OSP Software: 3 Steps to Find the Right Solution
By Fred Koh - December 4, 2018Tasked with finding OSP software? If you need to find an outside plant (OSP) tool to help document and manage your fiber plant, you may be wondering how you can get the project started and find the right OSP solution for your team’s unique needs? First off, find out what your budget is (the cost…
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Automated Network Documentation for Sharing & Collaboration
By Fred Koh - November 12, 2018These days, Visio and spreadsheets shared via a shared folder or via SharePoint seems to be what many of the people with whom I speak are using to document the network. Are you using Visio and/or spreadsheets to document the network? If so, how is this working out for your company? Being able to access…
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Graphical Networks at Orlando’s BICSI Winter 2019 Conference
By Fred Koh - October 29, 2018Graphical Networks has announced it will showcase netTerrain 8.0, its flagship IT documentation software, at BICSI Winter Conference in January of 2019. Attendees will be able to get a demo of netTerrain and see how they can manage the entire plant, inside and out, with end-to-end connectivity views, GIS-enabled diagrams, and in three flavors: DCIM, network…
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October is National Cyber Security Month: Why Network Diagrams Matter
By Fred Koh - October 15, 2018Ah, October. Falling leaves, changing colors, a chill in the air (all dependant upon where you live, of course), and of course, the ubiquitous pumpkin spice in everything. Less well known, but not any less important, is that October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) dates back to 2004, an…
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How to Calculate Data Center PUE
By Fred Koh - September 19, 2018PUE, which stands for Power Usage Effectiveness, is a ratio used to measure data center energy consumption. This ratio was first released in 2007 via The Green Grid, which is a nonprofit consortium of data center end-users, tech professionals, utility providers, and policy makers dedicated to ‘greening’ modern data centers. Data Center PUE: What’s the…
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The netTerrain Product Selection Pocket Guide
By Fred Koh - August 31, 2018Need to document the network — and your outside plant, as well? Or maybe you need to manage rack capacity and weight? Not sure which netTerrain product you need? Let’s figure it out! netTerrain is designed to be user-friendly, and it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which product you need: this quick…
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Change Management Crucial in DCIM & Network Mapping Success
By Fred Koh - August 29, 2018Have you been using spreadsheets and Visio diagrams to document your data center and networks? Are you considering upgrading to DCIM or an automated network diagramming solution? I’ve consulted on numerous project approvals and over the years, I’ve found that two key questions pop up time and time again: How, exactly, will you maintain the…
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Network Visibility for IoT Devices
By Fred Koh - August 27, 2018By now, we’ve all heard about the Internet of Things (IoT) via various news articles, social media posts, and maybe even stock analysts. How you define IoT depends upon what you’re doing: for some, it’s self-driving vehicles, sensor networks for monitoring, ‘smart cities’, or walking into an Amazon grocery store and picking up lunch without…
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How DCIM Can Lower PUE
By Fred Koh - August 17, 2018Data center power and cooling costs are expensive…and as infrastructures continue to expand, these costs are only going up. Because of solutions such as DCIM software, costs don’t have to keep skyrocketing. DCIM can give insights as to where power is being drawn by servers that aren’t performing any functions, for example, or true power…
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View Your Entire Cloud & Network Infrastructure
By Fred Koh - August 16, 2018The digital transformation movement is leaving no prisoners behind in its wake: infrastructure-as-a-service (the Cloud) — for example — has become immensely popular as it frees up IT and development time and the costs to maintain a data center. A 2016 IDG survey returned staggering results: 47% of companies have transitioned their messages to the…
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How Network Diagrams Help You with Compliance & Regulations
By Fred Koh - August 15, 2018Recently, I wrote a blog entitled ‘Network Documentation: Is It Really a Priority?’: in this blog, I discussed the importance of network diagrams and documentation in capacity planning, reducing mean-time-to-repair, lowering expenditures, cutting down on IT clutter, and more. One significant issue I didn’t discuss in that blog is this: regulatory compliance. Graphical Networks, my…
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Network Documentation: Is It Really a Priority?
By Fred Koh - August 10, 2018Let’s face it: we all say “network documentation is important”… but for some reason it is never truly considered urgent or a higher priority. I hear it all the time. Yet, when the ‘you know what’ hits the fan, we all go desperately scrambling for those uninspired network documents…only to find them outdated and basically…
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