Network Incident? DCIM Helps Eliminate Stress & Cost
By Fred Koh - November 23, 2020Downtime is an expensive and pervasive problem. A survey conducted in 2019 by the Uptime Institute highlights how much of a problem it is when it found that “almost one-third of data center owners and operators experienced a downtime incident or severe degradation of service in the past year, and half in the previous three…
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Meet Your SLAs with Network Diagram Software
By Fred Koh - November 19, 2020Ever set out to fix a common household problem like a leaky faucet? How much of that time do you spend actually fixing the problem — and how much of the time do you spend trying to figure out what’s wrong, where exactly the leak is coming from, which part you need, and so on….
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$60 Mil Question: Are Your Data Center Devices Properly Decommissioned?
By Fred Koh - November 13, 2020Morgan Stanley recently agreed to pay a whopping fine…to the tune of $60 million dollars. The crime? They did not properly decommission data centers connected to one of its business arms. They hired contractors, failed to keep tabs on customer data stored in obsolete devices, and, though no data breaches were found, $60 million later,…
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Considering DCIM? You May Want to Start Small
By Fred Koh - November 10, 2020As you may already know, Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software is becoming more and more critical to the modern data center. With it, you can plan and manage for capacity, power, manage cabling, and get a single-source-of-truth of your entire IT infrastructure. You can share insights across teams and provide different views to different…
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What is Data Center Network Documentation?
By Fred Koh - November 2, 2020We often discuss network documentation in this blog — it is, afterall, what our flagship product netTerrain, does (and well)! netTerrain, in a nutshell, is a complete network and data center documentation solution: it encompasses network diagrams/mapping, data center infrastructure management (DCIM), and outside/fiber plant…in one solution. In this article, we’ll discuss what data center…
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How Network Diagrams & Documentation Overhaul Your Workflow
By Fred Koh - October 28, 2020Over the years on this blog, we’ve often discussed the merits of network diagrams and documentation. We say it again and again, and use different examples to prove it: good network documentation and automated network diagrams save you time, stress, and money. Yeah, yeah…saving money, stress, and time all sounds great on paper, but what…
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No Network Diagrams? You’re Starring in a Psychological Thriller Movie
By Fred Koh - October 26, 2020Do you manage an IT network? You might just be trapped in a psychological thriller movie…. and you’re the star! What am I talking about? Ever watched “Memento”? In that movie, the star suffers from short-term memory loss. He’s on a mission, though, so he has to rely on makeshift reminders such as polaroid photos…
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DCIM Software: Marketing Fluff You Should Avoid
By Fred Koh - October 23, 2020Since Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software first hit the market over a decade ago, there has been a lot of hype and discussion around it. At first, the promise was that DCIM software was going to boil the ocean. When that didn’t happen, a slew of negative press followed suggesting that the software was…
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Where DCIM Wins, Where DCIM Fails
By Fred Koh - October 19, 2020Since it started really generating buzz about a decade ago, DCIM has developed two distinct reputations: the first is that DCIM is poised to completely revolutionize your data center and the way in which you work. The second reputation DCIM has? It’s an expensive piece of shelfware. Clearly, there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap between the…
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Good DCIM Software is Constantly Evolving
By Fred Koh - October 16, 2020Our company, Graphical Networks, has been in the data center sphere for many years and there’s one constant: technology, and how we manage it, is constantly evolving. To keep up, IT and network engineers need to be able to get information, and visualize, the different environments they manage. Good DCIM software needs to evolve alongside…
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Need Outside Plant Software? 3 Hacks You Should Avoid
By Fred Koh - October 14, 2020Do you manage a large network of outside plant IT infrastructure? Have an effective way to keep track of what you’ve got, where it is, and what’s connected to what? Can you use it when something happens, and someone needs to go out into the field? How can you plan your fiber infrastructure capacity to…
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IT Asset Management and DCIM
By Fred Koh - October 13, 2020In my previous article, If Your Data Center Swings Between Availability & Efficiency, You May Need DCIM, I briefly discussed IT Asset Management (ITAM). I’d like to explore this feature in a DCIM solution a bit more, as this is one of the most important features in a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). What is…
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