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BMC Software Inc. will bring its application perspective to network management at NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas, where it will show off a new release of its Patrol Dashboard and a technology alliance with Packeteer Inc.
The Houston-based company will introduce at N+I, which begins May 9, Release 6.7 of its Patrol Dashboard network performance analysis and reporting tool, which can now discover, monitor, report on and configure Packeteers PacketShaper application traffic management device.
PacketShaper can prioritize network traffic based on application or application type, user, and other parameters to ensure that the applications most important to a business get through when network congestion occurs.
With the new integration between Patrol Dashboard and PacketShaper, users working from a single console can see when theres congestion and make changes to ensure critical traffic gets through, according to Gerry Roy, BMCs senior manager for product management for networking and discovery in Austin, Texas. The integration allows Dashboard to collect network, application and end-user response time data from PacketShaper devices.
“Packeteer in WAN optimization is the market leader,” said Stephen Elliot, an analyst with International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., market researcher. “Its a smart move for BMC because it helps improve their credibility in network management. It also gives them more granular data collection and awareness than they currently have.”
BMC is also integrating PacketShaper with its BMC Event Manager and BMC Service Impact Manager. The integration will allow Packeteer alerts forwarded to the Patrol Dashboard to be shared with the event and service impact manager.
Release 6.7 of Dashboard also adds support for third-party load balancers, firewalls and IPSec VPNs (virtual private networks).
“Dashboard can discover load balancers, manipulate and configure them, and watch traffic to each component defined within the load balancer. From it you can back traffic off a loaded server and put it on another,” Roy said. BMC now supports Nortel Networks Alteon load balancers, but it intends to support others at a later date.
Dashboards reporting structure can also show performance and activity at firewalls from Nokia, Checkpoint Software Technologies Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.
New support for Ciscos IPSec VPNs provides reports on VPN tunnels to quickly see when those are congested, or to ensure that users are getting the bandwidth theyre paying for from their service providers.
Finally, Dashboard 6.7 takes advantage of data gathered through Ciscos NetFlow instrumentation to show application protocol distribution across an enterprise network.
The new release is available now. Pricing for the software starts at $3,500.