Secure your OSP, DCIM & Network Documentation with Granular Permissions
By Jan Durnhofer - June 28, 2021Security is top of mind within IT departments…especially lately. We’ve seen many headlines about breaches happening across corporate America and we just heard about the Solarwinds breach — one of the most sophisticated hacks in the history of IT hacks. Despite IT security making the headlines again and again, one often overlooked aspect of security…
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If Your DCIM Needs a User Guide, it’s Flawed
By Jan Durnhofer -Some folks say, “if a software needs a user guide, it’s already flawed.” While this statement may be extreme, there is a point here. At Graphical Networks, we strive to make software that’s as easy-to-use as possible (so it doesn’t become an obstacle between the user and the task at hand). In this blog and…
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DCIM’s Impact on Data Center Efficiency: 2010 vs. 2021
By Fred Koh -Lately, we’ve written a few blogs about how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software helps data centers achieve greater efficiency which made me think, it would be interesting to look at where we started over a decade ago and where we are today. Did you work in data centers ten years ago? What changes have…
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Limited Custom Fields in DCIM Software? Run for the Hills!
By Jan Durnhofer -We’ve said it in the past, we’ll say it now, and we’ll say it again in the future: good DCIM software needs to be flexible. In this blog (and video), we’ll check out some use cases that show why it’s important to have flexibility in creating custom fields as well as how they work in…
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Network Documentation: Do You Really Need the Bells & Whistles?
By Fred Koh - June 24, 2021One of my employees recently forwarded me a Reddit comment thread about network documentation. The original poster asked: what’s good for documentation software? A Redditor name-dropped a big name company in network documentation software and said “don’t buy it.” They went on to describe having been promised many great things to come out of the…
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2021’s IT Hardware Shortage: How DCIM Software Can Help
By Fred Koh - June 16, 2021It’s been a difficult year and a half….well, that’s an understatement. The explosion in demand for new tech to accommodate the sudden shift to remote work, the shuttering of factories, and the process of restarting these factories and opening up the supply chain again has led to the current silicon chip shortage. Now, as the…
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Data Center Outages: First Good News Then Expensive News
By Fred Koh - June 14, 2021New research from the Uptime Institute is in…when it comes to the quantity of data center outages in the year 2020, there weren’t any increases. That’s right: less data center outages. In fact, despite the impact of COVID-19, Uptime’s research shows that, on the individual facility level, there are less outages. Cheers: good news! The…
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Telehealth: What’s the Toll on Healthcare IT Networks?
By Fred Koh - June 10, 2021The past year or so of the pandemic have been a dizzying blur: it has meant great hardship and change for many of us. Now that the pandemic is finally, and thankfully, lessening, everyone’s starting to take stock of the permanent changes that have come out of this time. One major change is, inarguably, telehealth….
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Buying Network Documentation Software? Why a Demo is NOT Enough
By Fred Koh - June 3, 2021Do you need network documentation? Maybe you’ve done your homework and found software vendors that offer network documentation? Maybe you’ve contacted their Sales Dept. to schedule a demo. Almost at the finish line, right? Well…not quite. Sometimes, demos are not enough. Hey, you wouldn’t buy a car without giving it a test drive first, right?…
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IT’s Upcoming Silver Tsunami: DCIM Can Help
By Fred Koh - June 1, 2021The data center workforce that will be needed in the not-so-far future is predicted to grow from 2 million workers in 2019 to 2.3 million workers in 2025. As the baby boomer generation continues to work beyond what used to be the average age of retirement, there’s a big question mark hovering above multiple industries…
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Do You Really Need Rack Diagrams?
By Fred Koh - May 28, 2021Here at Graphical Networks, we make IT documentation software called netTerrain. netTerrain comes in two main flavors — Logical and DCIM (as well as an add-on outside plant network module). As folks come to us looking for IT documentation software, we’re often asked, “hey, what’s the major difference between your Logical and DCIM solutions?” The…
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Use Network Diagram Software? Integrating Network Tools Should Be Easy
By Fred Koh - May 26, 2021Network diagrams, as we’ve often discussed in this blog, are just visual depictions of the network. They can be as simple (think: post-it notes) or as detailed as you need (think: automatically generated logical diagrams that show the network in real-time). They map out what you have in the network, where it all is, and…
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