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Network Mapping and Monitoring Capabilities Keep Roll-Outs and Bandwidth Management on Track
Customer: Pylon One
Company: Integrated Business Systems
Location: Herts, England
Business: Monitor enterprise-grade networks set up for conferences, conventions, tradeshows, andother short-term events.
InterMapper's Role: InterMapper network monitoring and mapping software helps Pylon One network technician track fast roll-outs of temporary networks and then proactively manage switches for users that demand speed and 100% uptime.
Quote: “InterMapper helps us do in one weekend what most corporations would take six months to accomplish.”
Here's the assignment: travel to an immense facility where you will set-up an enterprise network that will accommodate 5,000 – 6,000 users who will be connecting with all manner of devices, some of them virus-ridden. You have to run all the cables for a network that will include about 60 edge switches and 300 – 400 small switches. You have four days in which to do it AND if it doesn't work, if the thousands of end-users experience slow connections, you have to fix the problem... immediately.
That's the daunting task that Pylon One takes on and completes on a routine basis. Pylon One provides short-term, enterprise-grade networks for the events industry. The networks they set up in hotels, conference facilities, and convention centers across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East all have a short shelf-life – about four days (four days of set-up for four days of use). For those four days though, they are the backbone of the event; heavily used by registration services, product demonstrators, presenters, internet kiosks, and participants who are all connecting to one another and their offices.
"InterMapper is very well suited to what we do," says John Houchin, JOB TITLE at Pylon One. "InterMapper runs on a laptop so we don't have to set-up a backend server. We just come in, plunk down, and set up monitoring. We start getting meaningful information right away."
The first information InterMapper supplies Houchin and his team is indication that switches have come on line. "When switches start going green, I know we're deploying" explains Houchin. Switches "go green" on an event facilities map. Houchin can, at a glance, see how the network is rolling out over both time and space. He simply imports a PDF blueprint of the event facility so that he can create a physical plot device locations and connections. "Without the map," Houchin says "we'd have to remember where everything is or carry around bits of paper." Knowing where switches are located in a very large facility –for example, the Venetian in Las Vegas – is especially important. Without a live network map, the Pylon One team would have to spend long periods of time searching for problems over acres of crowded, busy, event floors.
Once Pylon One has deployed all switches, they begin attending to ports. One member of the Pylon One team keeps InterMapper in front of him at all times, relying on the map for alerts to problems or potential problems. According to Houchin, event downtimes are measured in minutes, not hours. "People complain about a downtime of five seconds," he says. "We get calls about things like that and can quickly see, for example, that the VPN has dropped out. Usually the person who calls will see service come back while he's on the phone but we can tell him what happened."
The "big" questions Houchin has to answer continually over the course of an event are "Is the switch there?" and "Is the device plugged in?" InterMapper makes it easy to note looped switches and fix port errors.
Knowing what traffic is moving in and out of port is essential to providing quick answers to questions like "Why are the PCs in registration slow?" "In one recent event that question came in and we could see that registration was only using 20% of bandwidth. We could turn registrations' attention to the server end of things," says Houchin.
In another instance, Houchin noted that an uplink was working at 90% of capacity which was going to be problematic over the course of a busy event. "We instantly saw that we needed to add a house drop. There were cost implications but we could explain why the drop was needed and get it put in place quickly."
"We use InterMapper in very live environments," points out Houchin. "It's always interesting to talk to people who work in corporate IT. What we do in one weekend is a six month process for them. There's no pilot testing, no user acceptance testing, no rolling implementation, and no control over what will be plugged into the network. InterMapper helps us see that the roll-out is going according to plan and then allows us to meet extreme user demands over a concentrated time period. It gives us great information and is really easy to use." |
