Is this the best DCIM implementation ever?
By Jan Durnhofer - July 11, 2019During our users summit this past May, we uncovered some truly fantastic projects from our customers. Over the course of the 3-day event, we saw great examples of automation using our API, we discussed some cool fiber plant deployments, touched upon CFD (computational fluid dynamics) integrations with netTerrain, but one project was, truly, the absolute…
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“netTerrain DCIM Won Fair and Square.”
By Jan Durnhofer - July 10, 2019I recently had the pleasure of catching up with Javier Iriarte, Communications Manager at Acciona Energy, for a quick interview right after our users summit. Acciona Energía, a global supplier of clean energy based out of Pamplona, Spain, started using netTerrain DCIM recently and we have to say that the results are nothing short of…
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The Importance of Network Documentation
By Fred Koh - June 28, 2019I’ve written several articles about network documenting and automating the documentation process (you can see a recent article here)– afterall, our company specializes in IT documentation. In today’s article, however, I want to break documentation down into simple, easy-to-digest terms so you can arm yourself with the knowledge you need to really talk to upper…
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How is netTerrain Priced? (DCIM, Logical, OSP)
By Fred Koh - June 25, 2019“How can I get pricing for netTerrain?” netTerrain pricing is not listed on our website. I get this and understand how frustrating this can be. In today’s world, people want information instantly. I know I do! The reason why we don’t publish and instead ask for a 15-minute conversation beforehand is to determine if netTerrain…
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Make Your CA Spectrum Diagrams Sing
By Jan Durnhofer - June 17, 2019I remember way back in my Concord (and later when I worked for CA) days: I took a liking to the recently acquired Spectrum network discovery software (this was probably around 2004 or 2005). Spectrum was one of the first tools that I remember was capable of bringing in link data from an SNMP discovery…
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netTerrain Complaint of the Week: I want my API call!
By Jan Durnhofer - June 10, 2019Welcome back to the next installment of our weekly update in which we do something a bit odd for a vendor: expose holes in our product! Let’s be honest: nothing is perfect — and by discussing problems netTerrain users have encountered, we want to foster a collaborative environment, share some workarounds around common issues and…
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Implement netTerrain: Avoid the ‘Shelfware’ Effect
By Fred Koh - June 6, 2019Whether it’s for DCIM, network diagrams or outside plant, the majority of netTerrain users get the software up and running fairly quickly. Recently, however, I was in a meeting with a customer who bought netTerrain a year ago and haven’t really used netTerrain much yet. I asked, “why haven’t you used netTerrain much?”. Their response:…
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netTerrain Users Summit 2019 (Recap)
By Fred Koh - May 30, 2019We’ve been busy here at Graphical Networks: in addition to our ongoing projects, we recently hosted our first annual netTerrain Users Summit, held on the campus of the William F. Bolger Center in Potomac, MD. The Users Summit, which attracted netTerrain infrastructure administrators, managers, network engineers, and partners from four continents (North and South America,…
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Convince Your Boss You Need DCIM Software
By Fred Koh - May 29, 2019I’ve heard it before too many times to count: a well-meaning administrator knows their organization will benefit from the right DCIM solution. Afterall, their organization is struggling with prolonged troubleshooting times and associated expenses, wasted money on IT assets that weren’t actually needed due to improper utilization, cables that aren’t decommissioned, servers drawing power but…
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How DCIM Helps You Manage Your Infrastructure Cabling
By Fred Koh - May 21, 2019‘Spaghetti’: it’s a funny word for a not-so-fun problem facing many data center teams today. If your cabling is in a state of chaos aka spaghetti, you may need to consider DCIM to get your cabling under control. Data center cabling messes, or spaghetti, can truly wreak havoc on your operations: you end up dealing…
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Network Mapping of ServiceNow Data
By Jan Durnhofer - May 10, 2019I must admit that I am amazed by the amount of ServiceNow implementation in the corporate world today. With the proliferation of ServiceNow we get quite a few requests from customers to integrate some of the data they have in ServiceNow with their netTerrain projects. As I am no ServiceNow expert, I can’t tell you…
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netTerrain Complaint of the Week: ‘I want my pet feature’
By Jan Durnhofer - May 3, 2019Welcome back to the next installment of our weekly update in which we do something a bit odd for a vendor: expose holes in our product! Let’s be honest: nothing is perfect — and by discussing problems netTerrain users have encountered, we want to foster a collaborative environment, share some workarounds around common issues and…
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