What’s the Best Cable Management Software on the Market?
By Fred Koh - September 16, 2021When you can’t accurately manage and plan for capacity, you end up not knowing how many ports inside a device are active or not, which can cause unnecessary IT expenditures realizing the number of ports are not sufficient and need to buy new equipment, but in actuality it’s not. This also leads to managing your…
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Finding the Right Network Diagram Software: What’s Your Pain?
By Fred Koh - September 14, 2021This blog series on finding the right network diagram software will explore some of the important considerations and research to undertake to ensure you find a solution you, your team, and your company is happy with not just today, or next week, but for the long haul. In this, the first blog in this series,…
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Cable Management Software? What You (& Your Boss) Should Know
By Fred Koh - September 13, 2021Are you dealing with “cabling spaghetti” in your infrastructure? Do you need a surefire way to untangle yourself from this mess? If you’re not using good cable management software, you could be dealing with too many inefficiencies and too little time: slower troubleshooting because circuits cannot be properly traced, stranded ports and subcomponents due to…
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DCIM Software Racks: Monitoring and Oversubscription
By Jan Durnhofer - September 7, 2021In the previous four blogs in this five part series on racks in DCIM software, you learned about: rack basics such as rack mounting, modeling your own custom racks, creating visual overrides for capacity, and rack changes and capacity planning. What will you learn from the fifth and final (and corresponding video — which begins…
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DCIM Software Racks: Custom Modeling
By Jan Durnhofer - September 2, 2021In the previous three blogs in this series on racks in DCIM software, you learned rack basics such as rack mounting, how to set rack capacity visual overrides, and rack changes plus capacity planning. What’s next? All the features for rack management, rack capacity management, and so on are nice, but the question is: “how…
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Need Layer 2 Network Diagrams?
By Fred Koh - September 1, 2021I just wrote an article that gives you a checklist to run down before you purchase automated network mapping software (you can read it here). One of the items mentioned in this checklist is the need for Layer 2(L2) discovery. By Layer 2 discovery, I mean: how are network devices connected to each other? A…
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DCIM Software Racks: Changes and Capacity Planning
By Jan Durnhofer - August 31, 2021In the previous two blogs in this five-part series, we covered rack basics such as rack mounting, as well as visual overrides for racks. In this, the third blog in this series (and corresponding video, which begins at 9:55 and ends at 12:55), we’ll look at capacity management for racks in netTerrain DCIM software. When…
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DCIM Software Racks: Capacity Visual Overrides
By Jan Durnhofer - August 30, 2021In the first blog in this series, we discussed the basics of racks in netTerrain DCIM — and you also learned how to mount equipment to racks. What’s next in this, the second part of this five-part series? In this blog (and video, which begins at 6:57 and ends at 9:54), we’ll explore some of…
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The Automated Network Mapping Software Checklist
By Fred Koh - August 27, 2021Before you buy automated network mapping software (software that helps network operations to understand all the devices on a network and how they are interconnected through network discovery), you typically go through the process of making sure you really need it, make the case to the bosses upstairs that they really need to fund it,…
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DCIM Software Racks: Basics
By Jan Durnhofer - August 26, 2021In this blog series all about racks, we’ll dive into using racks in netTerrain and explore some of the capabilities in terms of: ease of rack mounting, modeling, the different kinds of racks or cabinets that you can create, and some of the capacity planning features. In this blog, the first in a five part…
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DCIM Software? Your Expectations vs. Reality
By Fred Koh - August 16, 2021If you read some of the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) vendor’s descriptions of DCIM software, you could be tricked into thinking DCIM is as seamless and easy as slipping on a pair of Google glasses and bam: you’re immediately slash power costs, planning for capacity by clicking a button, and gaining control of the…
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Convince Your Boss You Need Network Diagrams with 5 Statistics
By Fred Koh - August 12, 2021Do you manage the network? Is relying on Visio and spreadsheets driving you crazy? Know you need network diagrams but you’ve got to make a strong case to the bosses upstairs? If just promising them that you’ll get more done, reduce downtime, meet Service Level Agreement (SLAs), lessen the burden of overtime, and keep crucial…
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