Understanding Network Management System Scalability
As IT folks, we all know the importance of keeping a network management system (NMS) available at all times. Without the NMS availability, we would not be able to diagnose and triage network issues and keep the network up and working well for the business. Although an NMS is not a network device, it is of as much importance in the network as the other network infrastructure. Because an NMS is so critical for network administration teams in terms of achieving better process automation and operational efficiency, we need to ensure we understand the implementation of a network monitoring software really well to be able to leverage its benefits and to support your growing network.
Cisco
says, by 2017, around 3.6 billion people will be online, representing 48% of the world's projected population. This is a startling number. When so many folks are going to be online, then organizational networks should be able to support that which results in increased IT budgets and adding more network infrastructure, and IT staff. Network growth could happen when there’s increase business demand and dependency on the internet requiring higher bandwidth, support for more users, more storage, expansion into more geographical regions, etc.
To deal with this rapid network expansion, you must understand various NMS deployment and scalability options to ensure your NMS scales along with your network growth. There are three primary variables that impact NMS scalability.
#1 Number of Monitored Network Elements
Obviously network growth is associated with the adding more network elements. For the NMS, a network element is defined as a single, identifiable node, interface, or volume. It is based on the number of elements that you monitor, you purchase the license for the NMS.
#2 Polling Frequency
This defines the interval in which the NMS polls for information from the network devices. For example, if you are collecting statistics every few minutes, the system will have to work harder and system requirements will increase.
#3 Number of Simultaneous Users Accessing the NMS
NMS is a centralized tool for network performance monitoring that can be used by IT staff for different requirements. As it is being used by different IT staff from different network locations, the NMS should be able to support concurrent Web sessions to support the increasing end-user demand.
By controlling these three levers, you will be able to ensure the NMS can scale according to the needs of the network. SolarWinds offers a lot of scalability options so you can affordably extend your Network Performance Monitor, Server & Application Monitor, or other Orion platform modules to meet your growing network requirements.
Register for this FREE webinar to understand more about how SolarWinds network management, application and server management software seamless scales to support your growing network infrastructure.
Webinar: "SolarWinds Scalability for the Enterprise"
When: Wednesday, November 6, 2013 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CST
Agenda:
- Growing a single SolarWinds instance to support larger or distributed networks as well as additional users
- Monitoring geographically distributed environments with a single SolarWinds instance
- Monitoring geographically distributed environments with multiple SolarWinds instances
- Consolidating multiple SolarWinds instances in a single view
- Creating high availability and fault tolerant monitoring environments
Hear from our product experts how SolarWinds can easily and affordably support scalability requirements for your enterprise network!
