As a manager, you are under pressure not to overextend your IT resources — but how can you do that when you don’t know what you have (and what you’re going to need)?
The Most Interesting Man in the World is a minimalist: he likes one kind of beer, one outfit and one phrase. He doesn’t like network bloat.
So, how would the most interesting man keep the network chugging along with a right-sized infrastructure?
He’d open up the dashboard in his netTerrain.
Perhaps he needs to answer a question, such as: “do I have enough ports available at this site?” or “where’s my card usage at for this network?”.
To answer these questions, our guy would pull up his dashboard.
In the netTerrain dashboard, you can very quickly get a handle on your port and card usage. You can see that your port usage is at, say, 50% while your card usage is low at 10%.
This gives you an idea of what do you have, where you have it and what percentage of that is in use.
You can then go ahead and drill down on a per-site basis to get information on the specific card usage, port usage and overall assets per site.
Armed with intelligence about your usage, you can really take control of your planning. If you see, for example, that you are running low on ports, you can start thinking about planning to purchase new equipment as needed.
Or, maybe our guy is an end-user or worker-bee: he needs to install a switch or a router. What does he do?
He’d use his DCIM dashboard and take a look around.
In your dashboard, you can easily view the overall dashboard report and then drill down to the actual location to see overall statistics at a data center. You can go further here and drill down to the cabinet level to see which ports are free or what’s connected.
You can plan the installation without wasting any time getting out to a site only to find you don’t have any ports free.
Case study? Bell Mobility made the switch to netTerrain to meet the increasing demands placed on their IT infrastructure and resources. With netTerrain, they gained the insights they needed to optimize capacity while making sound investment decisions that support growth and future expansions. With accurate intelligence at their hands, Bell Mobility has boosted operational efficiencies, resulting in significant time and cost savings, along with improved productivity.
Bottomline: when you have a DCIM solution like netTerrain, you gain a proper inventory of your IT assets, budget and growth rates. With this information, you gain the power to plan, in advance, what needs to be purchased while steering you away from unnecessary purchases, piling up on VMs or allocating extra bandwidth that was never actually needed in the first place.