Cisco moves to support network management

12.12.2005
Cisco Systems Inc. Tuesday will announce a set of four network management products and an equal number of companion services, all based on a service-oriented framework that Cisco officials detailed here last week.

The Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) offerings being rolled out this week include software tools for application analysis and network planning, an appliance for managing bandwidth quality and a dashboard application for viewing information about system performance.

Ayman Soliman, a senior network architect at Thomson Financial Inc. in New York, has been testing Cisco's network planning software for the past two weeks but said he still hasn't learned enough about the product to decide whether to deploy it.

Soliman said the tool could help him assess the risks of making changes to Thomson's network, which includes about 3,000 routers and switches in 56 countries. "In a complex infrastructure, if you deploy a new feature, you want to know the effects on the network," he noted. But a thorough test of Cisco's new software is required because it will cost "in the upper US$200,000 range," Soliman added.

Cisco wouldn't disclose pricing on the NAPA components last week. It plans to release the network-planning and application-analysis tools tomorrow, while the performance-monitoring dashboard and bandwidth-quality appliance are due in March. The new services that are being added will allow users to hire Cisco personnel to help troubleshoot or even operate the NAPA products, said Clifford Meltzer, senior vice president of network management technology at Cisco.

Meltzer said the NAPA technology is evolving from Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture, a framework for next-generation business networks that the vendor unveiled at its annual conference for analysts last week.