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.
SONA focuses on enabling more efficient delivery of computing, storage, security, mobility, voice and collaboration services through a virtualized layer that sits on top of network infrastructures, said Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer.
Lev Gonick, CIO at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said he has worked with Cisco over the past several years as SONA has been developed and has deployed 7,000 of the vendor's IP phones, 1,350 of its Aironet wireless access points and a Catalyst 6509 Gigabit Ethernet switch.
SONA has allowed Case Western to move computing and network services that previously were dispersed among middleware or applications into its network layer, Gonick said. That, in turn, has enabled data engineers and administrators to be moved into new roles, such as supporting voice-over-IP services. More important, putting the services in the network layer provides "huge benefits" in planning for network architecture design, implementation and ongoing operations, Gonick added.
Case Western's IT engineers are testing the NAPA products, but Gonick said he has yet to receive an evaluation.
NAPA could help IT managers do a better job of planning their networks and application flows, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. "Customers need to manage across the whole life cycle," not just understand what parts of a network are failing, he said.
But some other analysts said that Cisco's focus on managing applications in the network will be a challenge, especially if the company is unwilling to interoperate and partner with other vendors of management tools.
Cisco wants to become "a strategic partner [with IT managers] in optimizing application performance across the infrastructure," said Dennis Drogseth, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. "But no C-level executive in their right mind is going to look for a truly strategic answer that's embedded exclusively in a single hardware brand."