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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Visualize your VCenter Environment Automatically
By Jan Durnhofer - April 29, 2019As more and more IT information today resides within virtual environments, there is an increasing need to document this information within a visual repository. Because of this growing need, we are often asked if VMware data can be visualized in netTerrain. Why…? Here’s what we’ve gleaned from our customers: the main reason to visualize VMware…
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New Hires in Maryland & New Development Office in Buenos Aires
By Jan Durnhofer - April 15, 2019You may have seen some posts on the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), netViz, or Network Documentation LinkedIn groups, or perhaps you saw it in one of our newsletters: we are in hiring mode! After a very auspicious 2018, in which we saw record profits and high 2-digit growth in virtually every area (bookings, revenue,…
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Need a Magic Red Button for Network Documentation? Read This.
By Fred Koh - February 6, 2019We get countless inquiries from people looking to ditch their spreadsheets and Visio diagrams: they are looking for an automated network documentation/network mapping solution. More often than not, network folks want to find the holy grail, for example: “What exactly can I discover, and can it automatically place the network device inside my data center…
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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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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: OSP Circuit Layout Records
By Jan Durnhofer - October 1, 2018A circuit layout record (CLR) is an end-to-end view of a linear connection between two endpoints, on one page. We have seen these before, as when we launched a CLR for a cable or a port, netTerrain tries to follow the path as far out as possible until it encounters no more connections or too…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: Terminating and Patching Up OSP Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer -In the previous blog, we started digging a bit deeper into the details of OSP circuits in netTerrain. This blog is also very technical: we will analyze how netTerrain terminates and patches up the circuits paths that we designed previously. Once you have your paths — with the correct hops, cables and strands — you…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: Designing Optimum Circuit Paths
By Jan Durnhofer -When creating a new circuit in netTerrain, who decides which path it should take and how is that accomplished? There are basically three ways to define a path for a circuit — with decreasing levels of automation: (Most Automation) By having netTerrain choose the shortest path (Less Automation) By having netTerrain choose the shortest path…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation
By Jan Durnhofer - September 30, 2018In an OSP project, a circuit can be many things: a service between two points A and Z on a map, an MPLS connection going over fiber, or really — any logical relationship between points that uses physical resources of the network. One thing is quite consistent in fiber plant layouts, however: circuits traverse from…
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Working with Cables & Strands in Outside Plant Software
By Jan Durnhofer - September 20, 2018Up until now, links in netTerrain have been quite simplistic in terms of how they are modeled: just choose a look and feel for the link, assign some properties and, if needed, apply some rules (visual overrides) to some of those properties. This works well for virtually all network mapping and most Data Center Infrastructure…
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Maximize Fiber Networks with Outside Plant Software
By Jason Sherman - September 13, 2018IT infrastructure and networks today are growing at an incredibly fast pace. Daily modern life is only becoming more dependant upon technology, not less: as a result, the need for networks is skyrocketing. What does this mean on the network level — and for those in the trenches of fiber and telecom management every single…
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DCIM PUE and alternative facts
By Jan Durnhofer - September 10, 2018Before we deconstruct the loaded title of this blog — ‘DCIM PUE and alternative facts’ — let’s first remove any mutual mystification around these two acronyms: PUE and DCIM. Or at least, let’s try… PUE stands for ‘Power Usage Effectiveness’. It measures the total amount of energy used by a data center to the total…
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