TRAC Research - Vendor Coverage - SolarWinds
The Role of Network Management Systems in Virtualized Environments
July 05, 2011
The effects of deploying virtualization technologies reach far beyond the parts of the infrastructure that are being virtualized by altering the roles of traditional infrastructure components. Virtualizing servers and desktops changes how organizations go about providing IT services, but also changes how the performance of IT services is being managed across the entire delivery chain. Sixty-two percent of organizations that participated in TRAC's recent survey reported that lack of visibility across the IT service delivery chain is one of the key challenges for managing IT performance in virtualized environments. As a result, organizations are increasingly realizing that ensuring optimal performance of their networks becomes even more important once they have virtualized their infrastructure. Furthermore, managing network performance in virtualized environments requires network management systems (NMS) to be enhanced with a new set of capabilities so they can address key challenges of virtualization management.

This report from TRAC Research analyzes the impact of virtualization technologies on network management and examines capabilities that are becoming increasingly important in virtualized environments.

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CA Acquires Nimsoft; More Than the Cloud and Mid-Market Play?
March 15, 2010

On March 10th, 2010 CA announced that it had agreed to acquire Nimsoft, an IT service management company, for approximately $350 million. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of March of 2010, and Nimsoft will operate as a separate business unit. The goal of this report is to examine the impact of this acquisition on the IT service delivery market and the impact it could have on customers and prospects of CA and Nimsoft.

 

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Four Key Trends in the Network Monitoring Market PDF Print
Written by Bojan Simic   
January 07, 2010

Network performance monitoring solutions are not one of those “cool” technologies that get a lot of coverage in the media and these products are sometimes perceived as using an old approach to solve new problems. It’s all about capturing and analyzing packet flow data, right? Well, not really. Not many people realize how much this market has changed over the last 3-4 years.

TRAC Research will cover trends and key vendors in this market in several upcoming reports, but here is a high level overview of 4 key trends that drove some major changes in this market.

It is About Applications on the Network, Not the Network Itself

Back in 2006, I conducted a number of interviews with folks that were in charge of network performance.  The top metric that they were using in that time to evaluate how their networks were doing was unplanned network downtime. I did a similar round of interviews in late 2007 and unplanned network down time wasn’t even one of the top three KPIs that they were using to evaluate network performance (even though it was still extremely important for them). Between these two rounds of interviews, metrics, such as application response times and application availability, became the top indicators of the health of enterprise networks. These changes in end-user needs had a major impact on network monitoring vendors. They caused several major acquisitions, a lot of significant product upgrades, new vendors entering this market, significant changes in messaging and positioning and opened several new markets for vendors that were able to adjust to these changes.

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