Hewlett-Packard White Paper Sample

To hold the line on rising costs, network management has to improve. This is a challenging proposition when typical network management systems tend to be disjointed, causing users to have multiple learning curves for each tool. Further, users have to operate each tool separately, swivelling their chair back and forth from one tool’s console to another, perhaps having to write a note about something from Tool A that they have to type into Tool B, just so they can get the needed information to solve the problem.

It would be much better to have the information available in a "single pane of glass," where operators could look at one console. They could then be alerted to issues as they are identified and drill down, in context, to the see the details they need.

In addition to the lack of a unified view and consolidated management system, network operations are plagued by other problems:

• Network performance issues can be caused by unanticipated traffic growth, configuration problems, link overloads due to traffic rerouted around failed network elements, and more. Usually network performance problems are not hard failures and are therefore hard to spot.
• Changes may lead to unwanted side effects, so understanding the impact of changes before making them is essential for reliable network operations.
• The monotonous work of making simple changes to hundreds or thousands of devices or objects is error prone.
• Operators are often unable to capture information necessary to pro-actively detect and solve problems before they impact the network.