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LONDON-Any company that both IBM and Intel use to handle the network monitoring of their internal systems is a company that warrants a closer look for other enterprises seeking to take better control of their own networks.
Entuity, with co-headquarters here and in the Boston area, is that company. Its whole point is that if you don’t know where everything is on your network, what it’s doing and how it’s all performing, then you really don’t know the status of your IT system and or data center.
It then follows that you really don’t know how well your system is serving its purpose-either internally or externally with customers.
“You’d think that great companies like Intel and IBM could do their version of what we’re doing, but they don’t,” Entuity Vice President of Operations Peter Camber told eWEEK. “It’s not that they can’t-it’s more because they just like ours.”
Both IBM Global Services and Intel use Entuity for controlling their international data center systems.
Entuity, established in 1997, is one of the world’s fastest-rising network management companies and one of the hottest IT companies in the United Kingdom. Its Eye of the Storm management software is now at work in systems belonging to many other companies and organizations beyond the two noted above, including Sony, JPMorgan Chase, NASA and British Telecommunications, plus a number of international financial services, health services, educational and governmental organizations.
In its own way, Entuity has become a leader in the UK’s IT sector, along with network search provider Autonomy, which recently bought content management veteran Interwoven and seems to be growing quickly despite the worldwide recession.
Entuity’s platform enables network managers to get a complete series of views into all systems within an enterprise. The company claims that it provides “automated, continual discovery of network infrastructure inventory and connectivity to maintain an up-to-date knowledge base of the network from the core to the edge.”
Eye of the Storm works across all platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX) and serves as the middle layer between single-function applications that are difficult to integrate and heavy architectures with specialized functions that are difficult to deploy and support.
It works seamlessly with VMware systems and complements standard networking equipment, such as that from Cisco Systems, Brocade and Nortel Networks.
The software, once in operation, gathers and stores the data network information, such as usage patterns and power peaks and valleys, and uses it as business intelligence, in that it can warn network managers when an outage or other problem may occur-hours ahead of time. It is a very proactive network package.
Eye of the Storm in Action
World’s largest 802.11n wireless deployment
Entuity just completed the network support for the world’s largest 802.11n wireless deployment, in a surprising place-at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.
The UM wireless network is a centrally managed service that supports the mobility needs of campus affiliates and guests for wireless Internet access using laptops, PDAs, cellular phones and other specialized wireless devices.
Entuity helped the UM Office of Information Technology meet a primary goal of implementing a manageable, expandable and scalable 802.11n wireless network to accommodate campuswide coverage over approximately 9,500 access points spread across more than 300 buildings upon full deployment.
The system provides a number of services, but the key ones are early alerting to and analysis of trends in network stability, accessibility and wireless access quality.
About 80,000 people are affiliated with UM across 1,204 acres on the campus. Most of them have some kind of wireless device, Entuity’s Camber said.
“Although the primary objective of the wireless upgrade project was to provide fast, flexible and secure wireless access to our user community, it needed to be done in a way that was complementary to our existing infrastructure and would not introduce new maintenance headaches,” said Louis Hammond, director of design and operations networking at UM. “Managing the new wireless environment in our existing network management solution, Eye of the Storm, allows us to leverage existing processes and expertise, giving us economies of acquisition, deployment, operation and ongoing maintenance.”
Another point of interest in the UM deployment is an implementation of a viable green IT program, which identifies and details infrastructure power and cost reduction opportunities.
Using the software’s Green IT Perspective, new in this latest version, to track the nightly workstation shut-down of more than 50,000 devices, UM plans to save more than $2 million in total annual utility costs at 100 percent compliance-a significant savings both monetarily and in CO2 output.
As eWEEK noted at the beginning of the year, automation is the watchword for 2009. Entuity has brought that new-generation automation to the networking sector in a big way.