Ryan Platten — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 15:58:10 +0000

For all businesses, making certain that the network is up, running, and supporting business services is beyond necessary – it’s the enabler of daily operations, from the productivity of staff to customer service. Employees and customers must have access to services, efficiency, and overall quality. This is especially relevant in today’s remote work-dominated environment, largely brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, every business needs tools that provide network status and keep services operating while ensuring sufficient capacity.

Choosing a network monitoring solution is an individualized process depending on your business needs, but the goal is the same: delivering a centralized, unified view of network services operations. Your network admins should be able to see the detailed activities of network operations from a holistic viewpoint and use a unified method for identifying anomalous events.

This webinar will cover the importance of Network Monitoring investment, the primary types of solutions in the market, important features, and how to prepare for the buying process:

Why Invest in Network Monitoring?
The Network Monitoring Market: Three Primary Types of Solutions
Network Monitoring Features Admins Can’t Do Without
How to Choose a Network Monitoring Tool

APAC: Empowering our Partners to Do More

Ryan Platten — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 15:56:15 +0000

Collaborate more – Learn about our partner vision and service strategy, all aimed at enhancing partner alliances and collaborations with all of our partners

Sell more – Get a refresher on the depth of data centre hardware maintenance services we provide globally, while also gaining an insight and overview of our newest DMSO services including ParkView Server Management and ParkView Network Management.

Differentiate more – Industry-first innovations including our First-Time Fix Guarantee on data centre hardware maintenance make your offering stand out from the crowd

Profit more – Park Place Technologies offers our partners strong front-end margin and deal registration protection to support your investment in business development.

Benefit more – We’re thrilled to announce our new partner program developed specifically to enable and reward partners for their collaboration and customer advocacy. Partners will be able to access the partner program via our new partner portal.

EMEA: Next Gen Data Centre Maintenance: New strategies for today’s world

Ryan Platten — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 15:54:11 +0000

As businesses evolve, so does the demands on the technology and IT we use in our infrastructure – they need to be efficient, resilient and agile to meet the demands of today’s fast paced world.

When the OEM warranty on your storage, server and networking hardware expires, what option do you take?

Do you extend the warranty for one year, accepting the OEM price hike for support?
Or do you refresh the hardware, despite knowing that your existing hardware could be supported for many years, even beyond End of Service Life (EOSL)?
Do you leave your IT hardware unsupported, taking the risk that your own internal team may be able to resolve any issues?

What if there was a different way, a next-gen alternative to the usual traditional maintenance routes for your IT?

In this webinar we’ll let you know how you can do maintenance differently with Park Place Technologies. You’ll learn:

How you can use third-party maintenance as part of a strategic approach to making your IT more efficient and agile, irrespective of your IT environment.
How maintenance can be monitored and automated, leaving you with one less task to think about.
How we have helped customers make strategic value-added decisions on their IT maintenance and how they have benefitted.
About our First-Time Fix Guarantee, giving you peace of mind, that we’ll fix your hardware right the first time – guaranteed!

Optimizing Federal Data Centers through Third-Party Maintenance Providers

Ryan Platten — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 18:34:32 +0000

“According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies reported that they operated 432 data centers in 1998, 2,094 in July 2010, 5,607 in August 2016, and 5,916 in August 2018. Operating such a large number of centers has been, and continues to be, a significant cost to federal agencies.”

The Big Issue:

Federal Data Centers (FDCs) are essential to the day-to-day operations of Federal agencies and are in need of optimization. Optimization efforts can reduce operational costs and increase efficiency, saving taxpayer dollars and improving service delivery.

Why it Matters:

Efficient and effective operation of FDCs has never been more important. With remote work becoming the norm for many Federal employees, proper management of FDCs is critical. By considering third party IT hardware support for government agencies for FDC management, Federal agencies could see long-term savings. One such opportunity is Third-Party Maintenance (TPM).

Ep. 5 – John Parlee on IT Security Teams Combatting Hackers

Jack Kauter — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:58:01 +0000

Welcome to The Blue Couch Tech Sessions, our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place Technologies’ Chief Information Security Officer John Parlee, interviews IDC’s Christina Richmond on the latest strategies that organizations and their IT security teams need to be aware of, to battle the increasing threat of hackers.

Listen to our previous episode here, or view our whole podcast series using your preferred channel below.

Park Place Technologies Overview

Ryan Platten — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 14:32:46 +0000

Managing your digital infrastructure has never been more challenging. It’s a seemingly never-ending cycle of being asked to do more with less.

To get ahead, you need an IT partner that’s thinking ahead.
You need a partner who saves you money and valuable time.
A partner who doesn’t just tell you something’s wrong, they tell you what’s wrong – and tells you help is on the way.
A partner who doesn’t just promise a first-time fix but guarantees it.
A partner with a roadmap of innovations designed to maximize your budget, agility and productivity.

Download our resource to learn why there is only one Place – Park Place Technologies.

Ep. 4 – CMO Jennifer Deutsch – Impact of Global STEM Initiatives on Tech

Jack Kauter — Wed, 26 May 2021 10:52:27 +0000

Welcome back to The Blue Couch Tech Sessions, our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, Park Place Technologies Chief Marketing Officer Jennifer Deutsch engages I Wish Co-Founder Caroline O’ Driscoll for a conversation on global STEM initiatives and its impact on IT and tech.

Network Monitoring: The key to Establishing Data Center Visibility and Embracing New Technologies

Ryan Platten — Tue, 25 May 2021 16:37:36 +0000

Table of Contents:

Evolution of IT and the Inception of New Technologies

Historical IT Impacts to the Modern Corporation
What Digital Transformation Really Means Today
Network Impacts of the Primary Game-Changing Technologies in IT

Implications to the Construct and Boundaries of the Traditional Data Center

Innovation Challenged the Traditional Data Center
Data Center Perimeters Fell, and IT Islands Formed
The Modern Data Center Network Emerged: Software-Defined,

Hyperconverged, and Automated

How Network Monitoring Gives IT the Power to Embrace Innovation
A New Network Introduces New Challenges to Analysts and Administrators
Network Monitoring Creates the Path for New Tech

Build the IT Backbone of Tomorrow with Third Party Maintenance

Ryan Platten — Fri, 07 May 2021 17:10:07 +0000

When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed federal entities to reprioritize and adapt to a remote workforce, IT teams had to shelve current projects and initiatives to accommodate a virtual environment. A year later, agencies are adjusting to a hybrid model and readying themselves for even skinnier budgets as they seek efficiency in data center management and consolidation for the future.

Download the “Build the IT Backbone of Tomorrow with Third Party Maintenance” whitepaper to learn how third party maintenance can help your organization stay a step ahead.

How Network Monitoring Enables Uptime and a Healthy Data Center

Ryan Platten — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 02:05:09 +0000

Table of Contents:

The modern data center of today

IT goes from supporting the business to being the business
Technology outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic

Causes and consequences of downtime in today’s digitally-driven business climate

The simple mistakes that lead to downtime
Prices to pay for service interruptions

Why every business needs network monitoring

Increasing complexity in the data center means increasing complexity on the network
How network monitoring converts reactivity into proactivity

Protecting the health of the data center with network monitoring

SmartCulture Honoree Video – 2021

Ryan Platten — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 20:08:34 +0000

For the third consecutive year, Park Place Technologies has been recognized by the NE Ohio SmartCulture awards. Watch Park Place’s honoree video below.

In 2020, Park Place President and CEO Chris Adams was named a SmartCulture Deal Maker for guiding Park Place through its recent acquisitions.

Park Place was recognized as one of 25 honorees at The SmartCulture Conference and was featured in a special editorial report in the April edition of Smart Business Cleveland. Other honorees include Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Cavaliers and Cleveland Metroparks.

ParkView Network Management™ Overview

Ryan Platten — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 19:53:10 +0000

ParkView Network Management brings the tools and expertise to deliver exceptional performance, visibility and intelligence to manage your network in today’s changing IT environment. Watch our video overview to learn more about our network management services:

Whether you’re interested in managed services or standalone enterprise network management software, there’ only one Place that offers it all!

Strategic Options for Federal Data Center Hardware Maintenance

Ryan Platten — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 21:05:12 +0000

COVID-19 has impacted the federal government and its approach to technology for years to come. Infrastructure managers face significant budget pressures, have stretched thin teams, work remotely and deal with travel restrictions. With a new President and agenda, priorities will change even further to bring to life campaign promises. At the same time, infrastructure teams ensure they are keeping the lights on with existing equipment.

Federal government infrastructure managers need to find ongoing cost savings and free up time to work on high priority initiatives. Now is a great time to consider utilizing a third-party maintenance (TPM) provider. TPMs provide support programs for top tier OEMs and are vendor agnostic. Infrastructure managers can take advantage of cost savings of up to 30-40% while working with only one partner focused on keeping your data centers up and running. TPMs provide hardware monitoring across the federal department’s infrastructure with automated issue detection combined with actionable insights so appropriate action can be taken.

TPMs already provide third party government IT support to many federal government agencies and departments. Federal infrastructure managers should look for TPMs with significant experience across departments and operations wherever you need them in the U.S. or globally. Locate a TPM with an existing GSA contract in place for required MSA schedules to ensure excellent communication and pricing right away. They should also be FAR compliant and have necessary security clearances in place.

Ep. 3 – AIOps: The ‘Angry Teenager’ of Tech

Ryan Platten — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 10:05:01 +0000

Welcome back to The Blue Couch Tech Sessions, our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, “AIOps: The ‘Angry Teenager’ of Tech”, Park Place Technologies EVP/GM, Kathie Lyons, and Paul Bevan, Research Director of IT Infrastructure at Bloor, discuss AIOps and its increasing influence in IT operations.

Third Party Maintenance Overview Video

Ryan Platten — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:07:04 +0000

What is third party data center maintenance? Watch the video below to learn more about Park Place Technologies global Third Party Maintenance support services.

Evaluation Guide: How to Choose a Network Monitoring Tool

Ryan Platten — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:41:00 +0000

White Paper Table of Contents

Why invest in network monitoring? Benefits in a risk-laden, customer-first business environment

The network monitoring market: Three primary types of solutions

Traditional network monitoring
Flow analysis tools
Application dependency mapping and application performance tools

Network monitoring features admins can’t do without

How can an organization decide which type is right for their needs?

Preparing for the buying process: How to choose a network monitoring tool

Network monitoring solution checklist

Is Automated IT Asset Discovery the Key to Solving IT Infrastructure Chaos?

Ryan Platten — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 14:48:21 +0000

What you’ll learn:

The challenge created by the ever-increasing scope and complexity of IT environments
The 5 benefits of an automated IT asset discovery process

ParkView Server Management™ Overview

Ryan Platten — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 16:32:53 +0000

Watch below to learn more about ParkView Server Management, our comprehensive server managed services.

Ep. 2 – A CEO Perspective: Navigating COVID-19 and Priorities for 2021

Ryan Platten — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 16:03:53 +0000

Welcome back to The Blue Couch Tech Sessions, our podcast series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

In this episode, “A CEO Perspective: Navigating COVID-19 and Priorities for 2021”, Park Place Technologies Global VP of Channel, Jeff McCullough, and Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company, discuss how IT companies adjusted to the challenges presented by COVID-19.

Go Global – Park Place Technologies

Ryan Platten — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 01:43:48 +0000

As the leading third-party maintenance provider, Park Place Technologies offers exceptional global service for data center server, storage and network hardware with 21,500+ customers in 154+ countries across the world.

Park Place Company Culture

Ryan Platten — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 19:02:11 +0000

Entuity

Ryan Platten — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 18:58:50 +0000

Manage your network, your way, with Entuity network monitoring software. With features like network topology mapping, network discovery, application path monitoring, and more, this all-in-one tool gives you full visibility into your network.

Park Place Discovery™ Overview

Ryan Platten — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 18:55:31 +0000

Driving Success and Innovation Through CX – IPSOS

Ryan Platten — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:35:05 +0000

The key to success of any service-led organization is the service they provide to their customers, and the investment they make in ensuring their customers have the best available customer experience (CX).

Join below to hear from leading CX and industry experts about why the customer journey and engagement are so important, and find out about the innovations Park Place Technologies are making to ensure they are continuously optimizing the CX for their customers.

Key takeaways from this webinar:

CX industry best practice and how it could impact your organization
Importance of customer journey and engagement – why it’s important for customers and why it’s important for businesses
How Park Place Technologies is enhancing CX for their customers through innovation and technology

First-Time-Fix™ Guarantee

Ryan Platten — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 11:08:56 +0000

With our new First-Time Fix Guarantee, if we don’t resolve your storage, server or network hardware issue on the first visit, we’ll credit you for one month of maintenance (and monitoring if applicable) on that device. It’s that simple.

Ep. 1 – The Future Is Edge – Preparing for Explosive Growth

Ryan Platten — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 17:13:18 +0000

Introducing The Blue Couch Tech Sessions. A new series featuring Park Place leaders, customers, partners and industry analysts discussing the latest trends in IT.

The first episode below, “The Future is Edge,” explores the explosive growth forecasted in edge devices, including 5G and IoT applications, and how IT leaders can prepare.

Entuity™ Webinar

Ryan Platten — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:42:16 +0000

We built Park Place Technologies on the promise of Uptime and our ability to efficiently keep server, storage and networking equipment running smoothly for our customers so their businesses also keep running. That is the baseline that our customers expect from us. Our approach to maintenance and support is second-to-none, which means our customers spend less time thinking about their data center equipment and more time thinking about their business.

In This Webinar You Will Learn How:

Our commitment to innovation can help you achieve your transformation goals
Your organization’s relationship with Park Place will strengthen as your digital transformation moves ahead
Entuity is helping enterprises of all sizes support both their digital transformation and business goals.

DMSO Webinar

Ryan Platten — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:37:41 +0000

Today’s enterprise data center must handle more requirements than ever before, with the IT infrastructure connecting distributed ecosystems of employees, partners, and suppliers. With this complexity comes the need for technology and services to ensure high availability and optimal performance of the IT delivery infrastructure.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

How increasingly complicated IT infrastructures are driving the need for new and different types of outsourced support
The latest trends in how companies are evaluating support providers
How DMSO (a new IT services model) is taking over much of the “heavy lifting,” allowing IT leaders to focus more on the big picture (e.g. digital transformation)

ParkView Discovery™ Webinar

Ryan Platten — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:26:29 +0000

Automating your IT asset discovery process can help you avoid change management surprises and better manage your costs. Watch our webinar to learn how.

This webinar covers the 5 key benefits of automating your IT asset discovery process – and how to do it:

Save time by knowing what IT assets are in your estate
Reduce risk by knowing which assets support which apps
Maximize resource use by matching costs to business need
Maximize your options by having accurate and timely data
Save CMDB operational expense with ParkView Discovery

DMSO | Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize

Ryan Platten — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 20:52:50 +0000

Maintaining and supporting data center equipment is business-critical. Hardware incidents and failures threaten your business operations – and your bottom line.

But data centers – and the concept of infrastructure – continue to evolve radically as businesses move to implement digital transformation in its many forms. The data that businesses now depend upon lives on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge, on networks and operations centers that can span the globe.

In turn, digital infrastructures of today – physical and virtual – require a new approach to maintenance and support. One that is more strategic, and prioritizes cost-efficiency, agility and insights through automation and analytics.

A service model that delivers a simplified view to Discover, Monitor, Support and Optimize.

Park Place Sales Career Opportunities

Ryan Platten — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 20:35:04 +0000

ParkView Hardware Monitoring™ Overview

Ryan Platten — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 20:32:39 +0000

Sheffield Hallam University Delivers Innovation and Community Success

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 01:27:35 +0000

Overview
Sheffield Hallam University was founded in 1843 and strives to be one of the world’s leading applied universities. The University has continually grown to support students in a variety of majors. From design, art and education to science, technology, engineering and a business school; over 50,000 students today are taking advantage of a university steeped in tradition that also has a futuristic outlook in preparing them for successful and rewarding careers upon graduation.

Supporting the student community and its 5,000 staff members, spread over two campuses, the Sheffield Hallam IT department is also forward thinking in its strategic plans to ensure that its technology platform can evolve and function at its best. Higher education today is no longer bound to a physical campus which makes the IT department a critical component, providing the network performance to support the changing education process.

University Details :

50,000+ students
5,000 staff members

Network Management Software:

Entuity Network Analytics

Entuity Customer Since:

November 2000

The Challenge
The University wanted to streamline its network management from a complex, expensive management solution to an all-in-one, easy to use and less costly software product. Their requirements also necessitated providing for legacy device management as well as new technologies that will keep the University on the cutting edge. As the University has expanded, it was also vital to reduce the risk of service outages so that students and staff could expect and rely on a digital environment to meet their online learning needs 24/7.

The Solution
To deliver outstanding student and staff user experiences, the Sheffield Hallam University IT Organization chose Entuity Network Analytics (ENA) — a flexible, all-in-one product that reduces the risk of downtime, keeps up with new technologies and lowers the cost of ownership. In addition, the ease of use and enterprise scalability of ENA makes it ideal for multi-campus deployments.

The Results
Always-on University Services Powered by Proactive Monitoring
The SHU network team continually shows the ENA Event View on their NOC dashboard screen. Both the network team and operations team have access which facilitates complete 24/7 management coverage for any network issues. Proactive monitoring is woven into ENA and is set up for key personnel to receive automatic email notifications when issues arise. This helps supply fast insight for faster resolution, a must for supporting round the clock, always-on students.

Richard Lester, one of the network engineers at Sheffield Hallam, uses events monitoring to track new devices that are added to the network. Richard said, “I find it extremely useful for monitoring the ports on switches. It gives me visibility to see if we’ve got any outages that need to be looked at. In fact, we’ve set up configuration rules for some problematic switches, so when they are disabled, they automatically go straight back up. And we can tell which ones and how often they are performing erratically using ENA.” These analytics provide accurate data to help them make the best decision–does it makes sense to pull out and replace poor performing switches or does it mean only further adjustments have to be made to make the switches operate effectively. Without key analytics the decision making process is a haphazard guess and is detrimental to all of IT.

New Equipment Rollouts with Zero impact on University Services
Entuity Network Analytics is able to aid in capacity planning for SHU for their rollout of new switches being deployed in new classrooms and labs. According to Lester, “Entuity has been valuable in helping us implement these new rollouts minimizing the risk of poor performance. I get reports on how many licenses are in use, how the switches are performing, all of which ensure our constituents are not adversely impacted.” Once the switches are live, further adjustments can be made to fine-tune devices to make the most of Sheffield Hallam’s investment in new capital equipment.

Custom Reports support University senior management and departments
Like most departments, transparency is important and being able to generate IT reports for internal University requests is essential. “For example, Senior Management requires network asset lists for budgeting and asset management, and a custom ENA report can generate these details automatically for us,” states Lester. “We know the data is accurate, and the report takes minutes to run which allows the report to be sent almost as soon as they request it.”

Another report they use consistently is a CRC report, which illustrates where there is packet loss creating poor performance. Prior to ENA, it needed drawn out, manual effort to understand what was causing this issue and to pinpoint where it was. Today, SHU runs a report to see where CRC errors are occurring on the network, this shows the area to address. “It’s often a case where fiber cables need to be replaced or traffic is moved to another switch. I look at this report weekly and can get advance visibility to head off problems before any staff members complain of network slowness.” This type of proactive management is vital in preserving network service levels for exceptional end-user performance throughout their multiple campuses.

Maximizing IT staff’s productivity and increasing network analytics accuracy
Automation of network management has two main outcomes – it removes the burden of tasks and workloads from the IT staff, so they can become more innovative, and it increases the accuracy of their network data. “Before ENA was in use, network topology maps were done manually. This runs the risk of inadvertent bad data or missed devices completely, plus the network is not static—it’s always changing. Now using Auto-Discovery in ENA, I can schedule it to run automatically every few months. It saves me lots of time and I’ve even caught rogue switches that were added to the network without our knowledge, which can increase the potential of derailing performance,” describes Lester. Networks are complex, and the SHU IT staff rely on ENA to provide the analytics to make better decisions that move network performance to outstanding levels.

Solving IP traffic gridlock & understanding its impact on network services using
ENA NetFlow
ENA NetFlow capabilities allow Sheffield Hallam’s IT team to see if network IP traffic is congested, where the traffic is coming from and going to, and how much traffic is being generated. Supporting today’s network with its critical IP applications such as VoIP and Video Conferencing, NetFlow’s analytics assist in understanding where performance issues lie. NetFlow analytics shape future network plans, isolate security issues, offers “denial of service” monitoring, and usage-based network billing. It is capable of providing information about network users and applications, peak usage times and performance data. As SHU expands its network, they are looking to make extensive use of Entuity Network Analytics and ENA NetFlow giving them even more insight for Capacity and Availability planning processes.

Future projects on the horizon for Sheffield Hallam
“We just pulled out of all our analog phones and replaced the entire system with VoIP service,” states Lester. This is a big project to integrate voice usage into the network. In the future, the IT Team hopes to add wireless management into ENA and get even more value from the product. VoIP requires specialized metrics to track voice jitter and traffic patterns to ensure voice quality is equal to the land line phones that were replaced. SHU also will have to monitor bandwidth to make certain that enough capacity/headroom is available to accommodate the two campus’ voice calls. “ENA is going to continue to equip us with valuable techniques for new technologies that will keep Sheffield Hallam on the forefront of IT technology. We will be prepared to support our students and faculty in their academic careers in the years to come.”

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Putting a Different Spin on Network Management

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 05:24:08 +0000

Overview
Headquartered in Denmark, Grundfos Pumps is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of water pumps and water systems for both commercial and home use. With over 40 manufacturing sites around the globe that produce more than 16 million pump units a year and 265 offices being managed by Entuity in 65 countries, ensuring optimum network services for their 18,000 employees is a massive undertaking. A network this large requires solid IT process and management strategies to ensure that the network itself is tuned properly for all of the services being run on it.

Grundfos Details :

18,000+ employees
4,500 network devices

Network Management Software:

Entuity Network Analytics

Entuity Customer Since:

September 2010

Configuration Management Adds a Unique Perspective for Managing Grundfos’ Global Network
Managing 4,500 varied devices takes a lot of best practice strategies and consistency in order for the whole network to work efficiently. From firewalls, routers, and UPS devices; to virtual routers and even air conditioners; keeping tabs on how they are all performing is just half of the story. The Grundfos IT team needed a way to streamline and automate their configuration management process for all these devices. It was taking too much manual time to set up the parameters and then each IT team member was using their own configuration rules based on their own expertise. This individual style of configuration provisioning led to varied discrepancies. They realized that better performance and effective management could be achieved if everyone followed the same set of configuration rules.

Fred Wiest, Network Engineer and Global Network Architect at Grundfos, developed a set of configuration best practices for each device type and then using Entuity’s network management software, automated the entire process. “ENA’s Configuration Management functionality offers us extensive capabilities to really simplify configuring our network.” Using the Configuration Management Module not only automates the configuration process, but it provides swift detection and understanding of any configuration changes that are made. It automates enforcement of configuration best practices across their global network. “We are a lot more efficient in handling new roll out deployments and can see any changes immediately before it impacts performance,” states Fred. “For example, we can set up a virtual router in Azure in less than 5 minutes. We configure SNMP, add it to ENA, hit a button and the router is automatically configured to our specifications in the Azure cloud.”

In addition, ENA has also been helpful in another part of the device management lifecycle—software upgrades, an IOS, or an HP system upgrade. Grundfos has automated the process of upgrades for switches, routers, firewalls, etc. There is a script that runs the upgrade and if there’s not enough space for the image, it will automatically clean up enough storage space, delete the old images and download the new image. This automated process for release upgrades doesn’t stop there, the configuration script starts the proper boot command and goes immediately into a reboot—the whole process is handled by ENA and saves so much staff time tending to these mundane but necessary tasks that never seem to be consistently taken care of. Keeping devices up to date with their latest software revision has never been easier and timely—this is especially indispensable for security purposes when relying on firewall devices that should be 100% current.

Service Monitoring – A Better Way to Deliver Services to End-Users
Grundfos is in the process of migrating from a legacy phone system to a Microsoft Skype for Business VoIP communications platform. And the goal here is to create a phone system that performs as well as the previous system providing an excellent user experience. VoIP requires management of bandwidth utilization availability to facilitate first-rate phone quality. Grundfos has set up a Service Monitoring View that monitors IP-SLA metrics and will alert automatically if there is an issue. Service Monitoring allows for a faster diagnosis and problem remediation because it focuses on only parts of the network that the VoIP traffic travels on. Now, they can easily monitor the quality of the calls around any particular region with custom views. “In particular, we automatically watch for voice payload fluctuations and call signaling issues that will impact a user’s voice/phone quality,” said Wiest. “Alerts are sent when thresholds are exceeded and then we can make immediate adjustments reducing the potential for poor voice quality.” Service Monitoring delivers operational efficiency because it is very specific in terms of what is being monitored. Grundfos IT engineers spend less time searching for root cause and more time rectifying the issue which lessens the amount of outage time on a service or application. This, of course, lends itself to high end-user satisfaction and keeps the business running smoothly.

Far-reaching Visibility and Extensibility Enhance End-to-end Management
Entuity Network Analytics’ flexibility and extensibility brings to network managers more valuable data by including a range of management capabilities for non-network products. It provides a more thorough look at what could be altering services. For instance, Grundfos adds several different brands of Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) to ENA to monitor. “We do custom polling to these UPS systems that are specific to each vendor—how many batteries are still active, what is the battery life available, etc. It is another way to eliminate the unknown with accurate data to make intelligent decisions on when to replace batteries before they die.” In the event of a power outage, an e-mail is sent to the operations team when the number of minutes of battery life goes below a given threshold.

Fred also reports, “Even our air conditioners are now being monitored—for temperature, humidity, or whether the compressor is running. It is really helpful for us to keep an eye on offices or data centers that are in warmer climates.” It has been instrumental in ensuring correct temperatures are being maintained and this data has been utilized to avert literal meltdowns of devices. Extensibility results in extending management capabilities beyond traditional network devices. Accommodating more diverse products that can be put under management allows ENA to deliver even more data and visibility for Grundfos to make better decisions and keep services running optimally.

Grundfos Results

ENA meets Grundfos’ changing network requirements to support expansion and enables them to remain competitive as the leading pump manufacturer in the world.
Adds consistency for configuration management parameters, improves processes, streamlines and reduces the time needed to deploy new devices.
Provides better visibility for individual services lowering the time it takes to resolve any issues ensuring outstanding end-user experiences.
Delivers accurate, customized insights to drive better decisions, appropriate responses and actions.

Sustaining a Fluid Flow for the Future
Grundfos leverages Entuity Network Analytics to improve processes and services rather than simply focusing on device management. “We look to Entuity as our partner in understanding the many ways Grundfos can take advantage of ENA to make our job easier and more refined,” states Fred. “We always need to be looking ahead while at the same time continue to offer reliable end-user services. It is a fine line to follow, but with better insight into our network we can remain the leader in the marketplace.” Grundfos is migrating to the cloud and will continue to add more digital applications like the expansion of VoIP company wide. Keeping a fluid flow of water is what they offer to the world; internally, Grundfos IT keeps a fluid flow of technology moving to their employees that maintains their corporate success.

Continue browsing our site for more information on Entuity Software or Park Place network management services.

Mellanox Technologies Chooses Entuity for a New Level of Network Insights and Management

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 01:17:32 +0000

Overview
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and Yokneam, Israel, Mellanox was founded in 1999 and is a leading developer/manufacturer of sophisticated end-to-end networking technologies, including adapters, switches, and cables. Mellanox knows the value of operational efficiency as their products are designed to provide the highest throughput and lowest latency delivering data faster to applications for unparalleled performance. As demand grew for their products, keeping the expanding Mellanox global network operating efficiently was becoming challenging. The Mellanox IT organization realized that their original set of distinct network management tools was not answering all their needs going forward.

Company Details:

1,900+ Employees

Global Network

12+ countries supported
25+ facilities including office buildings, laboratories and fabrication centers

Network Management Software

Entuity Network Management for BMC TrueSight Operations Management

Business Expansion Requires Reliable Network Performance
Preparing for the future Mellanox needed to guarantee an improved end-user experience and acquire a network management solution flexible enough to easily support their expanding global enterprise with network devices located in various locations: production networks, labs, offices and manufacturing sites. Other key areas that were necessary for the new network management system included:

Eliminating network downtime which led to poor productivity
Proactively preventing networking events before they escalated into real issues
Optimizing network performance through a deeper visibility into the network and its devices

What does it take to run a global company’s network
An extensive evaluation program was set up to fully explore which network management solution would best fit Mellanox. It was determined that after five products were tested–a large legacy platform, an unitegrated NMS solution, a vendor specific application, an MRTG analyzer and Entuity, Entuity network management expertly met all the prerequisites set by the IT organization.

With an all-in-one, integrated design, Entuity equipped Mellanox with the capabilities necessary to effectively manage over 1500 of their network devices to achieve their goals. For example, IT can now easily keep track of network devices’ keys measurements status (CPU utilization, latency, average SNMP response, reachability metrics/history) for maintaining high levels of performance. This visibility allows early detection of problematic areas for proactive resolution.

Additional metrics are now being used to measure real-time port utilization data, as well as, generating automatic reports that compare the data over time for accurate analysis. This information illustrates where and when there are bottlenecks and can also help effectively build out their network as the company grows.
An accurate representation of the network was also a vital requirement. Entuity’s continual, auto-discovery feature keeps their topology maps up to-to-date, with little to no effort from the IT team. Mellanox, as you might imagine, uses their own switches on their network and Entuity quickly added them to the products supported device list so that all Mellanox switches were immediately able to be taken under management. “Real-time topology maps have been very effective for us to understand were and how dependencies are found. This of course makes our job easier when it comes to responding and resolving events and has reduced the time spent searching for root cause details by almost 30%,” states Maor Amar, Network Engineer at Mellanox.

Why Entuity
“We considered a number of alternatives to improve our management of the Mellanox network. The test evaluations clearly showed that Entuity Network Management would best meet our requirements for enhanced network management, reporting capabilities, vendor support, unlimited scalability and enterprise-class functionality.”- Maor Amar, Network Engineer at Mellanox.

Business Benefits
As the IT team became more familiar with The Entuity product, it was apparent that standardizing on an all-in-one network management solution delivers operational excellence through:

Reduction of staff time spent managing the software increasing operational efficiency (no more data silos or multiple products to manage separately)
Outage and risk reduction for improving end-user productivity
Proactive Management for superior network performance
Better control of OpEx/CapEx expenditures
Improved network visibility allowing for efficiency and effectiveness of managing constantly evolving and growing network infrastructure
Lowers TCO and increases ROI–a streamlined automated solution reduces incidents, data inac -curacies outages and associated costs

“Mellanox can now effortlessly plan and enable future growth of our network and IT services. We will continue to capitalize on Entuity’s expertise in managing heterogeneous networks to optimize out IT infrastructure and provide outstanding application performance of our entire organization,” states Maor. “We re pleased with the results to date and look forward to taking advantage of more specialized capabilities within Entuity in the coming months.”

Bank Vontobel Chooses Entuity to Manage Global Network

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 01:15:16 +0000

Overview
As a globally operating financial expert with Swiss roots, Vontobel specializes in wealth management, active asset management and investment solutions. We empower our colleagues to take ownership of their work and bring opportunities to life. Because we are convinced that successful investing starts with assuming personal responsibility. We relentlessly question the achieved, striving to exceed the goals and expectations of our clients.

Company Highlights

Company Size: 2,100 employees
Global Network: 26 offices
Network Management Software: Entuity network management

The Challenge—Meeting Expanding Business Needs
Managing its network effectively is key for any organization, but when you are a global investment bank it becomes a much bigger issue. Delivery of critical IT services and reliable uptime are a necessity for a financial institution. The Bank Vontobel IT department realized that to fully support the continued growth of the bank a few areas needed to be addressed:

Bank Vontobel analysts were relying on more and more financial data to research investment strategies. A fast turnaround receiving this financial data to the end-user was imperative for them to remain competitive in the marketplace.
Existing network management tools were not integrated, which hampered rapid network resolution.
Proactive management was required to view potential issues before they became a problem to minimize network outages.

Smart Investing for the Future
The IT team implemented a trial version of Entuity Network Management arranged and managed by their IT supplier, ITConcepts, an authorized Entuity Partner headquartered in Switzerland. Bank Vontobel found it extremely easy to use, unlike their cumbersome multi-product, network management tool set. With the trial a success, Bank Vontobel chose Entuity to manage their global network. When banks experience network outages, the old adage “time is money” hits home very hard and very fast. Because minimizing downtime was a key requirement for Bank Vontobel, Entuity’s capability to proactively manage the network was an important factor in their decision to roll out the solution.

Through its real-time monitoring of network devices, the Bank Vontobel IT staff detects, isolates and troubleshoots problems before they impact services to their end-users. This ultimately protects the bank’s revenues and ensures a higher quality of service delivery.

Various out-of-the-box reports add to the ease and accuracy of managing their network. The bank takes full advantage of these reports by placing them in Entuity custom dashboards, which they display on a big screen TV in the network operations center. The dashboards include the TopN Summary Report and an Events Summary, as well as network maps—all providing key visibility to any abnormal network events for rapid resolution.

In addition, the Spare Ports per Device report, Traffic Report, and Temperature Reports aid in capacity planning, alerting to bandwidth issues before things escalate to a serious state and monitoring temperatures in each data center for optimum performance.

“Entuity reports have helped us increase customer satisfaction throughout the entire organization. The reports give us details on possible problems before they affect the network,” states Bernhard Mändli, Bank Vontobel Senior Network Engineer.

“The ability to manage a wide range of network details, report on them and automatically have the reports emailed to various departments provides a transparency of network operations to the business and reflects a proactive, professional IT department.” There are so many facets to managing a network and Entuity has given Bank Vontobel the tools to keep service performance at high levels.

Entuity has positively impacted staffing needs as well. In the past, the old network management tools necessitated a full-time IT staff member to manage the network properly. Now, with the automation and operational efficiency gained using Entuity and integration of all the functionality (fault, event, configuration, events, topology, inventory, etc.) into one product, the company has seen a 70% reduction of the amount of time needed to manage their network. This means, thanks to the implementation, they can use 70% of a job function for other key IT projects.

An IT Management Approach Built Around Bank Vontobel’s Priorities
In conclusion, the addition of Entuity network management has brought new levels of visibility for accurate network monitoring. Bank Vontobel’s network is consistently in heavy demand from all parts of the world; it is always on 24/7. Real-time network data allows for IT to adjust capacity and allows adequate data traffic, ensuring all end-users get outstanding application responsiveness. It’s all about quick response times that help sustain Bank Vontobel’s standing as one of the premiere global investment banks.

The ability to manage a wide range of network details, report on them and automatically have the reports emailed to various departments provides a transparency of network operations to the business and reflects a proactive, professional IT department.
– Bernhard Mändli, Senior Network Engineer, Bank Vontobel

Proactive Management
Proactive management now keeps Bank Vontobel’s network performing at peak efficiency for the entire organization whether the user is in the United States, Switzerland or Asia.

“Overall our experience with Entuity Network Management has been great,” said Bernhard. “It has reduced the time it takes to manage the network by 70% and this administrative overhead reduction equips us with more time to handle valuable IT projects. Our IT staff is more effective with proactive policies in place to support our end-users and all these operational efficiencies are felt company-wide.”

Bank Vontobel’s IT organization has taken the steps necessary to position their network as a vital and reliable component contributing to the bank’s continued success.

Vattenfall Consolidates Network Monitoring Using Entuity

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 01:10:25 +0000

Overview

Vattenfall is one of Europe’s largest generators of electricity and producers of heat. The company’s IT group began to face serious challenges due to a disjointed monitoring environment that was spread across its regional operations centers. With Entuity, the company was able to consolidate a disparate sets of tools and monitoring approaches and centralize network management. This allowed the IT team to significantly increase operational efficiency and gain deeper visibility across the network.

Company Highlights

Company Size: 30,200 employees
Countries Supported: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom
Network Management Software: Entuity network management

Business Needs

One of Europe’s largest generators of electricity and producers of heat, Vattenfall has approximately 6.2 million electricity customers, 4.3 million electricity network customers, 1.9 million gas customers and approximately 30,200 employees. The Parent Company, Vattenfall AB, is 100%-owned by the Swedish state, with headquarters in Solna, Sweden. Vattenfall’s IT monitoring operations were separately deployed across three main regions, including Germany, Sweden, and Poland. As a result, the company faced several challenges stemming from this decentralized monitoring approach. Specifically, each region was monitoring its part of the network using different tools with different levels of monitoring capabilities. One region was using a large, legacy framework network management solution, while the others were using multiple open source or low-end monitoring tools. Each region had to maintain skills with their own products, and each bore its own costs of monitoring. The company also lacked a global view of the network.

Centralizing IT Operations

As part of a corporate initiative, Vattenfall decided to engage in a project to centralize their IT monitoring operations in Poland. Entuity, along with BMC TrueSight Operations, with which Entuity has a tight integration, were chosen to replace the solutions currently deployed across their regional operations centers. “Entuity along with its integration to BMC TrueSight allowed us to consolidate a lot of functionality that was spread out across many locations,” says Andrzej Ciupa, Monitoring & Remote Operations Manager for Vattenfall. “It helped us move from a disjointed set of tools that were costly to manage, to a centralized way of monitoring the entire network consistently, proactively, and efficiently.”

Entuity: It Just Works

The IT team at Vattenfall chose Entuity as their network monitoring solution for several reasons. First, Entuity was easy to install. In the words of Ciupa: “Click, click, click, and it just worked.” No prerequisite software setup or complex configuration was required. Everything worked seamlessly out of the box. Second, Entuity Views make it easy for the team to breakdown their global infrastructure by regions. And the Explorer provides a “one stop shop” to view all of their required metrics as well as drill down for instant access to historical data. Third, Entuity’s dynamic mapping capability shows them exactly how the networks are connected and what else is affected during outages.

The team chose Entuity for other reasons too:

Built-in Device Support. Entuity supports hundreds of devices out of the box and immediately starts monitoring key metrics without requiring users to trawl through MIB files to select metrics themselves.

Extensibility. Entuity’s Stormworks development engine is a powerful mechanism for extending device support, which is critical for dynamic networking environments like Vattenfall’s.

Powerful Event Management. Entuity provides valuable events out of the box. Its sophisticated yet usable event management system allows the IT team to easily create rules specific to their network, to further prioritize events and reduce the volume of events forwarded to the TrueSight Operations console.

Customizable Reporting. Entuity’s embedded reporting functionality includes over 100 out of the box reports and allows the IT team to easily customize reports to meet their requirements.

Network Availability as a Service. Entuity’s Service availability monitoring gives the Vattenfall team a view of services across all parts of the network.

Easy Trap Monitoring. Entuity’s MIB Parsing allows for quick and extensible trap handling.

Easy Upgrades. Entuity’s simple upgrade procedure eliminates the need for complex pre-planning, which was often the case with Vattenfall’s previous solutions.

Built-in Integration. The TrueSight integration guarantees that Vattenfall has network visibility from the TrueSight central console and one-click workflow back to Entuity. This enables instant and deep analysis, and more accurate diagnostics.

“Entuity and its integration with BMC TrueSight allowed us to consolidate a lot of functionality that used to be spread out across many locations. It helped us move from a disjointed set of tools that were expensive to manage, to a centralized way of monitoring the entire network consistently, proactively, and efficiently.”
– Andrzej Ciupa, Monitoring & Remote Operations Manager, Vattenfall

Excellent Solution and Support

Today, Entuity is being used to monitor the whole Vattenfall estate of over 3000 devices and is integrated with TrueSight to provide a centralized events console for network, server, and application monitoring. The company has deployed eight Entuity servers across Poland, Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.

Entuity met Vattenfall’s challenge to centralize their monitoring and give them extensive control and visibility across the network. But the company is also impressed by the responsiveness of Entuity Support.

The Vattenfall team is happy to have access to a group of network experts who take time to listen to their needs and whom they can trust to work hard at addressing their requirements and challenges.

According to Ciupa, “Working with Entuity’s Support team is so different from our experiences with other vendors where we’ve made requests and then waited for months only to get no response or ‘no’ for a response. Entuity gets back to us quickly and does their best to help us do everything we need to do.”

University of Minnesota Uses Entuity to Strategically Manage and Upgrade Complex Network Environment

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 01:03:33 +0000

Founded in 1851, the prestigious University of Minnesota is one of the most comprehensive public universities in the United States. It is a premiere research university with faculty of national and international reputation, providing a strong tradition of education and public service.

Overview
Entuity managed the successful upgrade of University of Minnesota’s infrastructure. Entuity’s integrated performance, fault and inventory management, reporting capabilities and extensibility minimizes the number of tools University of Minnesota requires, so helping to manage costs and deliver services more effectively.

Business Needs
The University of Minnesota is dedicated to teaching and learning, research and discovery, and public engagement. The University serves more than 70,000 students and faculty. It offers degrees in more than 370 fields of study through its four campuses (Twin Cities, Duluth, Morris, and Crookston), a collaborative center in Rochester, extension offices, and research and outreach centers.

Keeping its distributed community well-connected 24×7 is vital to the University’s Office of Information Technology (OIT). OIT’s Networking and Telecommunications Services (NTS) group operates and manages the Twin Cities campus network. It provides front-end voice, data, and video communications services, including telephone and data connections and remote access services.

“The ability to integrate leading edge emerging technologies into our network infrastructure to support and improve it for future growth and sustained availability is crucial,”said the University of Minnesota’s Manager of Data Network, Design and Operations within the Networking and Telecommunications Services group. Reliable access to the network for its entire community helps the University in its overall goal of providing premier research and educational services. An in-depth review of the University’s existing infrastructure highlighted that the Twin Cities campus data network, installed in 1997, had outlived its life expectancy of five years. “We were hitting a ceiling – we could not easily extend and add new technologies and services to the network to effectively support our community,” the Manager said.

The NTS group determined a major upgrade of the Twin Cities’ campus network infrastructure was required. With a distributed and expanding network that already included 150,000 ports, the NTS group also determined it required a more effective and proactive means to monitor and manage the upgrade to a new network. The NTS group developed a detailed Request For Proposal (RFP) for the network upgrade, including a thorough section on network management, to replace the outdated systems.

The Solution
Through its extensive RFP scoring process, the University chose new equipment – Cisco 6500’s for the border, backbone and core infrastructure, and over 2,200 Cisco 3750 switches across 300 buildings for the distribution and edge devices.

The NTS group also evaluated several network management tools. Entuity was selected based on its scoring performance against the RFP.

“We needed network monitoring and management that could easily handle our complex, changing environment,” states Mike Faust, Design Engineer. “Entuity scored the highest in our RFP evaluation. Entuity integrated performance, fault and inventory management, reporting capabilities and extensibility helped it attain a leading score.”

“Entuity satisfied our network management system requirements and did so all in one solution. Entuity minimizes the number of tools we need, helping us to manage our costs and deliver services more effectively,” the Manager said.

Also critical in the University’s RFP scoring evaluation is that Entuity consolidates and correlates three operational disciplines using a centralized repository, a powerful analytics engine, presentation and notification and unprecedented reporting. The convergence of different types of information allows Entuity a unique understanding of network events, changes in network usage and their impact on a business. Entuity provides:

Performance Management, using Service Degradation Sensitivity to predict problems so infrastructure managers can take action before users notice
Availability Management which distinguishes between network, server and application faults and then reports the True Cause along with its business implications
Resource Management, offering a full inventory of IT infrastructure assets and what they are connected to. Included is a Spare Ports Report that saves costs in just hours after implementation

Extensibility: The University’s network constantly changes as new technologies are added, such as BGP, VPN and new security firewall services. Entuity is easily extensible and configurable to quickly add these components to monitor and manage them. The University plans to ‘tune’ Entuity to collect the specific information needed to improve the management and operation of the entire network

Ease of use: Entuity requires less overhead, administration and maintenance. Infrastructure discovery is up-to-date and information is quickly available. Entuity provides a distributed view down to the object level (device, port, WAN link, etc)

Reporting: Entuity’s reporting offers access to important statistical data, providing for proactive network management and the ability to extend information to all customers

Rapid implementation and out-of-the-box flexibility: Entuity is quickly installed, up and running and collecting network data within a few hours

“Entuity is a partner. They quickly respond to our questions, training requests and operational needs, continuing to demonstrate their commitment as a strategic element of our leading edge Network Upgrade Project. We have input into product planning for Entuity. Participating with Entuity in the process to progress Entuity will help us meet our goals and objectives as we evolve to more proactive network management for the future.”
– Manager Data Network, University of Minnesota

Summary
Using Entuity, the University of Minnesota’s met its network goals to:

Proactively manage network and connections and provide more reliable community support

Leverage inventory management and statistical reporting; determine resource limitations to improve network utilization

Use impact analysis; understand the impact of changes and forecast future needs

Identify and address collisions and blockages with effective fault management

View previously hidden edge port conditions; communicate to departments and fix problems

Retire home-grown systems

Prevent service problems from developing

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

TMK Group Enhances Network Management with Entuity

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:46:20 +0000

Overview

With over 30 manufacturing sites in Russia, the United States, Canada, Romania, Oman and Kazakhstan, TMK has the world’s largest steel pipe production capacity, as well as the largest sales revenues for oil tubular goods. This makes them the leading supplier of tubular products for the oil and gas industry. TMK supplies products to more than 80 countries worldwide. A few of their clients include Shell, AGIP, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum, Lukoil and other global oil and gas companies.

Company Highlights

Company Size: 30 manufacturing sites around the world

Countries Supported: Canada, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, United States

Network Management Software: Entuity network management

Business Needs

As you might imagine, keeping a global enterprise network operating at peak efficiency is no easy task. TMK’s IT organization was the driver of researching and implementing a new system to more effectively manage their WAN network. They saw the need for increasing the satisfaction of TMK’s end-user experience, decreasing the number of incidents and shortening the recovery time spent on rectifying network issues.

The TMK IT team had very specific requirements for creating their new network management ecosystem. TMK wanted to move away from the inefficient data collection and correlation methodology of using multiple, separate network management tools. They decided to look for a network management solution that offered IT infrastructure monitoring with a single, all-in-one, integrated product. The challenge of managing over 400 devices worldwide brought additional requisites that they wanted from their new solution:

Topology Maps of their entire IT infrastructure with data on its operational state and utilization based on different usage protocols for particular TMK locations.

Event and incident management capabilities that include filtering, multiple administrator usage, and importantly, the ability to set up custom event notifications for specific devices.

A strong root cause analysis feature for understanding and analyzing their network’s activities.

“We had a very long list of requirements that were absolutely necessary for TMK to move ahead with a stronger network management system”, states Sergey Korablev, TMK IT Director. “It was just as critical for our IT organization to have an out-of-the-box solution that would minimize the amount of time we had to spend with deployment and support services in order to get the product up and running.”

The Final Selection: Entuity Network Management

Entuity met all the TMK requirements and its features were verified during a two-month proof of concept arranged by their local IT supplier, Unicorns, an Entuity Authorized Partner in Moscow. Due to the successful pilot, TMK selected Entuity as their network management solution.

“During the pilot program, there were a few devices that were unique to us and they were quickly added to the Entuity software and put under management. Through this exercise we received dedicated assistance from our local partner Unicorns, as well as a fast response by Entuity support. This gave us the confidence that we were making the right decision in choosing Entuity,” says Korablev.

The TMK IT team has discovered over time that many of the Entuity features are making a big difference in evolving the efficiency, proactiveness and accuracy of their network management.

“They especially have found that the incident event-based mail notifications, automatic topology map generation, dynamic thresholds and friendly and clear UI’s all have helped them understand network behavior and have enabled them to proactively review activities before they become problems,” says Boris Goldshteyn, Unicorns General Manager. Entuity has helped the IT organization solidly improve the end-user experience producing higher satisfaction levels throughout the entire company.

What’s more, TMK has significantly reduced the time needed in executing routine day-to-day tasks. All of the automation Entuity provides has resulted in an unexpected benefit—freeing up the IT staff to tackle worthwhile projects. The TMK IT team also uses the many Entuity customer resources to keep them up to date on the latest new features, product releases and technical presentations. The team continually strives to keep network management moving forward. Entuity gives TMK an enterprise-class solution to do just that and as a by-product, it gives them more time to implement IT activities to support their company’s continued success.

“During the pilot program, there were a few devices that were unique to us and they were quickly added to the Entuity software and put under management. Through this exercise we received dedicated assistance from our local partner Unicorns, as well as a fast response by Entuity support. This gave us the confidence that we were making the right decision in choosing Entuity.”
– Sergey Korablev, IT Director, TMK

Tait Communications Chooses Entuity to Monitor Managed Services Infrastructure

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:42:13 +0000

Tait Communications is a global leader in designing, delivering, and managing innovative communications solutions. Founded in 1969 by Sir Angus Tait in Christchurch, New Zealand, Tait has regional offices in Australia, UK, Brazil, and the United States. Recently, the company began offering managed service solutions to further support customers running mission critical networks for public safety services and utilities. With its highly flexible architecture and enterprise class features such as multi-tenancy, Entuity helps Tait ensure around-the-clock availability and fast on-boarding of new customers without adding staff. In addition, Entuity’s seamless integration with BMC TrueSight Operations Management and BMC Remedy enables end-to-end IT management and timely, high quality service management.

Company Highlights

Customer Size: Two data centers—Houston, USA; Christchurch, New Zealand

Network Management Software: Entuity network management for BMC TrueSight Operations Management

Other Integrations: BMC Remedy

Specialized Features: IP SLA, QoS, Multi-tenancy

Company Overview
Tait Communications is all about smart, practical, and secure delivery. With customers in critical and high risk environments requiring safe, fast, and smart solutions that work all the time—public safety, utilities, mining oil and gas, and transportation—Tait has the skills, scale, and scope to manage and deliver on a variety of solutions to best suit customers’ needs.

With a global network of trusted partners and dealers, Tait works with customers to manage existing systems and support their move to future products, services, and applications.

Tait Communications corporate headquarters

Business Needs
From their strong position as innovators in radio communication technology, Tait realized that their customers required a way to manage these increasingly complex, vital networks to ensure 24/7 availability.

Public safety agencies and utilities were finding that the intricacy of skills and tools needed to manage critical communications radio networks had become a major distraction and took them away from their core activity of providing public safety services or utilities. Tait created its managed
service solutions to respond to this challenge.

An Open Slate—Creating a State of the Art MSP
Tait’s Managed Services team in New Zealand was delegated with designing and implementing the new managed service solutions. This included selecting software to manage their customers’ networks, providing the necessary processes to maximize system performance and reliability, and adding value to their customers’ investment in Tait’s communications solutions. “Tait is now in a position to make things simpler for our customers by looking after the radio management for them,” states Matt Whitaker, Service Management Centre Senior Engineer.

After a comprehensive evaluation, Tait chose Entuity network management to manage the network infrastructure for the Managed Service solutions.

Why was Entuity Selected? What Set Them Apart?
As you might expect, network outages present extreme hazards for Tait’s customers. What if there was a chemical leak and the danger could not be communicated to the public because the private mobile network was down? It is therefore equally critical that Tait’s managed services are always available to monitor for system problems.

Entuity’s flexible architecture enables Tait to apply and follow the same cross-consolidation model across their two service management centers (data centers) to support a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. This strategy ensures that every service management center can function fully by itself should there be an outage, or be covered by other centers should there be a need to evacuate.

Another feature that Tait required in their MSP platform was support for secure multi-tenancy environments. The ability to compartmentalize and manage customer networks separately was a crucial requirement for Tait. Entuity’s Network Management architecture handles multi-tenancy without creating complexity or requiring additional hardware or IT personnel. Entuity allows Tait to support customers by effectively segregating them for individual management on multiple servers, while also being able to manage these customer networks together on a single central console view that identifies which server/customer the network belongs to. This greatly improves operational efficiency.

As Tait’s managed services business expands, they need the ability to onboard new customers quickly and without adding staff and more overhead costs. Entuity easily scales to accommodate all sizes of enterprise networks and does not need a large IT staff to implement. Tait finds that using the virtualized poller allows them to scale very effectively and aggregate the information into a single pane of glass for ease of management.

Lastly, Tait wanted an integrated solution with the BMC tool suite. Entuity effectively handles the real-time infrastructure monitoring and feeds that data into BMC TrueSight Operations Management to proactively detect and automatically resolve performance issues. Additionally, Tait’s support centers around the world have integrated BMC Remedy with Entuity for accurate and timely service management. “We were looking for a set of best in class tools and we have found it with this platform,” states Steve Kingston, Tait Managed Services Development Manager.

Since using Entuity in concert with BMC TrueSight Operations Management, we’ve been able to provide an end-to-end customized solution to meet our customers’ individual needs.
– Matt Whitaker, Service Management Centre Senior Engineer, Tait Communications

Summary
When it comes to managing a mission critical network, outages simply are not acceptable. Tait has been successful in designing an integrated MSP platform to support their customers’ always-on networks.

With Entuity network management in place, Tait’s MSP solution ensures that their entire unique information and communications technology environment is managed. For example, radio antenna systems and radio base stations that are key elements of Tait customers’ private mobile networks can be fully monitored and managed. This minimizes preventive maintenance costs and allows the company to avoid traveling to mountaintop sites to check on radio tower performance. It also enables proactive maintenance activity to ensure the radio systems continue to perform as designed.

Getting the most from Entuity’s many features has provided Tait with functionality that was not initially evident. For instance, the IP SLA capability allows Tait to monitor the quality of the voice traffic between radio sites. This makes it possible to keep latency and jitter in check to ensure good voice quality for emergency communications.

Managing customer networks is an evolving process for Tait as they add new devices and services. In this respect, Entuity Support has proven to be a valuable partner in creating this new division.
“Since using Entuity in concert with BMC TrueSight Operations Management, we’ve been able to provide an end-to-end customized solution to meet our customers’ individual needs,” said Whitaker. “Entuity monitors the network in real time, and it has allowed us to keep customer satisfaction at high levels by giving them deep insight into what’s happening on the network. We’re impressed with Entuity’s capabilities and believe its well-designed architecture suits our business model very well.”

The future looks bright for Tait Managed Services, which is on track to continue the long-standing tradition of supporting their customers to keep the lights on, cities moving ahead, and communities safe.

Entuity monitors the network in real time, and it has allowed us to keep customer satisfaction at high levels by giving them deep insight into what’s happening on the network. We’re impressed with Entuity’s capabilities and believe its well-designed architecture suits our business model very well.
– Matt Whitaker, Service Management Centre Senior Engineer, Tait Communications

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Non-Profit Federal Credit Union Exceeds SLA Guarantee with Entuity

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:26:22 +0000

Overview

A non-profit federal credit union found Entuity to have out-of-the-box flexibility, rapid implementation and ease of use. Entuity delivers both management and network engineer level reports on uptime, device availability, device inventory and utilization. Entuity also integrates well with other management solutions.

Increased IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding guaranteed objective

Enhanced Help Desk call resolution with meaningful alarms, improving ability to serve members

Improved operational efficiency

Leveraged intelligent reporting to improve network utilization

Improved relationships with telecomm carriers and ISPs, increasing end-to-end performance and availability

Prevented service disruptions

Challenges

Network performance and availability problems impacted the guaranteed SLA requirement of 99.5%

No end-to-end service monitoring, no meaningful alarms

Budgetary constraints

Lack of consistent, reliable reporting

High levels of member service to maintain

Introduction for a Non-Profit Federal Credit Union

Under the philosophy of ‘people helping people’, this federal credit union is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative, and also one of the largest credit unions in the U.S. and the largest educational credit union overall with more than 260,000 members.

Their vision is to deliver world-class personal service to members through its 100 automated teller machines (ATMs), 24-hour automated telephone transaction service, and online banking system. They recognize that delivering exceptional value means providing operational excellence by combining service with technology and continually streamlining procedures, business processes and IT systems.

To deliver upon this vision, IT Operations is responsible for guaranteeing the organization’s stated service level agreement (SLA) of 99.5% availability of services. As the credit union added new branches, new members, and new applications, its SLA slipped to an average range of 98.9 to 99.1% availability.

Additionally, IT Operations relied on a rudimentary tool to “ping” their applications to determine availability. This ping capability was not adequate for truly measuring service degradation, performance or failure. As their network engineer explains, “We determined that a state-of-the-art solution providing event correlation and reporting capabilities was required to monitor the overall performance of our networks end-to-end and to generate meaningful alarms if a network event occurred.”

As a not-for-profit organization, they found balancing growth in membership with member expectations and budgetary responsibility to be a challenge. They needed a solution that could ‘manage itself’— be easy to use, Web-based, and require no additional resources.
Entuity offers:

High levels of member service to maintain

Availability management that distinguishes between network, server and application problems using root cause analytics, prioritizing problems based on business impact.

Performance management that predicts problems before costly business interruptions occur, using service degradation sensitivity.

Resource management that take inventory of network assets, their connectivity, and their logical dependencies in parent-child and peer-to-peer relationships.

“We selected Entuity because it provided both event suppression and fault correlation. With Entuity, we easily find where a problem is occurring without the system logging everything that is being affected.”
– Network Engineer

Additionally, the IT Operations team selected Entuity based on its following capabilities:

Accurate information and reporting:
Entuity pinpoints information, detailing what the problem is and where it is located. It provides the performance statistics of individual objects and ports and takes the performance of other ports into consideration.

Out-of-the-box flexibility, rapid implementation:
Installation took 15 minutes and within 3 hours, Entuity discovered over 6,000 interfaces (approximately 400 devices) within the network.

Immediate effectiveness:
Within an hour after installation, Entuity provided crucial information on where problems were occurring in their network.

Ease of use:
The staff did not require formal training. Within days, the IT team was reviewing and analyzing data, utilizing Entuity’s built-in Help system, Event Viewer and reporting abilities.

The Results

Improved SLA Availability: “Within 90 days of implementing Entuity, we improved our IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding our stated guarantee objective,” explained the network engineer. With Entuity, IT Operations is able to isolate and proactively resolve performance issues with the WAN, telecommunications carriers and ISPs.

Enhanced Help Desk Effectiveness: Within 3 days of implementing the program, the Credit Union’s help desk was isolating, troubleshooting and fixing problems they weren’t even aware existed. Entuity greatly improved help desk call resolution, improving their ability to serve its members.

Entuity helped the IT team locate performance degradation in the network. Based on this critical information, the team upgraded network cards to improve speed, performance and availability. These improvements relieved network congestion and reduced help desk call volumes.

Impact Analysis: “Utilizing Entuity, we discovered performance degradation caused by our telecomm carriers and ISPs. Entuity provided us with the detailed information and impact analysis to evaluate situations in real-time. For example, we quickly located a mis-configured ISDN line and bad cabling. We proactively worked with our service providers to resolve and improve these situations, increasing the overall performance of our applications and preventing service disruptions,” stated the Network Engineer.

With Entuity, the Non-Profit Federal Credit Union

Increased IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding guaranteed objective

Enhanced Help Desk call resolution with meaningful alarms, improving ability to serve Members

Improved operational efficiency cost-effectively

Leveraged intelligent reporting to improve network utilization

Improved relationships with telecomm carriers and ISPs, increasing end-to-end performance and availability

Prevented service disruptions

“We determined that a state-of-the-art solution providing event correlation and reporting capabilities was required to monitor the overall performance of our networks end-to-end and to generate meaningful alarms if a network event occurred. With Entuity, we are not inundated with alerts; rather we receive intelligent, meaningful information and act quickly.”
– Network Engineer

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

mStart Powers Network Insight with Entuity

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:21:14 +0000

Overview
Founded in 2010, mStart is a leading IT company specializing in MSP services that power businesses across the Adriatic region. It is headquartered in Croatia and has a further presence in countries including Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. As part of the Agrokor Group—which operates more than 100 companies internationally—mStart also provides for all the group’s technology needs. mStart offers the most advanced software solutions and services for businesses in a variety of sectors such as: agriculture, manufacturing, retail, wholesale, and distribution. Over 340 mStart IT professionals provide technical expertise, including the latest in e-commerce and payment transactions, ensuring that their over 60 clients are successful in making today’s digital transformation a reality.

Customer Details: Privately held, 340+ Staff members, 60+ Customers

Network Management Software: Entuity

Entuity Customer Since: November 2018

The Evolving Role of the MSP
To help their clients keep up-to-date on new IT technologies, MSPs today are evolving to be more than just service providers. An innovative and progressive MSP can ensure their clients stay competitive and at the same time achieve business success. mStart’s talented IT professionals are poised to help their clients understand the value of new technologies and how to simultaneously assist their end-users to get the most from them.

To achieve this new consultative status, mStart realized that their network management tool kit was not able to effectively move them ahead. Using multiple unintegrated, older software solutions did not allow for an efficient management platform. Separate network monitoring tools created more work because they were not integrated, and key information could not be shared from one product to another. For example, it was not possible to share fault management details with a configuration management solution, making it more difficult to quickly see where the root cause of an issue was found

Business Needs
Outlining their key challenges led mStart to adjust how they wanted to approach network management so as to expand the services they could offer. The areas they regarded as necessary to address for this business plan included:

Replace their three key separate network management tools—fault, configuration management and network monitoring with an all-in-one solution. Consolidating their tool set would immediately deliver more visibility, agility and an efficient way to manage

The rapid expansion of mStart’s customer base requires an MSP network management feature set that accommodates faster onboarding, proactive problem detection, SLA metrics, multi-tenancy for segmenting clients and the ability to easily add new technology and device support

Incorporating best practices for network and application path management—add a structured management strategy to enhance network management for their customers.

Real-time views and analytics ensuring outstanding service delivery to their clients.

Choosing the best fit for mStart and its growing customer needs—Entuity
After a comprehensive selection process that included a number of software products, Entuity (ENA) was chosen by the mStart IT team. “Our two top priorities were that the new solution consolidate our monitoring tools and that it be truly user-friendly,” states Kristijan Sić, Head of the network department at mStart. “Entuity Network Analytics has given us operational efficiency with its fully integrated solution. For example, we can compare configurations from the Configuration and Inventory Administration Modules which helps us determine where there have been configuration changes automatically. This has vastly reduced the time spent on manual, repetitive tasks allowing us to become a proactive IT consultant to our customers.”

The Results

Client Onboarding—Creating the Best Initial Customer Experience
Driving new business means streamlining the MSP client onboarding process enabling a fast, smooth transition into mStart’s environment for a solid initial customer experience. Onboarding also must include an approach to handle the varied business requirements for their clients. No two enterprises are alike. Using Entuity, mStart simply adds new clients and customizes what is essential for each client. For example, taking advantage of Entuity’s SLA performance metrics, which are critical when it comes to validating MSP services to clients, mStart creates a set of custom reports for each client. This enables accuracy and transparency for them to understand how their services are performing, where improvements can be made and provides them with relevant data providing a baseline for future IT needs.

Equipping mStart Customers with the tools to be successful—Valuable Analytics, End-to-End Visibility and Management Best Practices

Access to real-time performance metrics and topology maps are also important MSP prerequisites. Entuity supports the managing of multiple businesses through multi-tenancy and automatically updates network topology maps allowing mStart clients to fully understand what is occurring on their network at any given time. Topology maps can show where there have been changes—for instance, there are rogue devices being added to the network affecting performance? Real-time analytics from Entuity gives mStart the visibility to recommend the best business decision for individual customers.

“We find that creating a set of best practices using ENA for our clients helps them understand the IT management process and delivers a solid strategy to keep their networks operating optimally. IT is unpredictable and that’s why it is important to have a plan in place to document each client’s network and associated services,” said Kristijan. “ENA’s SurePath Module has given us another tactic to ensure application performance is not being held back by the network. Clients can now see where a critical application’s data is traveling back and forth on the network and where there are issues. The addition of ENA SurePath ensures that, for example, e-commerce applications are running smoothly and are not impacting sales revenue with poor performance.”

mStart is taking advantage of the many innovative Entuity features that help ensure solid network performance for their clients. For example, customizable reports show data that can provide significant savings in hardware costs. Using the Switch Post Connectivity and Capacity Reports can help spot where there is available capacity before purchasing additional devices. Not only will clients get reliable network performance but also CapEx costs can be better monitored for smart budget spending and planning.

mStart Powers Network Insight with Entuity for Continued Growth
mStart is making their MSP expansion business plan a reality with Entuity. Entuity enables the mStart team to attain this vision through efficient network management and offering IT services that allow their customers to stay competitive as they move into the digital world. Providing their customers with contemporary solutions that scale quickly, as well as, accurate analytics, outstanding service delivery and an innovative MSP feature set that can reflect their clients’ unique requirements, Entuity is the foundation of mStart’s growing MSP business. mStart with surely continue to be a trusted partner for companies in the Adriatic region looking to outsource their IT functions. Their innovation, functionality, and expertise is the hallmark of a successful MSP. Learn more about Entuity and see how this highly-acclaimed enterprise network management software can help your organization today!

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Manufacturing Group Reduces IT Costs with a Centrally Managed Infrastructure and Entuity Network Management

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:17:46 +0000

Company Highlights

Company Size:

4100 professionals

Countries Supported:

More than 21 Countries in Europe, North America, and Asia

Network Management Software:

Entuity network management

Introduction
With a global manufacturing and distribution network of more than 65 sites in 21 countries throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, centrally managing and serving this customer- specific, precision formed components company’s critical business services for the more than 4100 employees may seem an insurmountable task. But that’s just an average day for this manufacturing group. Based in two centralized data centers located in Switzerland, all of the company’s main business, communication, storage, accounting, customer management, and ordering systems are hosted for maximum efficiency and ease of maintenance. Connecting users at all of these sites — and the group to its customers — is a complex and distributed network infrastructure providing the foundation for business productivity.

The group consists of four business units, including an in-house IT service provider. Although their product lines and markets they serve are diverse, they all share the main electronic business systems.

The Challenge: Services Spanning the Globe
Worldwide access to the group’s business applications depends on the availability of their LAN and WAN network environments. To ensure their network is optimally deployed and efficiently performing, the group relies upon Entuity as their primary network management solution. Keeping users productive at all of these sites requires the continued, uninterrupted operation of the applications and electronic systems for their particular business unit. Business services such as supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), advanced product quality planning (APQP), finance and accounting, human resources, and warehouse systems are all centrally provided from the data centers. The group’s accounting system, which is based on SAP, features a variety of modules that store critical transactional information in Oracle databases for all locations. To ensure security, backup, and longevity of electronic records, all critical business data is stored centrally as well.

Connecting all the sites is an intricate and distributed network based on Internet-VPN or MPLS links. Like the arteries of the body, the network carries these critical business systems delivering life’s blood to the business, keeping it alive, growing, and efficiently performing. If the network is down or is even slow, user productivity is negatively impacted at a minimum. If there is a network outage, customer transactions could be interrupted resulting in lost business revenue and driving down profitability. A representative example is the warehouse system used by one of the divisions in Valence, France. Based on a SAP TRM installation hosted in Switzerland, all customer orders are received and sent as warehouse transactions over the network. If there is a network interruption, no orders would be processed, warehouse personnel would not be dispatched, and goods would not be shipped. The same criticality of network connectivity applies to the office infrastructure, where business communication would be at stake.

The Solution: Network Availability
With the availability and capacity of the network such a significant factor in providing business services, a versatile network management system capable of proactive issue notification was required. One that included a broad range of device and operational thresholds to alert IT staff of problems so they could be fixed before any users experienced service outages or degradation. A network management solution containing the complete breadth of functionality required by network administrators, and one that was fully integrated with their strategic Business Service Management (BSM) platform based on BMC Service Assurance products.

Using Entuity, the group has implemented a network management solution that solves their operational challenges. With Entuity, IT personnel have a top-down view of their entire network with separate views for each business location. The views include logical collections of all the network components that serve a particular business unit (comprising both local devices and central devices) to provide performance and operational forensics from the user’s perspective. This gives IT staff the information and insight required to make informed decisions about capacity and availability for optimum service delivery.

“Entuity gives us a top-down, business-centric view of our network that we previously did not have,” says their manager of Technology & Operations. “This gives us clear visibility from a user’s perspective to the complete infrastructure serving each location, including devices both at the local facility and our central operations center, to better manage and reliably deliver services to our user community.”

With the Entuity for BMC TrueSight Operations Management, the company was able to integrate monitoring and management of their network into their BSM platform to further automate infrastructure support. Realtime network monitoring is accomplished with Entuity. Performance or operational events reported by Entuity are then forwarded to TrueSight for correlation and processing. BMC’s Alarm Point is then used to automatically route incidents to the correct IT personnel including Help Desk as well as second-level support. Not only do incidents get solved faster having the appropriate and most experienced personnel assigned, but overall staff efficiency has improved since all staff are not distracted assessing trouble tickets which don’t apply to them.

The Result: Reduced Costs
Centralizing their IT infrastructure has helped the group reduce costs by providing economies of scale in several ways. Internet-VPN connections with strong, real-time monitoring provide lower cost transport than dedicated connection services with expensive SLAs.

The number and variety of Internet Service Providers keeps competition high and costs low. Housing applications and data storage centrally reduces maintenance time and costs and provides a consistency of service to end users. It also simplifies hardware requirements at remote facilities. Automating the alerting and incident assignment processes reduces end-user disruption and improves IT operation’s efficiency. By combining event information in the BSM system, downtime of end-user services is reduced. With these monitoring and management systems in place including Entuity, they can provide a high-level of service to thousands of users in more than 65 locations around the world with just 2 full-time equivalents in network administration.

Power Consumption
The amount of electricity used by the group in running their business units is of growing concern. It not only has an impact on operational costs, but also the environment and the local communities surrounding their businesses. Demonstrating their commitment to the environment, sustainability, and minimizing their impact on global climate change, they are committed to sustainability and the conservation of resources, and regards them as fundamental tasks aimed at securing the future of the company. Power conservation is one of the criteria used in evaluating business partnerships.

“Entuity gives us a top-down, business-centric view of our network that we previously did not have.”
– Manager of Technology & Operations

Entuity’s Green IT Perspective gives the group visibility and insight into the power consumption of their various business units. Reports from the Green IT Perspective detail the amount of power used by groups or individuals and their compliance with established shutdown policies that are designed to save power. They also quantify potential areas for savings. The reports are shared with users to promote additional savings, building awareness and personal responsibility for how their use of corporate computer resources impacts the company. The Green IT Perspective also identifies underutilized servers. Applications can be resource-leveled, making efficient use of compute power.

About Entuity
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unied enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston.

Keep browsing our site to learn more about Entuity Software or network managed services.

Health Services Company Relies on Entuity

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:12:51 +0000

Highlights

Focuses IT resources on business objectives

Improves network utilization

Prevents widespread virus attacks and potential service outages

Decreases MTTR by two-thirds

Improves development stress testing

Uses expansive reporting to improve forecast accuracy of network bandwidth and utilization

Prevents developing service problems

Communicates success effectively

Business Needs

For this health services company, IT Operations is pivotal. Whether it’s completing the challenging task of migrating offices to central platforms or consolidating redundant networks, IT Operations must maintain 24-hour, seven-day-a-week customer access to resources and information. As the Senior Vice-President of IT Operations explains: “Our goal is to manage the network to support our business. To ensure 100% access to our business systems, we need to know what equipment we have, what is not being used and how to identify potential problem areas to effectively manage traffic and bandwidth.”

During the first attempt at consolidation, a migrated office began consuming huge amounts of bandwidth, creating performance issues. Rudimentary network tools provided little to no reporting capabilities, making it impossible for IT Operations to determine the source of the problem. “We realized that to continue migration, we needed more from a network management solution. We needed network fault detection, network performance monitoring, network inventory discovery & management and in-depth reporting capabilities in one solution,” he states.

The company faced several challenges in meeting its goal:

Network consolidation; elimination of redundancies, taking advantage of equipment trade-ins and lower costs

Consistent, reliable reporting to support and manage for 100% access

Inventory management to determine resource capacity and effectively use bandwidth

Stress testing of applications, and tracking and reporting on results

Maintenance of high level of service for all customers

As the network engineer at the company explains:

“With Entuity, we have fault, performance and inventory management all in one tool. This makes our work more effective. Rather than integrating and working with two or three tools, we easily learned and use one. Our team is now more responsive to customer requests.”

Key to helping VP and his team choose Entuity’s solution is that Entuity consolidates and correlates three operational disciplines using a centralized repository, a powerful analytics engine, presentation and notification and unprecedented reporting.

“With Entuity, we have fault, performance and inventory management all in one tool. This makes our work more effective. Rather than integrating and working with two or three tools, we easily learned and use one. Our team is now more responsive to customer requests.”

The Results

Securing the Entuity resource management reports, the company recently identified a rampant computer virus, preventing widespread infection within the company.

“Entuity’s ability to track MAC and IP addresses on switches and routers proved to be an extremely useful feature,” according to the head network engineer. Their network sensors detected the virus scans and identified the infected IP address. “We entered the IP address into Entuity and with the touch of a button, determined which PCs and ports were infected and where they were located. Entuity allowed us to rapidly shut down the infected ports and switches. To move so quickly was invaluable. We experienced little impact to our network and services.”

The results of using Entuity include:

Improved Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): With Entuity implemented, the IT Operations team estimates it has decreased MTTR of problems involving PCs, servers and switches by two-thirds, freeing up valuable resources and increasing productivity.

Enhanced Support of Development: IT Operations more effectively supports their development teams. Utilizing Entuity, the team helps stress test applications before they are released into production. The network engineers drill down and determine what ports development servers use. Once this is determined, engineers track server and port utilization (volume of activity) during stress tests to determine where bottlenecks or bandwidth problems might occur. With Entuity, IT Operations identifies faults in the network and proactively increases bandwidth, preventing problems in production.

Impact Analysis: According to the senior VP, “Entuity enables us to review the impact consolidation has on our WAN in real time. We proactively evaluate where we are and use this analysis to forecast future needs as our consolidation efforts continue. We plan to display performance reports on our Intranet so business units can review system availability at any time and management can determine how well IT operations is performing. With greater visibility for the entire organization, we effectively prevent service outages and communicate our effectiveness.”

Summary of Results Achieved with Entuity

Focused IT resources on business objectives

Improved network utilization

Prevented widespread virus attack and potential service outage

Decreased MTTR by two-thirds

Improved development stress testing

Used expansive reporting to improve forecast accuracy of network bandwidth and utilization

Prevented developing service problems

Communicated success effectively

“Entuity’s willingness to be a true partner provided us with the ability to impact product planning, further helping us to meet our goals and objectives for better network operations and availability.”
– Senior VP of IT Operations

About Entuity
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unied enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston.

Financial Services Company Lays Foundation for End-to-End Infrastructure Management Using Entuity

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:07:19 +0000

A major European financial services company first used Entuity to reduce operating expenses and improve productivity by auditing and rationalizing disparate network environments following a merger. Entuity’s integrated performance, fault and inventory management, reporting capabilities and extensibility continue to help them ensure their network is optimally deployed and efficiently performing at minimal cost to the corporation.

Company Highlights

Company Size: 8 Million Customers

Countries Supported: United Kingdom

Network Management Software: Entuity network management

Business Needs and Solutions
Managing its network effectively is key for any organization, but when a merger or acquisition has recently taken place, as in the case of a major European financial services company, it becomes a much bigger issue. Previously independent networks need to integrate successfully in order to allow the IT infrastructure to work efficiently and support the business function.

In this case, the company formed after the merger of two major UK-based service companies. It now offers a complete range of financial products, ranging from online and high street banking to credit cards and insurance. The company has more than 10,000 employees who are spread out among eight large offices and 99 bank branches, plus 25 remote locations for its insurance division. The two individual companies were previously run by two separate networks, but as a result of the merger, they have been integrated into one.

The new single network now handles applications, including financial management tools, call centers for the banking and insurance divisions, all of the software and security for the company’s online bank, and mainframe applications. In addition to running an increased number of systems, the infrastructure has to support more offices and employees. As a result, it was decided that network management software was required to assist with monitoring of traffic, tracking devices and identifying any faults quickly.

To choose which software to deploy, the company identified its requirements internally and used these to carry out a paper evaluation on six of the leaders in the network management industry, as identified by analyst houses Gartner and Forrester. This produced a shortlist of two products, which were put into a proof-of-concept trial. Entuity’s network management software most closely matched the laid out criteria and proved to be the obvious choice.

A manager of network projects at the company said: “It was important to [us] that the majority of functionality would be available ‘out of the box’. This was the case for Entuity, which meant that we were able to begin to use it almost as soon as it had been installed. We also needed it to support the Cisco and token ring network we run, which it did. In fact, as it’s product-neutral, Entuity has been completely successful in integrating with and monitoring all the devices on our network.”

The company has more than 130 premises throughout the UK, resulting in a very complex IT infrastructure. Entuity is well suited to deployments that are spread over a number of different geographical locations and, through its discovery and reporting tools, it provides a complete, detailed topology of its network and the relationships between the devices on it. Its reporting function can also be used to support any service level agreement audits.

Entuity’s discovery function is automated, meaning it will look at the network at regular intervals and identify which devices are connected and how efficiently they are working. This Auto Discovery takes place as soon as Entuity is installed. How often it takes place after that time can be determined by the network manager.

Laying Foundations Using Entuity
Traditionally, recording the devices on a network would involve somebody having to manually check all the connections over a number of different sites. As well as being an extremely time-consuming task, this leaves the audit open to human error and has the potential to become out of date almost instantly should a connection be unplugged somewhere or new devices installed. Entuity eliminates this and also opens up the opportunity to make considerable savings. The network project manager commented, “After looking at the inventory report, we noticed that approximately five percent of our ports were idle. Although they were cabled up, they were not actually in use. Knowing this meant that we didn’t have to go out and buy more equipment, which we would have done, had we not had Entuity in place. This resulted in immediate and significant cost savings.”

Minimizing downtime was a key requirement. With its large number of employees and the wide geographical location over which they are spread, it is vital that the IT team has a tool that supports its ability to identify a fault before a user reports it. Through its Auto Discovery feature, Entuity enables companies to be proactive with its fault management by finding and fixing any problems before they affect the user. This reduces the length of time the computer is offline, which protects revenues and ultimately provides the company with a much higher quality of service.

Entuity also has a root cause analysis function which can be used together with the fault management tool to identify where the problem originated. By looking at both the topology of the network and the fault itself, Entuity can help to find and resolve the issue. Previously this would have been a time- consuming task requiring the network manager to locate the cause and fix it himself, but Entuity eliminates the need for this by doing it automatically.

The services company also uses Entuity’s reporting facility for trending and capacity planning so that it knows when the network is about to reach full capacity before it gets to that stage. This is something that happens at least once or twice a year, or if an application is added that requires a particularly large amount of bandwidth. By having this information available before it happens, They are able to reallocate resources or remove devices that are no longer being used.

“It is vital that our network is running to the best of its availability at all times. Entuity has enabled us to make effective use of capacity, as well as identify faults before they have had any significant impact.”
– Manager of Network Projects

In the future, the company has plans to integrate Entuity with its existing service management framework, as part of the ‘Manager of Managers’ initiative it is creating. It is also planning to use Entuity to monitor backplane integration on its key devices.
The network projects manager is confident that they will soon begin to see a return on their investment. He says, “The deployment of Entuity has definitely been beneficial [to us] by enabling us to make the most of our network. [We] rely on the IT infrastructure to remain competitive, therefore any length of downtime can have a major impact.
It is vital that our network is running to the best of its availability at all times. Entuity has enabled us to make effective use of capacity, as well as identify faults before they have had any significant impact.”

Factors Considered
In choosing Entuity as their network management solution, the company considered many factors.

Key Solution Characteristics

Eighty percent of functionality available “out of the box”

Inter-operability with current systems management platforms

Scalable and extensible for an expanding business

Standards based, e.g., IP, SNMP, RMON, COPS

Intuitive, web-based user interfaces

Fit for purpose, i.e., meets defined requirements

Suits deployments characterized by many geographical locations

High Level Functional Requirements

Network fault detection with automated root cause analysis

Automatic topology discovery and visualization

Service Level Reporting (SLR)

Automatic availability and performance exception alerts

Business impact analysis and prioritizating of network faults and degradations
Support for all CFS network hardware, including token ring

“The deployment of Entuity has definitely been beneficial [to us] by enabling us to make the most of our network. [We] rely on the IT infrastructure to remain competitive, therefore any length of downtime can have a major impact. It was important to [us] that the majority of functionality would be available ‘out of the box’. This was the case for Entuity, which meant that we were able to begin to use it almost as soon as it had been installed.”
– Manager of Network Projects

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Ensono Case Study: Entuity delivers as Ensono advances its business

Sam Kim — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:01:10 +0000

Overview
For nearly five decades, Ensono has helped organizations move ahead with their IT initiatives. When it comes to earning their clients’ trust as exceptional guardians of their IT service management platforms, Ensono’s technology expertise plays a large part. Evidence of this is that even before the cloud was being talked about, Ensono was pioneering leading edge cloud innovation for its global client base offering solutions and services across all industries. Ensono is a service provider that understands the new world digital economy and the value of a reliable and superior end-user experience.

Company size:
Privately held

2,000 global associates

200+ clients

Network Management Software:

Entuity Network Analytics

Other integrations:

BMC TrueSight Operations
Management

The Challenge
With the advent of digital transformation, services being delivered to end-users are changing at breakneck speeds. To enable their clients to respond to rising end-user expectations, Ensono realized that operational efficiency, streamlined network monitoring and the ability to rapidly add new devices under management were critical to build out the network and service performance necessary to meet these needs.

How to reduce the impact of these digital growing pains and ultimately improve the end-user experience was important to Ensono and their clients. Ensono was looking to fast track their network monitoring strategy to make their service management and client performance key differentiators. The fact was, Ensono had plenty of management tools, too many. It was tool overload. They were using disparate tools that were expensive to support and, in some instances, unreliable, not to mention tedious to monitor on multiple consoles. This approach was making it difficult to manage the contemporary IT services necessary for Ensono clients’ businesses.

The Solution
Having decided that multiple tools was not the most effective way to manage a variety of complex networks, Ensono focused on combining their tool sets.
“Consolidation is huge for us as is the reliability of tools,” states Sean O’Brien,
Senior Manager – Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring at Ensono. “Some tools would go down a lot. So, you are constantly having to monitor the tool and get it back online—creating more work for my team.” After a rigorous evaluation of several network management products, Entuity Network Analytics was selected as it met Ensono’s top prerequisites:

an all-in-one network management functionality that replaced disparate tools

seamlessly integrated into their BMC TrueSight AIOps platform

was reliable in its performance uptime

could quickly integrate new technologies

provided a robust multitenancy architecture.

The Results

Continuously adding new technologies for a complete network picture
During the evaluation process it became clear that network management products are not all the same and several did not effectively manage new technologies. For example, the Nexus switch was not covered in a few products and according to O’Brien, “Entuity put some solid thought and development into understanding what was necessary to manage within the Nexus product to be able to proactively identify switch problems. They have done a stellar job of handling some of the new technologies in the marketplace.” Incorporating new technologies is vital when it comes to managing today’s networks.

“Entuity put some solid thought and development into understanding what was necessary to manage within the Nexus product to be able to proactively identify switch problems. They have done a stellar job of handling some of the new technologies in the marketplace.”
– Sean O’Brien, Senior Manager – Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring, Ensono

Multitenancy empowers clients with transparency
As a service provider, the ability to handle multitenancy was very important to Ensono. “It’s a transparency thing. We need to be able to allow client A to log into a monitoring console and see what we see. And we need to be able to do that without them accidentally seeing client B” states O’Brien. Entuity’s multitenancy architecture allows specific, customized privileges to segment their clients’ access. Ensono’s client portal provides clients a robust way to see invoices and their monitored data from multiple sources such as BMC and Entuity. This consolidated client portal offers a single point of entry into their Ensono data. Taking advantage of Entuity’s multitenancy architecture delivers personalized on-demand access that increases client/Ensono transparency, client loyalty and add-on capabilities/revenue opportunities. Ensono strives for intimate clent relationships to keep them apprised on how their network is currently running and to proactively suggest where enhancements or new services may be necessary for future growth.

Consolidation of management tools drives efficiency and accuracy
One way streamlining monitoring tools has helped Ensono diminish management complexity is through an improved way to monitor WAN circuits. They can now reduce the number of SNMP trap destinations required from 7 IPs to 2 IPs, allowing Ensono to deliver all the services necessary for this type of management. The big change here is that Ensono needs only a single console to manage it rather than five consoles originally being used. Less complexity and better management visibility equips Ensono to work more efficiently and see anomalies before they become issues. Likewise, having all the network interdependencies found under one umbrella, analytics such as historical traffic patterns, capacity analytics are easy to generate and use for IT planning purposes.

A powerful combination: Entuity, BMC and Ensono
Ensono takes advantage of the BMC TrueSight AIOps platform and it was important that network monitoring be integrated into this bigger picture reflecting their end-to-end management ecosystem. “Literally after 15 minutes of work, we had Entuity fully integrated to our BMC environment and opening tickets to our NOC,” states O’Brien. Entuity Network Analytics is seamlessly included in the BMC dashboard making it one click away from illustrating how the network is affecting applications. “Having Entuity data automatically roll up into our BMC TrueSight platform allows a true single pane of glass for event visibility, analytics and processing.”

Moving Ahead
Entuity Network Analytics will continue over time to reduce Ensono’s hours spent managing the network and its associated costs by a streamlined, automated solution. O’Brien reveals, “We are starting to see cases where Entuity is routinely finding and managing things like Cisco Nexus FEC modules and automatically opening tickets on problems. These were challenging with some of our other tools. Now we can address these types of issues before they cause an outage –it is even better than a faster resolution. It is true proactive outage prevention.” In addition to automation, Entuity’s breadth of analytics adds a layer of historical data that helps Ensono understand, evaluate and resolve the underlying reasons that are causing network or application issues. All this arms Ensono with a foundation for dependably introducing new services and responding to customer needs more quickly. Ensono is looking forward to its partnership with Entuity. “Our Ensono team has already suggested a couple of features to Entuity that were needed, and we quickly received patches to accommodate these requirements,” said O’Brien. This close collaboration will accelerate network efficiency, performance and innovation while at the same time keep Ensono client satisfaction at high levels.

“We are starting to see cases where Entuity is routinely finding and managing things like Cisco Nexus FEC modules and automatically opening tickets on problems. These were challenging with some of our other tools.”
– Sean O’Brien, Senior Manager – Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring, Ensono

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Electric Car Service Gets a Charge Out of Entuity

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 22:12:24 +0000

A developer of battery-charging and battery-switching services for electric cars designed an intelligent infrastructure to support the use of electric vehicles in a real world environment, without affecting existing electrical infrastructure. From charge spots, in-car software, and operations centers, to switch stations, cars and batteries, the company created a seamless operational environment for EVs around the globe. Striving to make electric car travel as commonplace as existing standard gas vehicles, the company rapidly moved towards that goal.

Overview

Customer Size:

500 Employees

Countries Supported:

Australia, Denmark, Israel, Netherlands, & United States

Network Management Software:

Entuity Network Management & Analytics

Setting the Standard for an Entirely New Automotive Segment
An electric car service company needed to support their pioneering global research, development and operational teams with always-on network services. Initially network management was accomplished through a mix of disparate tools which did not provide the proactive or efficient network management capabilities that were critical to their business growth and success.

Perhaps the greatest IT engineering challenge for any growing company is its ability to respond quickly when adding new services and supporting a growing end-user base. The network in this study was rapidly evolving and had over 180 devices consisting of routers and switches and over 1000 servers.

Eliminate Data Silos and Network Blind Spots

The company knew exactly what their end goals were: proactive monitoring, agile and efficient operations, minimize OPEX, minimize time-to-market—all of these wrapped around a customer-centric IT organization that could deliver reliable IT services globally. These factors contributed to the selection of Entuity Network Management. Entuity enables an all-in-one enterprise network management solution that can easily scale to meet their future expansion requirements. The inherent advantage of an inclusive product ensures more efficiency with a single focal point for management. “The data we receive from Entuity is extremely useful in our day-to-day environment. It covers a range of metrics that we rely on heavily for proactive monitoring. Dynamic maps, custom reports and graphs allow us to better control and manage our network performance for all of our users worldwide,” states the IT Manager at the company. Entuity data assists in planning capacity, keeping OPEX spending at reasonable levels, deploying dependable services and much more.

The electric car services company was forward thinking and designed an integrated Business Service Management (BSM) strategy to connect all their IT functions, for example: CMDB, change management, service desk, data center, application management as well as network infrastructure monitoring. Entuity Network Management incorporates seamlessly into BMC’s BSM platform creating a strong, comprehensive way to feed network infrastructure details into the BSM platform. This integration provides a unified management strategy that fosters faster response times, requires less manual work, improves accuracy and operational efficiency. Applying Entuity network infrastructure data to BMC’s Truesight Operations Management eliminates data silos and network blind spots and ensures high levels of application and network performance. Plus, this out-of-the-box Entuity integration with BMC eliminated the need and cost for developing a complex custom interface.

Custom Dashboards and Integrated NetFlow Saves Time and Effort
This company is taking advantage of a wide range of features found in Entuity. For example, Custom dashboards for business key performance indicators and KPI metrics for every device and interface helps them to understand how the network is performing. Because the company is spread across the globe, real time graphs for traffic volume and utilization are used to adjust the traffic flow where necessary. Additionally, using the Entuity NetFlow application integrated in the Entuity network monitoring solution, they can pinpoint and address Top Talkers that are causing network congestion issues all from the same single pane of glass. No need to jump from network management to a NetFlow application, it is all combined into a single source solution—saving time and utilizing appropriate infrastructure data for a complete management platform. What’s more, historical flow records that are captured aid in planning future network capacity requirements to keep the network at reliable performance levels.

Accelerating Operational Efficiency
Technology startups understand the need for operational efficiency as most employees wear multiple hats. The business fully exploits Entuity automation features to deliver accurate topology maps through continuous auto-discovery so they can understand what is on their network without expending any manual effort. Gathering appropriate network data is routine with preset report generation capabilities. These out-of-the-box reports are a time saver with vital network health details, capacity reports, performance by location, spare ports, and many more. “It is very easy to capture the data we need to be effective in managing our network,” states the IT manager, “and we get a lot of value from custom dashboards. Entuity helps us manage the network to reflect our unique needs.”

“We rely on Entuity to help us get through the rigors of everyday network monitoring with the confidence to proactively handle events, maximize our IT staff and supply outstanding service delivery to our entire company”
– Head IT Manager

The company finds Entuity’s advanced automation features on the consolidated event console extremely helpful for looking at particular device changes. It’s easy to drill down and analyze what is happening with devices for a rapid resolution. Using Entuity, they have now reduced the time it takes to resolve events by 40% or more.

The Network Achieves All Customer Centric Goals
“We rely on Entuity to help us get through the rigors of everyday network monitoring with the confidence to proactively handle events, maximize our IT staff and supply outstanding service delivery to our entire company,” says the IT manager. They use tightly integrated netflow, configuration, and physical and virtual monitoring to provide the precise traction required to run an enterprise class network. With critical network visibility and the all in one feature set of Entuity network management, the results is a streamlined way to manage the network. According to the company, “We set out to find a network management solution that would equip us with proactive monitoring to meet the extreme demands of our end users. We needed a way to react to changes quickly and operate efficiently. It’s clear that Entuity has met our stringent requirements, which permits us to effectively meet our customer-centric goals. Entuity keeps us on track.”

“The data we receive from Entuity is extremely useful in our day-to-day environment. It covers a range of metrics that we rely on heavily for proactive monitoring. Dynamic maps, custom reports and graphs allow us to better control and manage our network performance for all of our users worldwide.”
– Head IT Manager

About Entuity
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unied enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston.

Discovery: A Growing Business Relies on Entuity.

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 22:01:35 +0000

Overview
Discovery is a global company with ten business units supplying health insurance, car insurance, life insurance and financial services to nearly six million people in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Asia and the USA. Discovery has expanded from being solely a healthcare company to a multifaceted corporation offering innovative services to meet the evolving needs of its clients since its origin two decades ago.

Company Highlights

Company Size: 10,0000+ employees, 10 Business Units

Countries Supported: South Africa, United Kingdom, Asia, United States

Network Management Software: Entuity network management

Business Needs
Discovery’s ongoing expansion was straining its global network infrastructure and services delivery. There are over 10,000+ internal users and an IT staff of approximately 250 including 4 dedicated network engineers. Supporting 10,000+ users is not an easy task. With more than 800 network devices worldwide, Discovery needed a network management solution that could provide critical network visibility to quickly identify network issues. They needed to keep service delivery at high levels to ensure that each business unit remained productive.

Today, Discovery is in the process of moving into a new state-of-the-art facility that will consolidate multiple data centers into a new, single data center in South Africa. The IT team there will see a dramatic increase in the number of monitored devices they will be responsible for when this new data center becomes operational. Their Entuity network management solution will equip them with the ability to keep Discovery’s network reliably operating for the ten business units around the world.

Keeping an Expanding Network Healthy
Growing pains are inevitable when your company is expanding worldwide. The challenge for Discovery was to support their various business units with always-on network services. When your company provides health and financial services there is no room for error. From third-party healthcare providers and end-users to Discovery employees, everyone depends on 24/7 access for health or financial answers. Initially network management was accomplished through a mix of disparate tools, which did not provide proactive alerting or necessary network management capabilities, such as capacity planning, that were critical to Discovery’s business growth and success.

There was limited visibility into how many network devices and links were up, down or experiencing errors. Measuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and latency was also difficult and not fully accurate. The increasing complexity of applications and network expansion was leading to more outages affecting company productivity and escalating capacity issues. The single function, non-integrated network management applications were not effective, efficient or accurate. “Despite the growing demand of applications and various services, without a comprehensive view of our network, our resources were not always being used effectively,” stated Paul Du Plessis, Discovery IT Communications Manager. The Discovery IT team realized that to successfully support the company, it was time for an enterprise class network management solution.

A Powerful Prescription for Maintaining Network Health
Perhaps the greatest IT engineering challenge for any growing company is its ability to respond quickly when adding new services, supporting an increasing end-user base, and supporting new technologies. Discovery was thriving, and the IT organization needed greater network visibility and insight into how the network was being used and how to expand it effectively to provision the company’s rapid expansion. After a thorough evaluation of multiple network management products, Entuity network management was chosen.

Entuity had the broadest and deepest functionality in a single product. Even during the evaluation process, Entuity uncovered some “hidden” issues. For example, high interface utilization on critical links was identified, SDIs were brought to light, traffic patterns were highlighted and the lack of capacity planning was evident. Entuity’s proof of concept showed its ability to function as an enterprise class network management solution through its ease of navigation and all-in-one view, thereby providing an accurate picture of Discovery’s worldwide network. “Without Entuity,” remarked Paul Du Plessis, “we would not have the realtime visibility to ensure our network is supporting the entire corporation.”

“Entuity is quick to respond to our hardware vendor interoperability requests and we appreciate how they continue to adapt to shifts in technology. For us to have a software vendor that always improves its product is instrumental to our continued success as an IT organization.”
– Paul Du Plessis, IT Communications Manager, Discovery

Benefits
The Discovery IT team now has an all-in-one integrated network management solution. The key improvement using Entuity has been in end-user satisfaction levels. Since installing Entuity, the team is able to respond more proactively, which has led to much lower time to event resolution, consistent uptime and in turn, happier customers. The ability to quickly track the root cause of an outage creates less stress for the IT department and improves their own engineer time management. It also makes an obvious difference in the network’s performance. Using Entuity, the IT Operations team estimates it has decreased Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) of problems involving PCs, servers and switches by two-thirds, freeing up valuable resources and increasing productivity.

Improved network management is further achieved with increased visibility to changes in routing neighbors of network devices. This new automatic alerting on changes allows IT to proactively manage any associated detrimental events that might be triggered. Additionally, the alerting, capacity planning, and real-time visibility features provided by Entuity have given the Discovery IT organization:

Enhanced network management efficiency

Accurate data to make smarter decisions

Reduced operational complexity

Key Results Achieved with Entuity Network Management include:

Ease of network scalability and addition of appropriate IT resources for ongoing company expansion

Reduced number of service outages with improved alerting and root cause analysis

Decreased MTTR by two-thirds and increased end-user satisfaction and productivity

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Entuity Delivers a Unified Solution and Proactive Management to Dell Services

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:56:57 +0000

For more than two decades, Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems) has been a worldwide provider of information technology services and business solutions, developing the right experience and expertise by working to keep customers in a variety of industries ahead of the curve. Entuity network management was initially deployed by Perot Systems. Dell Services continues to use Entuity today to manage the networks of its global customer base.

Overview
With more than a thousand customers spanning the globe and in light of the growing popularity of their Advanced Network Monitoring service, Dell Services needed an easily scalable approach to manage an increasing number of customer networks as well as their corporate backbone without additional personnel. Entuity was chosen as their single network monitoring platform.

Business Needs
IT services can be transformative in today’s information economy, delivering a competitive edge to companies who use them effectively to keep businesses solvent and cost effective in tough economic times. But acquiring the skills and expertise to implement and remain current with the abundance of rapidly changing technological solutions can take resources beyond those of even large enterprises.

For more than two decades, Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems) has been a worldwide provider of information technology services and business solutions, developing the right experience and expertise by working to keep customers in a variety of industries ahead of the curve. Central to the technology and business solutions designed and implemented for end customers is the network as it provides the critical connectivity and economy of scale required to deliver IT services. Entuity was initially deployed by Perot Systems. Dell Services continues to use Entuity as one of its key network management solutions for its roster of clients worldwide.

With more than a thousand customers spanning the globe, the scope of many network projects that Dell Services routinely undertakes trumps that of the traditional enterprise. Where a typical enterprise network comprises 20 to 50 devices, Dell Services needed an easily scalable approach to manage nearly 4800 devices without additional personnel. For each new customer, Dell Services must properly plan and configure the customer’s network while ensuring the adequate infrastructure is in place to support current and future needs. With Entuity, Dell Services can tackle the challenge of managing a sizeable number of devices and the exponentially higher number of associated network elements.

An Integrated Approach for Efficiency
Properly provisioned and operating network infrastructure is at the heart of the business solutions Dell Services provides to its customers. Dell Services was in search of a scalable way to provide that infrastructure and also a flexible approach to provide customized network management solutions catering to customer requirements, all without increasing operational costs.

Historically, Dell Services used three separate applications to provide event detection and reporting services. An additional consideration was Dell Services own corporate backbone that was expanding for additional capacity and required a solution that would work for both its own corporate network and those of its customers.

Operating with three separate applications created a number of business challenges. To start, the network operations staff had three different views of network activity to track. Without a single unified view of the network, it was difficult for Dell Services to access a consolidated glimpse of network activity. In addition, each separate application polled the same network devices for similar data, creating redundant traffic on the network, while also affecting the resources of the hardware that was being polled, both of which contributed to overhead costs. Additionally, managing three applications required more administrative effort to support.

The most immediate challenge to Dell Services was its ability to efficiently and effectively service its customers. With a customer base that cuts across many industries and spans the globe, the demands of Dell Services customers are as diverse as its businesses. Dell Services needs to be able to provide network management reports and a guarantee that it will meet stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in various formats. From three platforms, it proved difficult to synchronize the information imperative to meeting SLAs, providing effective fault and performance management and reporting on network activity.

Insight to Resolve More
With Entuity, Dell Services migrated from three different platforms for fault and performance management and reporting to one platform that performed all three functions collectively. These capabilities were available out of the box from Entuity. With Entuity’s flexible, easy-to-use solution for network management, deployment did not require a huge commitment in terms of labor hours from Dell Services. Even better, there was little need for custom adaptations to Entuity, even with the complex requirements of Dell Services network management environment.

“Within days, Entuity was up and running and had placed all of Dell Services corporate network and those of its 60+ global customers under management,” said Dineta Cooper, lead subject matter expert for Dell Services (Perot Systems) network management. “We were pleased that implementing Entuity did not take an army of technologists to roll out. In fact, the deployment was accomplished with just two people, freeing our other associates to focus on serving clients.”

Dell Services was instantly able to monitor the nearly 4800 network devices that comprised its network, ranging from routers and switches to MPLS networks to firewalls, without a single lapse in network performance. But the true hallmark of technology achievement was the shift in the way network problems were handled.

“Entuity actually created additional work for our staff initially,” said Kristin Morris, manager network management applications for Dell Services (Perot Systems). “Why is that good? Because Entuity proactively highlighted areas of focus to address before they became service impacting issues. This allowed us to ultimately provide better services to our customers. We were confident that Entuity would continue to proactively identify even more opportunities for improvements over time.”

“Within days, Entuity was up and running and had placed all of Perot Systems’ corporate network and those of its 60+ global customers under management. We were pleased that implementing Entuity did not take an army of technologists to roll out. In fact, the deployment was accomplished with just two people, freeing our other associates to focus on serving clients.”
– Dineta Cooper, Lead Network Management Subject Matter Expert, Dell Services (Perot Systems)

Capacity to Scale
As an MSP, Dell Services network management solution is the backbone of its global customers, as well as its own corporate network. The challenge Dell Services faced was one of scalability to provision new services for existing and future customers across its massive network without increasing operational expenses.

The three solutions Dell Services formerly used redundantly polled the network for data. By implementing Entuity, the redundant polling for similar data was eliminated, reducing the management overhead. This in turn reduced the amount of traffic traveling across the network. In addition, potential hardware inefficiencies were reduced by limiting the number of times a piece of hardware was polled for similar data.

Entuity offers network technologists at Dell Services another level of visibility into its infrastructure, actively monitoring, reporting and alerting on the routing protocols connecting its complex and distributed network. Entuity discovers and collects data, presents reports and visualizes active routers for each protocol. Proactive management of these devices is enabled through active notification on routing peer-related events. The centralized information captured within Entuity, along with the graphical visuals in the Connectivity Viewer, help network administrators, architects, and managers understand the topology of routing protocols that improve service delivery, reduce performance degradations and outages and eliminate manual trouble shooting processes. Dell Services uses the BGP routing alerts to identify and isolate MPLS anomalies that previously required manual effort to analyze. Network engineers are alerted to all events, even those that are not service impacting or apparent to the user community. This data can be used to identify and document trends to review with carriers to help improve service delivery.

Dell Services also uses Entuity’s IP SLA module to create synthetic transactions to measure network response time and performance. Entuity analyzes and presents data as meaningful information such as measurement of jitter for streaming audio/video/VoIP, measurement of end-to-end metrics including client-server latency and availability and identification of slow/unreliable hops along a path. These measurements help technicians establish a baseline understanding of network performance and can be correlated to symptomatic events such as slow application response. Entuity proactively alerts on behavioral trends so they can be resolved before service is impacted.

Dell Services customer service expectations and requirements are unique. In provisioning new customers, not only does Dell Services need to establish appropriate SLAs, but they need a reliable way to measure and report compliance. With Entuity’s built-in reporting and data export functionality, Dell Services can document operational level and prove service delivery.

Account teams use Entuity’s capacity planning Heat Map reports to identify when customers are trending towards capacity problems and propose additional capacity. Network teams use router summary reports to establish trending and identify devices with resource trends high-lighting devices that are over or under utilized. This gives them the requisite documentation from a technological perspective to recommend upgrades and accurately and efficiently size new hardware.

“Entuity handles reporting in an innovative way, allowing us to provide exceptional client service” shared Morris. “The software includes a powerful reporting solution, which enables us to interact with the data management core via a web interface and create new reports on the fly. This reporting functionality combines full access to stored data with an extensive variety of presentation styles. We can schedule these reports to be created and automatically delivered or have them generated on demand.”

With recent speed and reliability increases in its wireless mobility solutions, Dell Services has experienced heightened demand for wireless service. Wireless connectivity has quickly become commonplace and a standard feature on many of Dell Services client networks, as well as its own. The flexibility and mobility provided by wireless networking offers great benefits for users and complements existing network infrastructures, but shouldn’t add to the burden of those tasked with its management or require separate processes to maintain. Using the Entuity Wireless Module, Dell Services is able to unify visibility and management of wireless and wired networks to reduce operational expenses and ensure availability of critical wireless access points and controllers for its customers. Entuity’s Wireless Module helps Dell Services technologists from the initial infrastructure assessment to the ongoing management of its wireless devices, of which there may be thousands at any one location.

Entuity automatically discovers and monitors all wireless access points and controllers in use at the customer facility. By automating the process, the completed survey is done in hours versus the days it would have previously required. Without manual intervention, the accuracy of results is improved to facilitate informed technology architecture planning and budget-friendly hardware procurement advice. Within seconds, Entuity can produce reports on the details and distribution of wireless devices in a customer environment.

“Entuity actually created additional work for our staff initially. Why is that good? Because Entuity proactively highlighted areas of focus to address before they became service impacting issues. This allowed us to ultimately provide better services to our customers. We were confident that Entuity would continue to proactively identify even more opportunities for improvements over time.”
– Kristin Morris, Manager Network Management Applications, Dell Services (Perot Systems)

The Benefits
Using Entuity as part of Dell Services Advanced Network Monitoring service has delivered business benefits from both an operational cost and a revenue potential perspective. The most immediate impact to Dell Services bottom line was the reduction in operational costs by consolidating three separate applications to one. This not only reduced software and maintenance costs, but also the training costs associated with keeping personnel proficient. The streamlined system also increased the number of devices that network operations personnel can each effectively manage, reducing the overall salary expense as fewer support staff are now required when new customers are added.

Eliminating the redundant polling created by three separate systems not only reduces the management traffic overhead required to ensure proper operation, but also increases the available capacity to customers. The perceived performance increases have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. This spare capacity also allows Dell Services to add more customers without a corresponding increase in hardware infrastructure, thereby minimizing capital expense while maximizing revenue potential.

Winning and Keeping Customers
In the managed services business, price and expertise land the customer, but continued delivery on agreed service levels keeps the customer and ensures satisfaction. The flexible reporting available in Entuity enables Dell Services to provide detailed and customizable reports on each customer’s unique key performance requirements. It helps prove to customers the value they are receiving each and every day.

Capacity to serve the current and future requirements of a growing customer base brings added value. As more enterprises are choosing the cost-effective flexibility of managed services, more are turning to Dell Services for its demonstrated expertise in providing technology and business solutions. The advanced capabilities in Entuity help Dell Services ensure that customer networks are optimally deployed and efficiently performing. The extensive infrastructure data and forensics delivered by Entuity help account teams proactively avoid service interruptions and identify opportunities to propose (and justifiably prove) additional capacity or hardware upgrades that will positively impact the customer’s service levels.

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Major Card Services Provider Optimizes Network Performance with Entuity

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:54:31 +0000

Overview
As one of the largest high street banks and mortgage companies in Britain, this major company provides a range of classic Gold and Platinum credit cards, as well as affinity and lifestyle cards for a wide range of organizations.

Since card processing occurs across several distributed locations, this Card Services Provider needed a solution to optimize its network to improve efficiencies and quickly and easily incorporate new functionality. Entuity was chosen to re-allocate equipment, improve MTTR, and receive early warning of problems to prevent impact to service delivery.

Network Performance Optimization
With credit card processing handled in several distributed locations across the UK, a major Card Services Provider needed a network management solution that could not only improve processing efficiency by optimizing their current network, but also allow the company to incorporate new network functionality easily and fast. The chosen solution had to be able to handle very aggressive deadlines, provide fully integrated and comprehensive functionality and permit minimal network slowdown during deployment.

“We implemented Entuity within hours. And because it required very little maintenance or training, it meant that almost from the get-go we could utilize junior staff for troubleshooting tasks,” said a Network Services Manager for the company. “Before Entuity, these tasks had required much more senior attention before. The product showed a return almost immediately: it identified a server issue where incorrect network interface settings were causing many batch processing jobs to take up to eight hours to complete. After identification, processing time was trimmed to a mere 30 minutes.”

Spare Ports
Another clear immediate benefit was in switched port management. The team can easily auto-discover all of the switched ports already deployed within the network and not yet being used. This enables management either quickly and accurately to reallocate ports (saving the manual effort traditionally associated with port identification) or put back unnecessary (and costly) equipment purchases.

The network team knows that it will always face aggressive deadlines in which to implement new network projects, particularly those that have a direct impact on network performance. A recent example of this was the requirement to serve video across the corporate LAN. “Entuity optimizes our network in performance and capacity terms, automatically identifying errors and providing early warning of any over utilization that will impact service delivery.”

Reporting Benefits
The network operations team also benefits from the product’s reporting functionality that provides a real understanding of network performance, including network utilization and availability. Entuity identifies where faults and bottlenecks occur and how well each is managed. The product provides a simple and automated method to generate these reports, and provides the service level information they require.

Final Results
The Discovery IT team now has an all-in-one integrated network management solution. The key improvement using Entuity has been in end-user satisfaction levels. Since installing Entuity, the team is able to respond more proactively, which has led to much lower time to event resolution, consistent up-time and in turn, happier customers.

The ability to quickly track the root cause of an outage creates less stress for the IT department and improves their own engineer time management, it also makes an obvious difference in the network’s performance. Using Entuity, the IT Operations team estimates it has decreased Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) of problems involving PCs, servers and switches by two-thirds, freeing up valuable resources and increasing productivity.

“We implemented Entuity within hours. And because it required very little maintenance or training, it meant that almost from the get-go we could utilize junior staff for troubleshooting tasks.”
– Network Services Manager

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Buchanan Gains Deep Network Visibility with Help from Entuity

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:48:25 +0000

Founded in 1988, Buchanan Technologies is a technology services corporation that helps its clients successfully navigate the continuing and tremendous shifts in enterprise technology.

Included in Buchanan’s services are complete, turnkey IT solutions offering management and monitoring of business IT infrastructure and applications to enterprise organizations in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Buchanan’s core principles and beliefs guarantee that its clients always remain at the center of everything it does. In keeping with this commitment, the company’s managed services group deployed Entuity Network Management. With the help of Entuity, Buchanan is now able to deliver the network visibility needed to ensure that its clients’ networks are performing at peak efficiency and availability.

If you are interested in discussing Buchanan Managed Services using Entuity, check out at Buchanan.com.

At A Glance

Customer Details: Privately held, 250+ Employees, Contractors and Solution Architects, 110+ Global Customers

Network Management Software: Entuity Network Management for BMC TrueSight Operations Management

Other Integrations: BMC Remedy

Priority #1: Customer Satisfaction
Buchanan’s mission is to partner with businesses that benefit operationally and financially from the use of its services. Its teams support specific technologies as well as the business processes that keep its clients’ businesses running smoothly.

In keeping with their fundamental values, Buchanan employs and develops a diverse and experienced team of consultants, engineers and architects. This allows Buchanan to guarantee that all of its strategies and activities are focused on one objective: to serve the best interests of its clients.

The Main Challenge: Limited Visibility
To maintain its high standards of customer service and to be a true partner to its clients, Buchanan was searching for a new network monitoring tool that would provide a more superior view into its clients’ networks. It needed to be a bona fide enterprise-class solution that would deliver fast access to detailed information about network devices and enable Buchanan to proactively manage its customers’ networks and fix issues rapidly.

The company’s previous network management tool was limited in technology and would only allow it to ping a device to determine whether that device was up or down. This meant it was limited to only the information the vendor of that device was providing. In addition, the prior tool did not offer the reporting capabilities needed to validate service levels to its customers.

According to Darvey Lavender, Director Client Services for Buchanan: “The service value we offer our customers is being an extension of their IT team. We allow them to focus on the internal goals of their organization—moving their business forward, while we ensure that their systems are up and running and their end-users are online. We needed a network management tool that offered a higher level of visibility, allowing us to support our customers at the highest level.”

Why was Entuity Selected?
The Buchanan team first heard about Entuity from one of its very large managed services customers. Part of Buchanan’s role was to support this customer’s Entuity implementation in its network environment. Having had direct experience with Entuity, the team eventually decided to evaluate and ultimately implement it for monitoring all of its client networks.

Entuity met the challenge: providing quick accessibility and deep visibility into network devices. With Entuity, the Buchanan team now gets streaming information and more detailed operational characteristics that tell them what’s really happening inside the devices it monitors. It uses this information for the benefit of its customers, for example, showing them whether a device has pending issues, or recommending when they may need to upgrade a device or increase capacity levels. Entuity’s root cause capabilities are another big benefit for Buchanan, offering a better understanding of the “root cause” of issues and pinpointing the exact location for fast resolution.

According to Lavender: “Entuity provides quick visibility, an expedited alert that issues are either forthcoming or have already happened. It helped place us in a more proactive stance with customers and gave us more diagnostic capability with the devices. That helps us continue to be a great partner to our clients.”

Entuity Reports Shone a Light on Network Information
In addition to improved network visibility, the Buchanan team is extremely pleased with Entuity’s reporting capabilities. In fact, reporting is, alongside visibility, one of Buchanan’s favorite features. It’s imperative to have professional reports for its customers, but with the previous tool this was, according to Lavender, “a challenging and manual process.”

Since installing Entuity, the Buchanan team can report to its customers in a much more granular way about what it’s monitoring, what they see happening on the network thanks to the network topology mapping tools, network flow analytics, and the location of devices. It can create customized reports that are tailored to its customers’ service level agreements, illustrating SLA metrics for both historical and current data. These features have allowed the added benefit of streamlining the number of standard reports.

The team also appreciates the automation aspect of Entuity reports, which enables a more systematic, repeatable method of reporting to customers. “It’s nice to be able to auto-generate required reports using Entuity instead of having cut and paste,” says Lavender. “It’s allowed us to have a more automated process for sharing valuable information with our customers.”

“Entuity enables us to take a proactive stance with our customers by stating, we see this happening, and this is what we need to do to keep it from causing you problems”
– Darvey Lavender, Director of Client Services, Buchanan Technologies

Operational Efficiency Boosts Customer Satisfaction
Improving the operational efficiency of Buchanan’s managed services strengthens the company’s reputation as an expert in their industry and a reliable partner to their customers. It also means the company spends more time satisfying its customers and less time managing its network management product. For example, it no longer has to spend hours trying to get reports to generate correctly.

The new customer onboarding deployment process is also much more efficient. Before Entuity, there was often a lot of “back and forth” with customers about what they needed and when they could get it. With Entuity, the team can go into the environment and define and configure customer devices very easily. Ongoing monitoring is easily achieved and maintained, with Buchanan requiring just one member of staff dedicated to monitoring upwards of ten customer networks.

“We’re able to onboard customers more quickly now,” says Lavender. “We can complete the deployment in a much more streamlined manner and have visibility to new devices right away, where before we had much more man power devoted to getting devices online and monitored. Entuity makes the process much simpler.”

The Perfect Balance: Delivering Outstanding Services to Customers while Maintaining Business Profitability
Buchanan’s managed services group was looking for a network management system that would provide the fast, in-depth information it needed to guarantee 100% customer satisfaction. The company not only achieved this with Entuity, but has also benefited from Entuity’s customizable reports that allows it to tailor information to each client’s needs and automatically generate reports on a regular schedule. Buchanan can now rapidly and accurately onboard customer devices, which is another way the company provides the best possible service to its clients.

From a business perspective, the operational efficiency and automation gained from using Entuity also allows Buchanan to maintain a stable profit margin. Customer retention, faster customer onboarding, and reducing staff expenses all contribute to a successful organization that is well poised to support its growing customer base in the years to come.

“The network is one of those very difficult areas that not many people understand. When things happen, it’s always, well, ‘what caused that?’ Entuity enables us to take a proactive stance with our customers by stating, we see this happening, and this is what we need to do to keep it from causing you problems. Since we started using Entuity, customer satisfaction has definitely increased across the board.”
– Darvey Lavender, Director of Client Services, Buchanan Technologies

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.

Airport Company Soars to Record Heights With Help of New IT Technologies

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:39:55 +0000

A major South African airport company needed an enterprise-class network management solution that could handle the challenge of helping them manage the millions of passengers and thousands of flights passing through airports across the country each year. Upgrading to a new solution became a critical priority in anticipation of the huge influx of football fans and tourists that would be visiting South Africa for the 2010 World Cup. The company chose NetSpeed Technologies for their networking expertise and Entuity for its proven ability to provide exactly what they needed: proactive management, IT resource efficiency, flawless technology rollouts, and outstanding service around the clock.

Highlights

Increased IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding the guaranteed objective

Enhanced Help Desk call resolution with meaningful alarms, improving the ability to serve members

Improved operational efficiency

Leveraged intelligent reporting to improve network utilization

Improved relationships with telecom carriers and ISPs, increasing end-to-end performance and availability

Prevented service disruptions

No Margin for Error

Managing a nation’s aviation infrastructure is no mean feat, especially when the world’s largest sporting showpiece, the 2010 Football World Cup, is not only standing on the doorstep but ringing the bell. The airport company that is the subject of this case study, ensures that South Africa’s airports run smoothly, and has done so for years. Its responsibilities extend beyond the maintenance of existing infrastructure. Further development of new and existing airports requires rigorous planning — and state-of-the-art technology — where there is no margin for error. The company supports over 98% of the country’s commercial air traffic. The extent of the growth it has experienced, and the company’s reliance on technology, has stretched their IT infrastructure.

Every year, their network of 10 world-class airports processes more than 36 million passengers and 291 thousand aircraft landings from nearly 50 international destinations, connecting South Africa with the world. World Cup 2010 will be the acid test for their aviation infrastructure management capabilities. The huge influx of football fans and other tourists visiting South Africa in 2010 will rely on outstanding airport services.

Thunderous Growth-Gusting Challenges

The company required a massive IT upgrade to facilitate business growth and deliver both internal IT services and efficient external services to commuters passing through South Africa’s airport network. The new technology needed to be installed without any disruption to service delivery. However, the existing IT management tools did not provide the ability to plan, analyse, and ensure that the new deployments were effectively and efficiently brought on line without service disruptions.

Before engaging with NetSpeed, the company was using a number of disparate IT and network management tools, which did not provide any consolidated performance management data. They wanted to improve its ability to analyse trends, plan capacity upgrades and automatically link a given fault to a specific piece of infrastructure. They wanted control of its entire IT infrastructure via a single configuration management database that met the requirements of the ISO telecommunications network management model for fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security management (FCAPS).

Strategic Objectives Eliminates IT Holding Patterns

The airport company needed to migrate from reactive network management to proactive network management in order to be more cost-effective, productive and leverage maximum value from its IT resources. The IT department sought a network management solution to reflect both this IT proactive strategy and accommodate their explosive growth. After evaluating a number of providers, they selected NetSpeed Technologies for its deep expertise in the enterprise management area. NetSpeed’s network management solution was Entuity. Entuity’s range of capabilities assisted the IT department to improve operations efficiency, protect critical services needed 24/7, and roll out new technologies without disruption. NetSpeed Technologies was chosen based on a 15 year successful track record with valuable experience in the enterprise management sphere. In addition to specialised product knowledge, NetSpeed adds industry knowledge for network management solution comparisons and an in-depth knowledge of infrastructure management practices.

NetSpeed took the time to understand the existing issues and delivered a scalable network management solution that offered the effectiveness and efficiency the airport demanded. The airport company’s network supports 10 airports around South Africa, and is constantly expanding. NetSpeed successfully deployed Entuity within a month, providing a real-time, integrated network management data to ensure 24/7 service reliability reducing performance holding patterns.

Navigating The Network Proactively

During a thorough proof of concept phase, NetSpeed demonstrated the solution’s capabilities within hours. Ultimately Entuity was implemented on time and within budget. The implementation included on site training for the company’s staff and other relevant airport suppliers in all provinces. NetSpeed is also providing ongoing support and maintenance for the solution. Entuity’s comprehensive data is now being used for fault, capacity, asset, performance and security management as well as reports across their nationwide network delivering proactive management capabilities. Additionally, Entuity has been integrated with the company’s existing help desk solutions enabling fast resolutions using accurate data.

While Entuity includes several different components, the solution remains a single integrated platform, with all network management aspects visible via a single user interface. NetSpeed’s partnership with Entuity enabled the airport to benefit from best-in-class software and accompanying implementation skills.

“Dramatic results have been achieved—proactive management, IT resource efficiencies, flawless new technology rollouts; they all equip [the airport] to deliver outstanding services 24/7. Their IT infrastructure is truly a cornerstone in keeping them successful.” Julian Renecke Director, NetSpeed Technologies

Taking Off Without The Turbulence

The solution is used throughout the company, and monthly reports provide both operational and executive information. The company’s ability to manage its IT infrastructure is no longer hindered by technology silos and accurate data can now be shared by all providing insight into key IT infrastructure devices and performance metrics.

Greater integration and automation of routine tasks has led to less human intervention during the reporting process, and has allowed IT staff to be more productive. The roll out of Entuity is helping to keep the company a market leader by maximizing the benefits delivered by their IT infrastructure.

These benefits include:

Consistent, reliable delivery of critical IT services

Proactive visibility to correct performance issues before they impact the network

Automation of IT processes to improve accuracy of information

Freeing up IT professionals to focus on more important tasks.

According to the IT Infrastructure Manager at the company: “The solution delivered by NetSpeed is helping [us] to monitor our IT infrastructure so we can continue developing world-class, secure and safe airport experiences for our customers. The complex services that operate our airports demand 24/7 network access. NetSpeed and Entuity have assisted the IT team to have insight into network performance and availability to a level that has never been possible for us. Problem resolution is now greatly enhanced due to this insight. NetSpeed Technologies has helped us maximise the benefits of the Entuity solution with their professionalism and outstanding technical expertise. We look forward to the future with our network foundation solidly in place to support [our] entire business.”

Additional benefits have included greater efficiency in terms of network port availability. A labor-intensive exercise, their previous network management tool did not allow for proactive management of network availability, meaning spare switches were in constant circulation to accommodate spare capacity needs.

The Entuity solution also has a unique “Green IT” component that addresses power utilization and consumption, and server utilization. This Green IT module informs management of power consumption and server usage consolidation opportunities on the network and provides implementation methodologies to realize power related savings.

“NetSpeed and Entuity have assisted the IT team to have insight into network performance and availability to a level that has never been possible for us. Problem resolution is now greatly enhanced due to this insight.”
IT Infrastructure Manager

The airport company and NetSpeed enjoy an excellent relationship based on the solution NetSpeed has provided, supplying the company with greatly enhanced enterprise management capacity. Says Julian Renecke, director, NetSpeed Technologies: “Speed, accuracy and agility are vital when managing a network that supports 10 airports and their associated passengers. As a team, NetSpeed Technologies has enabled [the company] to deploy a network management solution, Entuity, that really meets these requirements. Dramatic results have been achieved—proactive management, IT resource efficiencies, flawless new technology rollouts; they all equip [the company] to deliver outstanding services 24/7. Their IT infrastructure is truly a cornerstone in keeping them successful and we are proud to be their ongoing technology partner.”

About Entuity
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unied enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston.

Texas Tech Storage Maintenance Case Study

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:38:15 +0000

Dustin J., Assistant Director of Technology Operations and Systems Management (TOSM) at the Texas Tech University System (TTUS), was faced with a dilemma. His relationship with Dell Inc., the OEM, was solid and the warranty maintenance for the servers and storage in his data centers was satisfactory.

However, support for his legacy server, storage and data center infrastructure assets were more difficult to obtain. His datacenter is 350 miles from the nearest metropolitan area, and third-party service providers he talked to could not supply the cost-effectiveness and flexibility that he needed. To avoid replacing expensive devices prematurely, he needed extraordinary maintenance and support.

Texas Tech is a major comprehensive research university and medical institution that provides higher education to liberal arts, technical and medical students in several locations across Texas. Mr. J.’s group of 14 full-time IT staff members supports hardware hosting and facilities management for servers and storage devices for the TTU system and its institutions.

TOSM’s responsibilities include server and storage hosting, server management, local and remote server backups and database hosting and management. His group is also responsible for hosting the ERP system shared by Texas Tech University and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, which includes the student, finance, financial aid and human resource systems for those institutions.

Extend Hardware Lifecycle

Mr. J.’s role at Texas Tech grew with his department, which transformed from a mainframe support group managing a mainframe and four servers ten years ago to today’s distributed computing system of more than 600 servers and more than 650TB of storage. The Texas Tech University System operates this hardware from one main data center on the Lubbock campus and leverages a smaller data center used for disaster recovery about ten miles away.

Dell, the provider of their co-branded fiber-channel SAN devices, claimed that at five years old, the university’s storage equipment was at the end of its supportable life. Mr. J. disagreed, estimating it had two or three more years of life. He knew keeping the SANs in service and avoiding the cost of replacing these assets would require cost-effective, flexible and responsive support.

In what Mr. J. described as “perfect timing,” a call from Park Place started a relationship that provided just the services that the university required. These services enabled Texas Tech to reduce IT storage maintenance costs while meeting their needs for support responsiveness.

“We operated an expensive storage infrastructure that had a longerlife than manufacturers were willing to support. Park Place helped us avoid pushing our SANs out the door at the end of 5 years.”

Dustin J.
Assistant Director of Technology Operations and System Management

Case Study Key Points

Texas Tech retains control of equipment lifecycle

Reduced storage maintenance costs

Provided an alternative for end of service life equipment

Reduce Storage-related Maintenance Costs

By storing and monitoring the inventory of spare server, SAN and tape library parts onsite, Park Place enabled the IT group with the ability to address issues immediately as opposed to waiting for parts to be shipped and/or delivered from other locations. Compared to costs of the previous third-party service provider, the resulting savings of maintenance costs were up to 50% less for specific devices.

Defer Costly Capital Expenditure

The IT group’s post-warranty agreement with Park Place enabled the IT group to extend the useful life of its storage assets and depreciate related costs for up to three more years than was previously possible. This delayed the need to incur infrastructure replacement costs of close to $300,000.

Ensure IT Support Responsiveness

Because university operations required uninterrupted services, the university’s location made third-party maintenance and support a concern to Texas Tech. Other third-party services, which required offsite parts storage, were located in larger cities more than 300 miles away. These distances would result in 3-to-12-hour response times for parts that weren’t stocked in the local parts depot.

Mr. J. was pleased to learn that Park Place would store spare parts at the Texas Tech facility, which eliminated lengthy response times. On the rare occasions when the IT group needed a specialized part that was not in local inventory, a Park Place engineer would fly or drive the part to the university for delivery.

Incorporate Third-Party Maintenance Into Support

The ability to provide just the right amount and types of support throughout the SAN lifecycle was another valuable benefit of Park Place services.

A Dell Platinum agreement ensured that Dell engineers provided some support after its OEM hardware warranties expired. Mr. J. and Park Place’s Key Account Manager, worked together to design a flexible, customized agreement that suited specific Texas Tech requirements. Under the new agreement, troubleshooting duties would be assumed by the OEM and/or Park Place. Park Place services filled in the gaps, replacing failed parts quickly and providing qualified personnel for parts replacement when necessary.

Build a Relationship with a Vendor They Can Trust

Park Place Technologies’ account executive has also become a trusted advisor of the IT department. “Our Park Place Technologies account executive and I have a had a good working relationship,” Mr. J said. “It’s good to know that I can ask for an opinion and trust the answer to be impartial. I like to be loyal, and I like it when our account exec can be the same with us. I looked forward to building a good relationship with Park Place, and I think we achieved that.”

“Our Park Place Technologies account executive and I have a had a good working relationship. It’s good to know that I can ask for an opinion and trust the answer to be impartial. I like to be loyal, and I like it when our account exec can be the same with us. I looked forward to building a good relationship with Park Place, and I think we achieved that.”

Dustin J.
Assistant Director of Technology Operations and System Management

About Park Place Technologies

Park Place Technologies is your global data center and networking optimization firm. Powered by the world’s largest on-the-ground engineering team, a robust group of advanced engineers and our fully staffed, 24x7x365 Enterprise Operations Center, we offer a robust portfolio of IT solutions to optimize networking and data center Uptime and performance. Our services include third-party data center hardware maintenance, data center professional services, infrastructure managed services, network performance monitoring and IT hardware sales. Through our unique and fully integrated DMSO (Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize) approach, customers enjoy streamlined infrastructure monitoring and management, cost efficiencies, less chaos, and faster mean-time-to-resolution – ultimately providing the freedom to think bigger. Park Place’s industry-leading and award-winning services include Park Place Hardware Maintenance, Park Place Professional Services, Park Place Managed Services, Entuity Software and Curvature Hardware sales.

Park Place is a portfolio company of Charlesbank Capital Partners and GTCR.

Building an Enterprise Network Management System

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:30:24 +0000

A lot of different network management solutions exist today, yet some are on a completely different level than others. Rudimentary solutions with some basic features may work for smaller networks, but an enterprise-level NMS may be what your company needs.

So what are you looking for in an NMS? Use the diagrams below to help you determine what level of network management may be right for you.

Do You Really Need Enterprise Class Network Management?

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:06:57 +0000

This paper begins with an overview of the basic categories of network management products, followed by a discussion of the key features of a great enterprise management system and the signs that a business may be ready for an enterprise-class solution.

The Goal of Network Management
The ultimate goal of network management is to lower risk, eliminate downtime and slowdowns, minimize variability, and actively support business expansion. The amount of business conducted that doesn’t rely on available and performing networks is small and shrinking. A good network management system is an indispensable asset that protects the company from slowdowns and catastrophic outages that would have major business impact. But what kind of network management product do you need? Has your network reached the point where enterprise class features are necessary? If so, what does great enterprise network management software look like?

The Network Management Landscape
Network management products typically fall into three basic categories.

Free Tools
There are free tools, some of which are basic versions of the above SMB products. These usually require manually loading devices into the system and offer a basic level of pinging or SNMP polling. They provide little to no elemental performance data and may offer rudimentary events, such as up/down device status. These tools are best suited for small networks of about 20 to 30 devices.

Intermediate SMB
At the next level are low-end to intermediate SMB solutions. Like framework solutions, they involve multiple products and/or “add-ons” that require at least some integration. They usually come with a low initial price tag and cover a range of functional areas such as discovery, inventory, and events, and, in intermediate solutions, some level of autodiscovery, performance, flow, and technical reporting or graphing capabilities. Data collected by these products is not as deep as that of enterprise class solutions, although some can be extended through programming. These may be effective products for smaller networks, but as networks scale bottlenecks may occur, especially in those designed with a central database.

Enterprise Class Solution
Enterprise class solutions let you manage the latest technologies and devices. These products provide sophisticated features for all of the requisite network monitoring functions, including detailed discovery and auto-discovery, inventory, events root cause analysis (with features such as downstream event suppression and rules), deep elemental and flow monitoring, performance, topology, configuration, and technical and business-focused reports and dashboards.

This category includes “legacy” framework solutions, which comprise multiple point products that must be individually integrated and maintained. It also includes “all-in-one” solutions where all (or most) functionality is embedded in a single software stream, with limited or no integrations and simpler scaling depending on the product’s architecture. Both framework and all-in-one enterprise solutions offer unlimited scalability, although all-in-one solutions tend to be less labor intensive due to their more unified designs.

Evaluating Network Management Products
Many IT directors evaluate network management products without a strategy, often considering a broad mix of free tools, low-end to intermediate SMB products, and enterprise class solutions at the same time. That’s like going car shopping and looking at a Yugo, a Porsche, and a Sherman tank. It begs the question: what are you going to do with this vehicle: pick up your children from school (safe car), take your mother-in-law to the hairdresser (cheap car), invade a small country (massive weapon), or race in the Indy 500 (fast car)?

Let’s look more closely at enterprise class. What does that mean, and is it for you? Not everyone needs enterprise level network management. If you have a network of only a dozen devices that are all stored in the same closet, you likely don’t need an enterprise solution. Free or SMB tools will suffice. They’ll tell you if the device is up or down in a simple list, and if you need to reboot a device, you simply go to the closet and turn it off and on again.

The first sign that you need an enterprise class network management solution is when it is really important that the network be continually up, but you can no longer draw a picture of your network on a whiteboard. When a network gets to be a few hundred devices or larger, you can no longer completely understand it. Therefore, you can no longer troubleshoot it in your head. This is when you need a management solution that can “crawl” the network and do it for you.

There are fundamental capabilities you should expect from an enterprise class network management solution as outlined in the next sections.

Enterprise-Class Network Management Solution

Discovery of Device Inventory and Topology
You cannot be expected to manually load the network device inventory into a network management system. It must auto-discover what you have, and do so continually. Networks change. Frequently. Furthermore, it must also discover the topology of the network, not require you to manually input what you think is how the network is connected. This sounds pretty basic, but it’s surprising how many SMB solutions cannot do this.

Root Cause Analysis
Lower end products are “red light / green light” products: they tell you what is up and what is down, in a list. Lists are useful when there are only a dozen or so devices in the network, but when there are hundreds or thousands of devices, lists are useless. You need a solution that not only tells you that something is wrong, but also tells you where the problem is. Dozens of network devices may be unreachable, but there is likely only one that is the true cause of the problem. This is why topology is so important.

Performance
A network that’s performing poorly is actually worse than a network that’s down. If your network is down, you go do something else to be productive. If a network is just very slow, you sit in front of your computer waiting for things to happen, wasting time and getting frustrated. A good enterprise-class network management system monitors the performance of the network at the device level and with an eye toward application flow as well.

Configuration
Though it’s widely accepted as truth that 90% of the problems on a network occur as a result of someone changing something, it’s remarkable how few network management solutions integrate device configuration change management into their solutions. It’s either a “bolt-on” afterthought or it’s completely missing. Network change management is no longer a separate solution. It’s a part of every-day operations.

Reporting
A management solution is only as good as the information you can get out of it. Every IT department must justify themselves to the senior management of the company (and to their customers). That means they must prove to their constituents that they’re providing the service to which they committed. Different “customers” want to see data at different levels of technical complexity, and a good network management system allows them to easily create and view appropriate dashboards and create reports at the CIO level, as well as at the technical user level.

Service Level Monitoring
You can think just of managing components: how they interrelate, how they’re connected, their health, and so on, but grouping those components and monitoring them as a service to meet SLAs and/ or ensure that end user needs are being met is what ultimately matters.

Monitoring at the service level is especially important for large networks where you can no longer keep track of every component in your head. In larger networks, appreciating the business relevance of each component means you must be able to monitor them as sub-components working together to deliver a service.

Proactive Management
An enterprise-class network management system warns you before the fact that you have a problem. Lower-end tools tell you that something has gone wrong after the fact. This is not acceptable for mission-critical networks. An enterprise-class management solution will tell you things like the secondary power supply on your core router has failed and you are running on your primary, or the temperature on this switch is rising and the fan is failing—at this rate, it will overheat tomorrow. Issues are identified before they become problems.

Intelligent Event Management
As data grows, so do the problems that accompany it. An enterprise-level business will produce far more data than any network engineer can handle, threatening to overwhelm them with alert storms. But for the most accurate insight into the network’s operations, you need all of that data, as well as comprehensive categorization of events far beyond a simple ‘up/down’ status. Enterprise network management software will make sense of this vast sea of data and reduce the noise to a manageable volume displaying what needs to be seen, without engineers having to sift through to find the most important issues.

Technology-friendly
It’s not just network size and distribution that is growing, but also the sophistication of the technology and protocols that keep the network running. As data and service demands increase, more technologies are required to keep an eye on how your network is functioning. However, because of scaling and resource issues, network management tools aimed at small businesses will be unable to cover the same degree of complexity that an enterprise solution can. High-end enterprise network management solutions can offer a host of crucial monitoring technologies for flow, NBAR, SDN and the cloud, to name but a few. These will only become more prevalent and therefore vital to ensuring excellent network performance.

Machine Learning
Though not yet mature, machine learning represents the next generation of technologies that will help the network engineer keep their network running. It is part of the current trend, embodied by methodologies such as AIOps, that employs technology in a capacity to assist and augment the human in their work. Big data has long exceeded the capacities of any human analytics, and so enterprise network management software now provides machine-based analytics to enhance both the accuracy and productivity of the people in the network operations center. Machine learning can help move a network team away from descriptive and predictive analytics towards a model of prescriptive analytics, where tools can help prescribe actions in the face of multiple future outcomes.

“Monitoring at the service level is especially important for large networks where you can no longer keep track of every component in your head. In larger networks, appreciating the business relevance of each component means you must be able to monitor them as sub-components working together to deliver a service.”

Automation and Device Support
A lot of this comes down to automation. Lower-end tools require you to manually control individual device settings, touch off reports, and load information into them. When you have a network of 10,000 devices, this is not an option. You need a network management system that automatically tracks your network inventory, runs regularly scheduled (and previously defined) reports, monitors and alerts on performance thresholds, and determines the root cause of problems.

There’s another issue that needs to be considered: device support. Lower end products don’t really dig into the network inventory since they don’t track performance or specific status of devices under management. They simply report that the device is responding or not responding. But higher order management products go into great depth of device understanding. When a network vendor comes out with a new device, the enterprise class managers need to add detailed support for that new device.
Unfortunately, the hardware vendors don’t necessarily ask the software management vendors what their release schedules are and then sync to them. It’s important to ask a network management vendor how long it takes to add support for a newly released device.

Finally, there is the issue of operation. All this functionality needs to be usable, not just available. The product needs to be easily installed, quickly learned, and integrated in a cohesive whole.

Network Managment Misconceptions: Issue 3

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 19:07:33 +0000

Working with customers of varying sizes and industries, Entuity has amassed significant experience in identifying and diagnosing network risk factors. Even companies who had implemented what they thought were proactive policies were surprised and blind sided by what Entuity network management software found lurking just below the surface of their networks. The basis for most issues was that the companies simply did not know enough about their network’s health and were unaware of the impending danger. This paper is the third in a series where we look at common misconceptions about network management through the real-life experiences of various companies. The aim of each issue is to bring to light network risk factors, quantify those risks with examples, and—most importantly—give you the prescription to keep your network from becoming terminal to your business.

SLAs: Carrot or Stick?

Network instability has a direct, negative impact on service level agreements to the detriment of both the provider and the recipient of the service. And so, an agreed upon level of service is determined, contracted, measured, and billed: deliver as contracted and the provider will get paid and there will be no penalties. Better yet, deliver above agreed levels and there could be performance bonuses.

On the other hand, if service levels are not met, the penalties can be severe. As with network crashes, the likelihood of a service being completely down is relatively small, but even intermittent interruptions can cause huge penalties come billing time.

Either approach—carrot or stick—is common with managed service providers (MSPs) and finding a way to consistently deliver a win-win for customers and service providers is very important.

MSP Feels the Pain

SLA penalties as well as operational expenses were concerns for an international MSP as they were growing and winning new customers globally.

With their former management toolset and methods of work, one network engineer was required for every ten new customers added. Their use of several management tools led to silo-based management, which became increasingly ineffective, raising costs for staffing, training, integration, operations, and maintenance. Naturally, this made it harder for the MSP to guarantee SLA levels that would meet their customers’ requirements and put them at increasing risk of penalty.

As a result, they decided to look for a solution that would simplify and unify infrastructure monitoring with a single software product that would improve the efficiency of their operations and provide clear reports that they could use to share SLA metrics with customers.

Entuity Decreases Operational Costs

Following an extensive evaluation, the MSP chose Entuity as their network management solution. It was the only solution that not only met their technical requirements but allowed them the deployment flexibility required in a service provider environment.

With new methodologies based on Entuity, the MSP was able to successfully take on fifty new customers without additional engineering personnel, avoiding more than $500,000 in annual operational expense. These Entuity capabilities have been key to their success:

Flexible License Management/Control. Gives greater control of customer environments and saves on licensing costs by letting providers easily manage and un-manage devices and sub devices.

SLA Reporting. Delivers detailed reports that demonstrate the achievement of SLA targets and provides the option to let customers monitor their services through Entuity in realtime.

Multitenancy. Enables providers to co-locate customers on the same monitoring servers and devices while enabling role-based access to customers, who see only their services.

Elemental Performance. Allows for continuous monitoring of network performance to provide early warnings of degradation using a variety of methods such as SNMP, syslog, LLDP, SONMP, flow, QoS, CDP, IP SLA (DHCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, and Jitter), and more.

Capacity Planning. Provides several capacity planning heat map reports that allow MSPs to track things like port usage and spare capacity, inbound and outbound faults, and memory and CPU utilization

Other Benefits to MSPs

Granular pricing and licensing. Distributed licensing allows for allocating licenses exactly where needed. Flexible licensing structure includes device, object, perpetual, subscription-based, or customized licensing. Ability to un-manage ports means you pay for only what you manage.

Improved price quotes. Automatic discovery of all monitored devices on a network enables quick and accurate identification of the IT infrastructure and, in turn, improves the accuracy of price quotes for MSP services.

Fast and efficient expansion. Entuity delivers class-leading per-server capacity. Scaling is a straightforward matter of adding and linking additional all-in-one servers. It is nearly unlimited and transparent to users.

Larger selection of service offerings. Entuity’s extensible processing engine enables the fast addition of new devices to support rapid roll out of attractive new services.

Protection of premium level customers. Entuity continually monitors the network infrastructure for impacts on business services. This enables proper prioritization of troubleshooting and repair efforts to ensure that premium service customers are least affected.

Summary

The key to resolving the carrot or stick predicament is to avoid it in the first place. With Entuity, the company is now serving their customers—and themselves—even better. They have improved the efficiency of their operations, achieved greater flexibility in taking on new devices, gained deeper network insight, and used customizable SLA reporting capabilities to easily share information with their customers.

ABOUT ENTUITY
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unified enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston.

Network Managment Misconceptions: Issue 2

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 19:04:04 +0000

This paper is the second in a series where we look at common misconceptions about network management through the real-life experiences of various companies. The aim of each issue is to bring to light network risk factors, quantify those risks with examples, and—most importantly—give you the prescription to keep your network from becoming terminal to your business. In this issue, we discuss a common cause of network problems, duplex mismatch, which is potentially disasterous if not identified and corrected quickly.

The Dangers of Network Instability
Businesses today rely on bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive enterprise applications such as VoIP, streaming media, CRM, ERP, PDM, or a multitude of SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com. They build Internet connected trading or partner networks, where any delays in transactions can ripple work stoppages and cost overruns throughout numerous organizations. Discovering the common causes of instability, then, is paramount.

Whether a network serves one building, multiple campuses, or divisions across the globe, instability usually is caused by misconfiguration or unknown change. The dynamic nature of mobility technologies and network access technologies today makes these issues less obvious and more insidious.

Duplex Mismatch Wreaks Havoc on Manufacturing Company
A surprisingly persistent and ubiquitous problem occurring in most networks is duplex mismatch between system NICs and their associated switch port. In more than 90% of the customer proof of concepts Entuity has completed, our network management solution has identified duplex mismatches that had gone unaddressed for weeks or months. The potential impact and ensuing cost is compounded since performance issues from a duplex mismatch often don’t show up under light load. When the load increases and the users are pushing the service heavily, that’s when performance will be massively impacted—just when they need it most. And with the majority of transactions being TCP based, the retry mechanisms will eventually allow the transactions to succeed, but very, very slowly.

Identifying and correcting duplex mismatches is also not a one-time, “set and forget” task. It’s an ongoing issue in the fluid, constantly evolving enterprise infrastructure of today.

Take for example a high-tech manufacturing company that was performing maintenance on their corporate application servers. Their Microsoft Exchange server needed requisite updates of security patches, so the operations team scheduled down time for 3:00 AM on a Saturday to minimize impact on the user community. Patching and updating went without a hitch, the server rebooted successfully, and everyone went home happy.

Come Monday morning however, the moods were not as light. As the wave of business users sat down at 8:00 AM with their cup of coffee to check their email, the operations call-center was flooded with the dreaded complaint, “the network is slow and Outlook says the connection to the Exchange server is lost!” Realizing that most problems come as a result of change, and that the security patches were the last change made to the server, operations staff quickly uninstalled them and rebooted (running without important security patches, which put the network at high risk). But even as the staff began to breath a sigh of relief, the calls kept coming in.

Before the day was out, five IT technicians spent half a day troubleshooting the problem while the user community waited. The final fix was to swap out the server with a spare and relegate the original server to off-hour file backup alone. That also didn’t work. What was wrong? It wasn’t until weeks later when they upgraded their open-source network monitoring tools for Entuity that were they able to immediately identify the true cause of this problem. Uniquely sensitive to duplex mismatch issues, Entuity alerted the network manager that the NIC reverted to halfduplex state during the server reboot, causing incompatibility with the switch. It wasn’t the security patch at all.

How Entuity Identifies Duplex Mismatches
Entuity’s advanced Event Management System (EMS) and comprehensive reporting capabilities allow it identify duplex mismatches in multiple ways. First, if a port duplex setting changes, Entuity raises an event that indicates the change. Second, if the port duplex setting has not changed, Entuity can identify duplex mismatches through a Port Inbound Fault “Incident,” which may point to a possible duplex mismatch. (An Incident is a collection of events that help prevent event storms and add focus to situations that may impact business services.)
Finally, Entuity can identify mismatches using its embedded Report Builder. In the figure below, a tabular inventory report displays only those ports that were configured for half-duplex operation. Given that ports are usually configured for full-duplex operation, this may indicate duplex mismatches, and warrant further investigation.

Summary
For one high-tech manufacturing company, hundreds of hours of IT time uninstalling patches, swapping out the server, and finally reinstalling the patches could have been saved if they had been using Entuity. Entuity’s integrated EMS and deep, actionable reporting capabilities ensure that organizations have the immediate insight they need to quickly get to the real cause of problems before disaster strikes.

ABOUT ENTUITY
Entuity takes the work out of network management. Our highly automated, unified enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects and easily integrates with major frameworks and networking environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements. Founded in 1997 by two senior-level IT executives from the financial industry, Entuity is headquartered in London with US operations in Boston. For more information, visit entuity.com.

ENA Cisco Unified Communications Manager

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:54:40 +0000

Highlights

Monitors of UCM configuration

Retains polled readings for both interactive exploration and reporting purposes

Gathers device pool, IP phone, Gateway, Gatekeeper, Voice-Mail device, Media device, CTIdevice and H.323 device inventory and inventory change details

Generates events against UCM CPU utilization and UCM processes

The Entuity Network Analytics (ENA) Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) module manages Cisco®Unified Communications Managers within the context of the overall network. Configuration change and UCM availability are monitored and alarmed. All UCM information is integrated within Entuity for reporting. The Entuity UCM Module can also be used as part of a VoIP solution.

Managing UCM as part of your Network
Cisco UCM is an IP telephony system, placing calls over the IT network. The UCM managed phones use the same IP network as other network services. The ENA CUCM module allows you to manage UCMs within the network infrastructure.

ENA manages UCMs as an application on a managed host device. These devices are not, by default, auto-discovered but must be added manually. Once added, UCM details are discovered and populated into Entuity.

UCM management conforms to the standard Entuity security model, with permissions being granted through View membership. This integration continues with inventory data & events being displayed within the WebUI, and data being available for Reports.

ENA manages a VOIP network through the integration of different management technologies.

How does ENA manage UCMs?

The ENA UCM Module is a full UCM SNMP integration, presenting all of the data in the UCM MIB including:

Device pools (time zone, tftp servers, regions and inter-region bandwidths)

IP phones, Gateways, Gatekeepers, Voice-Mail devices, Media devices, CTI devices, H.323 devices – configuration and status history

Overall UCM status, e.g. number of each device type (registered, rejected, active, etc.), memory and CPU usage, uptime, process count

UCM process monitoring, both CPU and memory

Availability events for changes in managed device status

Performance events with configurable thresholds

Resource events for the UCM managed host.

ENA UCM Events
All events are generated via polling, although trap based UCM events can be incorporated using ENA’s extensible trap handling system. Threshold based events are configured with a system-wide default but can be overridden at the individual UCM, or UCM component level.

UCM Device Availability Events
ENA UCM monitors the registration to the UCM of CTI, gatekeepers, gateways, H.323, media and voicemail devices, raising events when registration succeeds or fails.

UCM Device Performance Events
ENA UCM raises events when UCM CPU utilization is high, or a process is holding too much memory.

UCM Managed Host Events
ENA manages hosts as devices, and device and port events are raised against hosts, e.g. port unavailability, device congestion. ENA also raises events against specific Managed Host information, e.g. disk space, CPU utilization, memory utilization.

Reporting on UCMs
The ENA UCM integrates with ENA’s existing reporting tools. UCMs are included to device reports, for example:

Device Inventory and Device Module Inventory Reports. You can run these reports as inventory change reports, to identify UCM configuration change.

SLA, Traffic, Fault and Inventory Interactive Queries.

All ENA UCM information is available for the ENA’s Drag and Drop Report builder allowing you to create your own reports.

ENA UCM Module Availability
The ENA UCM Module is available as an add-on license module. ENA runs on Windows Server 2008 (R2 and SP2) and Windows Server 2012, 64-bit; Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Linux, 64-bit; Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and VMware ESX/ESXi Server.

Summary
The ENA UCM Module allows:

ENA UCM Dashboard provides an at-a-glance way to monitor phone services.

Monitoring of UCM configuration

Retention of polled readings for both interactive exploration and reporting purposes

Gathering of device pool, IP phone, Gateway, Gatekeeper, Voice-Mail device, Media device, CTI device and H.323 device inventory and inventory change details

Events generated against UCM CPU utilization and UCM processes

Monitoring of the UCM device performance, raising events when appropriate.

Network Managment Misconceptions: Issue 1

Sam Kim — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:45:27 +0000

Working with customers of varying sizes and industries, Entuity has amassed significant experience in identifying and diagnosing network risk factors. Even companies who had implemented what they thought were proactive policies were surprised and blind sided by what Entuity network management software found lurking just below the surface of their networks. The basis for most issues was that the companies simply did not know enough about their network’s health and were unaware of the impending danger. This paper is the first in a series where we look at common misconceptions about network management through the real-life experiences of various companies. The aim of each issue is to bring to light network risk factors, quantify those risks with examples, and—most importantly—give you the prescription to keep your network from becoming terminal to your business.

The Redundancy Myth
Most IT personnel rightfully associate “stability” with not “crashing.” The industry reflects this way of thinking, standardizing on mean time between failures (MTBF) as an accepted measure of reliability. But with the advances in hardware and communications protocols, natural disasters aside, you may be hard pressed to remember the last time you had a complete network outage. In fact, modern network architectures purposefully build in redundancy to the point that complete outages are largely a thing of the past. A false sense of security, however, can cause you to miss more pervasive and increasingly frequent instability issues.

Financial Services Company Lacks Link-Level Visibility
That was precisely the experience of a major financial services company before using Entuity. They had already invested millions of dollars in a network management framework and spent thousands of labor months deploying the application. Unfortunately, the framework lacked the link-level visibility to indicate that the primary fiber connection between the company’s two main campuses had been down for some time.

The cause? A construction crew installing new utility poles alongside the parking lot severed the backup fiber link. Ordinarily, this would not have been a problem—if, that is, the IT staff had known that the primary link had failed and had been able to fix it right away. But because their framework solution couldn’t see the failure, the staff didn’t know their redundancy had been compromised and that they’d been running over the backup link for weeks before it was severed. In addition to the panic, overtime costs to retrench, and the emergency service call from the fiber repair contractor, this outage impacted millions in financial transactions for this company. In addition, the framework solution was a huge investment, yet failed to alert them of the risk to their redundancy.

Had the company been using Entuity, they would have had the benefit of several features that would have quickly notified the IT staff that trouble was ahead. These features include continually updated inventory, topology maps that provide clear visual indicators of the status of devices, ports, links, and services, and an embedded Event Management System (EMS) that eliminates event storms and allows focus on the most important events. Entuity also enables service-level monitoring, which would have allowed the team to define a service that consisted of the primary and backup links.

By monitoring their redundancy as a service, the team would have had port-level visibility meaning they would have known that the port for the backup connection (which was normally down) came up (and they were now running on an expensive link) and that the primary link had failed. They would have further known about the subsequent failure of the backup.

Entuity Helps Financial Trading Company Avoid Disaster
Another financial trading company discovered how little they knew of their network’s health during an evaluation of Entuity. Shortly after installing the software at their facility, Entuity alerted an operations manager to a fan failure in one of their core switches. There was a secondary fan still in operation, but the temperature data being collected by Entuity clearly showed an increase that would go critical in a few days.

The software evaluation team took a brief intermission to immediately fix the situation. On continuing the evaluation, investigation of a core router revealed a secondary power supply failure—a risky situation. Obviously, the team took another intense intermission. In both cases, their current “red-light, green-light” monitoring tools reported that the devices were “up,” but left them blind to imminent doom. A failure in either of the two cases would have left business users without access to the trading applications they need to complete their jobs. Hundreds of users idle and customers unable to make trades would certainly have been a disaster.

Summary
The consequences of the lack of visibility into the true state of the network can be severe. Traditional framework network monitoring solutions and lower-end tools simply don’t go deep enough to catch all or most of the issues that may pose a threat to the network. Entuity starkly contrasts with these products by providing detailed, easily accessible network information that enables businesses to catch potential problems before they happen. Features such as continuous auto discovery, up-to-date topology maps, an advanced EMS, service, device, and port level monitoring, and industry-leading dashboards and reports enable companies around the world to dramatically reduce the risk factors that may be lurking just below the surface of their networks.

5 Things You Need to Know About Reducing Data Security Risk During Asset Disposal

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:56:13 +0000

What you don’t know about securing the data on retired servers and storage devices can hurt your company’s data security efforts. Many organizations underestimate hard drive-related security risks or assume incorrectly that routine software management methods provide adequate protection.

Dedicated Maintenance Services Offer IT Managers a Trustworthy Option

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:54:35 +0000

Hardware assets are among the most valuable elements of the data center. Storage arrays, servers and network equipment often dictate resource use in the data center. With IT budgets facing strain and many companies shifting resources into the cloud, CIOs often must consider alternate ways to support critical hardware over an extended period of time. This leaves IT managers to develop hardware strategies that maximize the value of infrastructure while also meeting performance and operational standards.

Simplify Your Maintenance Services – Infographic

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:44:12 +0000

Complicated contract administration and less than desirable customer service experience are only a fraction of what IT professional navigate on a daily basis. Park Place Technologies understands this, and has tailored their maintenance services specifically to ease these points of pain

Shopping for Support Services – Infographic

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:42:36 +0000

When customers evaluate maintenance options outside of OEM support for server, storage and network devices, OEMs will occasionally make statements that can result in fear, uncertainty and doubt or “FUD”. These tactics often overstate the difference between OEM and third-party support providers, which are capable of offering the same levels of quality service for a much lower cost. The FUD sometimes created by OEMs can be persuasive, to mitigate any concerns that may arise when considering a decision to move away from the OEM, consider some of the core benefits offered by a third-party vendor and ask to speak with customer references.

What to Do Once an OEM Warranty Expires – Infographic

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:39:05 +0000

When OEM hardware reaches the end of its initial warranty, key decisions must be made on how to move forward in a data center. In the following infographic, Park Place Technologies outlines your options for post-warranty data center hardware maintenance, and offers common considerations to take for each one.

Rock County Case Study

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:36:35 +0000

Located in south-central Wisconsin, just 100 miles outside of Chicago, Rock County employs about 1,200 people across 29 different departments ranging from the Health department to the Sheriff’s Office, as well as Public Safety, that process large amounts of data every day. Mickey Crittenden, CIO for Rock County, leads the Information Technology team who maintains the county’s mission critical storage and server equipment that house that data.

When it came to making decisions for the next fiscal year, Rock County CIO, Mickey Crittenden, was faced with many challenges. Traditionally, Crittenden’s team took a conservative approach to hardware maintenance by working directly with the OEM for service and support. However, as equipment aged and reached its end of service life or end of warranty, the team felt they had no choice but to refresh their hardware. The county’s IT department was limited in their budget on what could be spent towards hardware maintenance.

“If a piece of hardware was still reaching its requirements, there was no reason to refresh,” Crittenden stated. “We followed a strategy to get as much life out of our equipment as much as possible. However, sometimes that strategy does not align very well with the OEM’s offering.”

With the pressure to refresh, and a tight budget, Crittenden began researching third-party maintenance options to ensure the lifecycle of his equipment was extended as much as possible.

Moraine Valley Community College Case Study

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:35:57 +0000

Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC) is located in Chicago’s southwestern suburb of Palos Hills, Illinois. Founded in 1967, the school enrolls more than 34,000 students serving 26 communities annually and is one of the largest community colleges in the state.

Susan G. is the Director of Network Operations, Computing Services and Telecommunications. She oversees all wired and wireless networks, virtual server environments, storage, telecom, and ERP infrastructure. These responsibilities also include email and other critical applications.

Moraine Valley Community College’s Challenges

For Ms. G.’s team, it was pertinent to find a hardware support solution that would fit shrinking budgets. MVCC maintains two separate Storage Area Network (SAN) environments that supports the college’s ERP system and other applications. Although Ms. G had a team member who could support IBM AIX, finding a staff member to support hardware was a challenge.

“The biggest challenge the college currently has is supporting two separate environments. Finding the right talent to support AIX and the IBM SAN environment is difficult. It is hard to compete with salaries offered in Corporate America for this talent. As a result, we seem to always be short of staff to support the most critical applications on campus,” Ms. G said.

Another factor that played into MVCC’s challenges was an affordable Service Level Agreement. Ms. G. said, “Our ideal hardware maintenance solution is 24 x 7 x 4 hour response time. This can be very expensive when dealing directly with the original equipment manufacturers.”

With the need to support their SAN environments, and with a limited budget, Ms. G. began researching other support options. A former employee of MVCC had previous experience with third-party maintenance providers and was introduced to Park Place Technologies.

Choosing Park Place Technologies

Having never used any third-party maintenance providers for its data center hardware, MVCC researched several third-party maintainers and collected other competitive quotes as required by the college. Flexibility on budget was not an option. When MVCC made the switch to Park Place Technologies, the initial decision was based primarily on price and flexibility.

“The Park Place solution was convenient. Park Place worked along with MVCC to determine the right coverage for the variety of equipment we covered. They responded with a price point and SLA that the college was comfortable with, so we chose them over the other vendors,” Ms. G said. “The Park Place solution was convenient. Park Place worked along MVCC to determine the right coverage for the variety of equipment we covered. They responded with a price point and SLA that the college was comfortable with, so we chose them over the other vendors.”

Susan G.
Director of Network Operations

Case Study Key Points

Retains control of equipment lifecycle

Saved 70% on maintenance costs compared to the OEM

Provided an alternative for end of service life equipment

Low total cost of ownership

The Park Place Difference

Since starting their partnership with Park Place Technologies as a third-party maintenance provider, Ms. G. and her staff have been satisfied with their IBM storage equipment support. Some significant considerations that played a part into why MVCC continues to use Park Place Technologies as its hardware maintenance and support provider include:

Obtaining Administrative Ease

One of the major factors of choosing Park Place Technologies for MVCC was the endless flexibility it provided for its customers. “Park Place was willing to do whatever it was that we thought we needed—whether it is certain coverage on parts of the environment or different coverage on storage and some of the physical servers we support. It was total flexibility,” Ms. G. said.

Flexibility also extended into their contracts. With Park Place Technologies, MVCC could add or delete equipment at any time. “Not locking us into long contracts allowed us to be comfortable in making decisions on our storage equipment moving forward. That was huge!” Ms. G. added.

Receiving Exceptional Support

For MVCC, receiving support was quick and painless. Although support calls were few for its IBM storage environment, Ms. G.’s team member attested to the fact that the response from Park Place was quick and the field engineers were able to provide the MVCC IT team the appropriate solutions and documentation related to any issues it was having with its IBM storage devices.

Saving 70% on Maintenance Costs

Moraine Valley County Community College has saved about 70% in maintenance and support costs compared to standard OEM maintenance. This significant cost savings allowed peace of mind for budget concerns by Ms. G. and the IT team at MVCC.

The Future with Park Place Technologies

Ms. G and her team look to continue and expand their partnership with Park Place Technologies.

“Park Place has been very responsive to the needs of the college. They are proactive in their support and have lived up to their SLA. Fortunately, we have not seen a lot of problems with our IBM hardware, but we know we can count on Park Place to respond quickly to our needs,” Ms. G. said. “Park Place has been very responsive to the needs of the college. They are proactive in their support and have lived up to their SLA. Fortunately, we have not seen a lot of problems with our IBM hardware, but we know we can count on Park Place to respond quicky to our needs.”

Susan G.
Director of Network Operations

About Park Place Technologies

Park Place Technologies is your global data center and networking optimization firm. Powered by the world’s largest on-the-ground engineering team, a robust group of advanced engineers and our fully staffed, 24x7x365 Enterprise Operations Center, we offer a robust portfolio of IT solutions to optimize networking and data center Uptime and performance. Our services include third-party data center hardware maintenance, data center professional services, infrastructure managed services, network performance monitoring and IT hardware sales. Through our unique and fully integrated DMSO (Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize) approach, customers enjoy streamlined infrastructure monitoring and management, cost efficiencies, less chaos, and faster mean-time-to-resolution – ultimately providing the freedom to think bigger. Park Place’s industry-leading and award-winning services include Park Place Hardware Maintenance, Park Place Professional Services, Park Place Managed Services, Entuity Software and Curvature Hardware sales.

For more information, visit stagingppt.wpengine.com. Park Place is a portfolio company of Charlesbank Capital Partners and GTCR.

Park Place Service Keeps University Hospitals Data Centers Healthy

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:33:24 +0000

Andrew Balazs is not a doctor, nor does he play one on TV. But as Manager of Data Centers and Disaster Recovery at University Hospitals, he recognizes the role IT infrastructure plays in life-and-death scenarios.

“If our health care professionals don’t have access to required information the second they need it, they can’t help the patient,” Balazs said. “They need instant access to patient histories. They can’t give a drug to somebody in the hospital when they don’t have access to their drug interaction records. They need the latest radiology image before they go into surgery. If any information is inaccessible, it disrupts the whole flow of a health care system.”

The responsibilities are vast, and the IT infrastructure is complex.

Game-Changer for The Open University

Sam Kim — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:31:49 +0000

Paul Alexander is Head of Technical Services for the STEM faculty at The Open University, which counts among its alumni Oscar winner Julie Christie, singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading and IT entrepreneur Natalya Kaspersky. The STEM Faculty is the largest of the university’s faculties with 700 staff and 1800 associate lecturers. They deliver over 185 modules across the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum, this equates to 20,000 full time equivalent students which is 29% of the university total. In addition, they have world leading researchers contributing to the university research outputs, which in turn feeds into the Research Excellence Framework submission (REF2020) as well as numerous international research projects.

Open University’s STEM Faculty IT infrastructure is critical to accomplishing its mission. “Uptime, security and monitoring IT infrastructure are more critical mandates than they ever were before. We have a significant number of OEMs –Dell, HPE, IBM and older storage. We have a few hundred assets from two different very wide and varied legacy IT infrastructure portfolios that we’re trying to combine. As such, we’re going to have a huge portfolio of equipment that will be coming under the same banner,” Alexander said. “Plus, our site is very different to a lot of other sites in terms of the complicated nature of the network and firewalls and how that is setup. Any solution we use is going to have to do a bunch of work around that. I was unhappy with the existing maintenance that we were dealing with, and looking for solutions to support our mission-critical IT.”

From the New Normal to the Next Normal in the Data Center

Sam Kim — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:24:36 +0000

The global coronavirus pandemic revealed gaps in data centers’ business continuity planning. Faced with a rapidly changing, enduring, worldwide crisis—which confounded preparations designed primarily for isolated, short-term emergencies—IT leaders have come to realize the “new normal” will remain a moving target for months to come.

Data center managers are striving to prepare for additional coronavirus outbreaks, which health professionals deem likely. The most forward-thinking leaders, however, are intent on leveraging the heightened attention to infrastructure future-proofing to also enhance readiness for a full array of crises not adequately reflected in existing contingency plans.

That such blueprints must take into account today’s increasingly hybrid, distributed infrastructure poses particular challenges for data center monitoring and maintenance. Indeed, COVID-19 has exposed vulnerabilities endemic to the current approach to these fields.

Fortunately, there exist both processes and technologies to help resolve pressing support-related issues in complex digital environments. By implementing appropriate risk mitigation and maintenance prioritization, adopting strategies to maximize staff availability, and investing in network resources and remote monitoring tools, data center leaders can withstand the next interruption, whatever its cause, reach, or duration, and thrive in our increasingly uncertain era.

This paper outlines strategies for mitigating these data center maintenance issues, many of which are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, and ensuring uptime in the most difficult scenarios.

Download the Whitepaper

Georgetown Law Center Case Study

Sam Kim — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 08:16:04 +0000

Located at the foot of Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Law School offers unparalleled access to the Congress, the Supreme Court, and numerous agencies, administrative boards, and commissions of the federal government and the District of Columbia.

At the school’s law center, IT Director Matthew B. has been managing the school’s IT infrastructure for the past three years. He manages the school’s data center and network as well as connectivity and telecom hardware. Shortly after commencing work at Georgetown, Mr. B. conducted a review of service contracts for their data center hardware.

He found Park Place Technologies service to be the only viable alternative to Dell’s support programs, costing less and supporting a wider range of servers than Dell itself.

Preserving the Data Center

The school operates a data center at one location and a facility providing partial backup, a second router, and Internet connectivity in another building across the street. Additional servers are installed at the second facility whenever high availability, highly redundant services are required. The data center used many models of Dell PowerEdge servers, many of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer. The IT infrastructure also includes a Dell PowerVault 770N network attached storage (NAS) server.

The IT staff included Mr. B. and three network administrators. The administrators have varied duties, which also include audio-visual services and video and Internet conferencing.

Finding and maintaining reliable, cost-effective support services is another important part of Mr. B.’s responsibilities, one that can minimize the business risk of operating the school’s IT infrastructure

“Without Park Place, we would either have to buy new servers or shrug and pray and hope that the old servers don’t go bad.”

Matthew B., CCNA, CISSP
Director of IT Operations/Information Security Officer

Case Study Key Points

Georgetown retains control of equipment lifecycle

Cost-Effective Solution for supporting legacy equipment

Provided an alternative for end-of-service-life equipment

Support Georgetown’s cost containment and vendor consolidation strategy

“Each year, we review the servers coming off-contract or needing renewal. We perform the same process and get a number of quotes. Last year, we excluded sole-source quotes as Park Place was the only provider we found with viable support. With Park Place, renegotiation is an easy process.”

Matthew B., CCNA, CISSP
Director of IT Operations/Information Security Officer

Comprehensive Support, Lower Costs

When service contracts of any of the law center’s servers expire, university officials want the IT department to get several quotes to ensure that post-contract support services are cost-effective. Of the support services that Mr. B. found, only Dell Computer and Park Place Technologies, a company specializing in data center hardware maintenance, offered the Dell server support that the IT team needs.

Park Place supports servers that Dell would not and offers the university lower cost end-of-life support services than Dell does. Park Place quoted a lower price to support all of the data center servers than Dell quoted to support only some of them. This alternative has helped the IT department to avoid the cost of buying new servers or paying premium rates for support. As Mr. B. described the situation, “we would either have to buy new servers or shrug and pray and hope that the servers don’t go bad.”

The greatest risk of the “shrug-and-pray” approach is to applications, the lifeblood of the school’s IT operations. The most important applications include the Microsoft Exchange communications environment used to support email and web applications used to provide the school’s Internet presence. Other application-based functions include accounting, file and print services and scheduling using Windows Active Directory structure DHCP.

Although Park Place and Dell support provide comparable levels of service, Park Place offers substantially lower-cost services and supports a wider variety of older server models than Dell. When the school buys a new server, Dell support is just part of the contract. When the server contract expires, and the school wants to support the server, the school encourages the use of Park Place services.

About Park Place Technologies

Park Place Technologies is your global data center and networking optimization firm. Powered by the world’s largest on-the-ground engineering team, a robust group of advanced engineers and our fully staffed, 24x7x365 Enterprise Operations Center, we offer a robust portfolio of IT solutions to optimize networking and data center Uptime and performance. Our services include third-party data center hardware maintenance, data center professional services, infrastructure managed services, network performance monitoring and IT hardware sales. Through our unique and fully integrated DMSO (Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize) approach, customers enjoy streamlined infrastructure monitoring and management, cost efficiencies, less chaos, and faster mean-time-to-resolution – ultimately providing the freedom to think bigger. Park Place’s industry-leading and award-winning services include Park Place Hardware Maintenance, Park Place Professional Services, Park Place Managed Services, Entuity Software and Curvature Hardware sales.

Park Place is a portfolio company of Charlesbank Capital Partners and GTCR.

Resources - Park Place Technologies

Webinar: Critical Software Support is only a CLICK away: View our Recorded Webinar!

Optimizing Data Center Efficiency with Liquid Cooling

The Looming Power and Cooling Challenge for Data Centers and Liquid Cooling Solutions from Park Place Technologies

Why cooling is a growing challenge

Liquid cooling as the future solution

Benefits of liquid cooling

Park Place Technologies’ liquid cooling solutions

Enhancing Application Monitoring | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

How Liquid Cooling is Helping to Manage Growing Data Center Cooling Challenges

Key Insights from the Report:

Global Customer Experience Company Gains Operational Efficiency and Improves Compliance Reporting with Entuity Software™

Welcome to Park Place Technologies

What You’ll Find Inside:

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Network Observability Report: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Network Observability Report: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

Winter 2025 Network Monitoring Grid® Report from G2

Webinar: Next-Gen Network Monitoring: An In-Depth Look at Entuity Software™ in Action

Liquid Cooling Guide

Entuity Software™ V22.0 Overview [VIDEO]

Webinar: 【新しい保守サイクルの考え方】〜ITをもっと自由に かつてない顧客体験を（メンテナンスジャーニー [VIDEO]

Webinar: Data Centre Cooling Technology – How Liquid Cooling can help organisations deliver sustainable data centres. [VIDEO]

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 13 – The Future of Liquid Cooling for Data Centers

Webinar: Unlocking the Benefits of Outsourced NOC Services [VIDEO]

ISG Provider Lens™ – Private/Hybrid Cloud – Data Center Services Report

Webinar Presentation: Unlock Savings on VMware Support: Your Alternative Guide

Webinar: Unlock Savings on VMware Support: Your Alternative Guide [VIDEO]

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 12 – Holistic Professional Services

Webinar: Not Just for EOSL Support [VIDEO]

Device Management Best Practices | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

IT as a Growth Accelerator: How Managed IT Can Free Up Resources for Innovation [VIDEO]

Liquid Immersion Cooling Solutions from Park Place Technologies [VIDEO]

Enterprise Monitoring Usability Index from G2

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 11 – Risk and Governance of Cybersecurity

From Speeds and Feeds to Business Intelligence | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Empowering Security Success: How the Channel Can Add Value to Existing Investments

The Sustainable Data Center Transformation

Dealing with the Density Dilemma

Entuity Tech Talk EXTRA Edition: Cisco IOS-XE Device Vulnerabilities

Telling Stories with Your Network Monitoring Dashboard | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Dashboards for Network Monitoring (Transcript Teaser)

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 10 – A Cloudy Future

Integrated Infrastructure Services – Park Place Technologies [VIDEO]

15-Minute Introduction to ParkView Managed Services™ [VIDEO]

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 9 – Trends from the Data Center to the Cloud

Entuity v21.0 Release Details | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

The Blue Couch Tech Sessions Podcast: Ep. 8 – Head in the Cloud

Entuity Software™ Product Tour

Network Monitoring Software Integrations | Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

IT Infrastructure Management – How to Stay on Budget & Innovate [WEBINAR]

How to Architect Your IT Department To Deliver Agility [VIDEO]

We Solve Problems – Park Place Technologies [VIDEO]

Curvature Hardware – IT Hardware Sales [VIDEO]

User-Defined REST API Polling – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Ep. 7 – Trends in IT Security Risks

ClearView™ Network Support Assessment

Entuity Webhooks & Use Cases – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Sustainability & the Circular Economy in IT

Network Management Megatrends in 2022

Navigating the Great Cloud Acceleration

Some Key Findings

GigaOm Radar for Network Observability [REPORT]

Network Management Megatrends Research Insights: How to Optimize NetOps

Multi-tenant Network Monitoring – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

User-defined REST Polling – Entuity Tech Talk [VIDEO]

Five Unexpected Enemies of Your Data Center

Jewelry Retailer Receives Hardware Maintenance from Park Place

THE CHALLENGE

THE OPPORTUNITY

HOW WE OPTIMIZED IT

Medical Supplier Receives Hardware Maintenance and Operating System Support

THE OPPORTUNITY

HOW WE OPTIMIZED IT

RESULTS

Large North American Beverage Maker Extends Hardware Life

Procurement Foundry Webinar – IT Skills Gap Strategies

Procurement Foundry Webinar – IT Procurement Strategies for Managing Tech Supply Chain Issues

Procurement Foundry Webinar – IT Infrastructure Cost Management Strategies

Ep. 6 – Mike Nicholis on Engaging Professional Services

How to Build and Manage a Hybrid Cloud Environment [Webinar]

Webinar: 【新しい保守サイクルの考え方】〜ITをもっと自由に　かつてない顧客体験を（メンテナンスジャーニー [VIDEO]