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Network Physics Inc., originally a WAN optimization/application acceleration provider, spent so much time proving to customers that its products worked that it discovered a new niche for itself: helping IT shops decide which vendors products worked best to solve their performance problems.
This week, the Mountain View, Calif., company will build on that idea by releasing an operating system upgrade for its appliances that speeds troubleshooting and pinpoints the source of response-time delays. The NetSensory OS 5.0 software, with its new NetSensory Insights, can be used to test different WAN optimization/application acceleration products to determine which offerings best address performance problems unique to the customers environment.
NetSensory Insights is a set of templates that can step users through the process of creating a base line, auditing the network, troubleshooting, searching for worms or malware, and tuning performance.
“[The technology] has a composition breakdown chart that shows all the different pieces of the communication,” said one beta tester, who asked not to be named. “You can see the network transmission versus client and server wait times. I can show that the problem is on the servers—with a 55-second wait time—and the transportation time is nothing.”
NetSensory Insights encapsulates a workflow and provides a quick set of reports, views and analyses that can be shared with different parts of the organization, whether its the help desk or server administrators.
While officials say NetSensory Insights does not compete with network management tools such as Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView, it remains to be seen how well they communicate that to users who may already have invested in such tools, said analyst Rick Ptak, principal at Ptak, Noel & Associates, in Amherst, N.H.
NetSensory OS 5.0, which runs on Network Physics NP-2000 data center appliances and NP-500 branch office appliances, also adds the ability to track applications use of TCP persistent connections, a new Web-based application classification and behavior-based alerting to more quickly detect anomalies on the network.