Why Don’t You Publish Your Software Pricing?
By Fred Koh - July 26, 2021When exploring purchasing software, whether it’s looking for a network diagram tool, a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, or Outside Plant (OSP) software, one of the first things that crosses people’s mind is…how much does your software cost? We don’t publish our prices online because the cost is based on two things: what do…
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Got Fiber Plant Diagrams?
By Fred Koh - July 20, 2021During the intervening years since we first launched netTerrain Outside Plant (OSP) — it’s an add on module to netTerrain Logical or netTerrain DCIM — we’ve fielded many questions about the type of GIS-enabled maps that netTerrain supports as well as netTerrain’s ability to import existing maps/diagrams. What’s netTerrain OSP (Outside Plant Software)? First, what’s…
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Beavers vs. Your Outside Plant
By Fred Koh - July 16, 2021When we first saw this news story back in April of this year, we said, “we have to write a blog about this.” What’s it about? Well, you probably “wood”n’t believe it, but: beavers caused some massive headaches in a Canadian town. Yes: beavers. If you’re new to working on the outside plant, that may…
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Need to Replace Your DCIM Software?
By Fred Koh - July 14, 2021Using a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution? Whether it’s something free (like OpenDCIM) or something you paid for, there may come a time when you decide you need something that your current DCIM solution doesn’t offer, or if your DCIM vendor has moved on to focus on other products and is not supporting its…
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Outdated Hardware/Software Headaches? Network Diagrams/DCIM Can Help
By Fred Koh - July 9, 2021In 2016, Dimension Data released their then-annual Network Barometer Report which showed that 42% of network devices were either outdated or aging. While this statistic is a few years old, I doubt the numbers have radically changed since then. It’s all too easy for software and hardware to become outdated…but the price you pay for…
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DCIM’s Impact on Data Center Efficiency: 2010 vs. 2021
By Fred Koh - June 28, 2021Lately, we’ve written a few blogs about how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software helps data centers achieve greater efficiency which made me think, it would be interesting to look at where we started over a decade ago and where we are today. Did you work in data centers ten years ago? What changes have…
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Network Documentation: Do You Really Need the Bells & Whistles?
By Fred Koh - June 24, 2021One of my employees recently forwarded me a Reddit comment thread about network documentation. The original poster asked: what’s good for documentation software? A Redditor name-dropped a big name company in network documentation software and said “don’t buy it.” They went on to describe having been promised many great things to come out of the…
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2021’s IT Hardware Shortage: How DCIM Software Can Help
By Fred Koh - June 16, 2021It’s been a difficult year and a half….well, that’s an understatement. The explosion in demand for new tech to accommodate the sudden shift to remote work, the shuttering of factories, and the process of restarting these factories and opening up the supply chain again has led to the current silicon chip shortage. Now, as the…
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Data Center Outages: First Good News Then Expensive News
By Fred Koh - June 14, 2021New research from the Uptime Institute is in…when it comes to the quantity of data center outages in the year 2020, there weren’t any increases. That’s right: less data center outages. In fact, despite the impact of COVID-19, Uptime’s research shows that, on the individual facility level, there are less outages. Cheers: good news! The…
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Telehealth: What’s the Toll on Healthcare IT Networks?
By Fred Koh - June 10, 2021The past year or so of the pandemic have been a dizzying blur: it has meant great hardship and change for many of us. Now that the pandemic is finally, and thankfully, lessening, everyone’s starting to take stock of the permanent changes that have come out of this time. One major change is, inarguably, telehealth….
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Buying Network Documentation Software? Why a Demo is NOT Enough
By Fred Koh - June 3, 2021Do you need network documentation? Maybe you’ve done your homework and found software vendors that offer network documentation? Maybe you’ve contacted their Sales Dept. to schedule a demo. Almost at the finish line, right? Well…not quite. Sometimes, demos are not enough. Hey, you wouldn’t buy a car without giving it a test drive first, right?…
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IT’s Upcoming Silver Tsunami: DCIM Can Help
By Fred Koh - June 1, 2021The data center workforce that will be needed in the not-so-far future is predicted to grow from 2 million workers in 2019 to 2.3 million workers in 2025. As the baby boomer generation continues to work beyond what used to be the average age of retirement, there’s a big question mark hovering above multiple industries…
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