Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Visual Networks (VNWK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: david wolf who wrote (8)	2/10/1998 11:16:00 PM
From: david wolf	Respond to of 367

<good article discussing impact of VNWK deployment > Internet Week October 27, 1997 Delta Takes Back Control The IT folks at Delta Airlines have found network management nirvana. Think that's overstating it? They don't. Not when they've been able to slash $2.5 million in yearly WAN costs. The nation's third largest airline, with 63,440 employees and a fleet of 553 planes, late last year installed a set of management tools and CSU/DSUs from Visual Networks Inc. to manage 150 public and 20 private frame relay connections. The project is about half complete, but the results were immediate. The airline was able to call its service provider's bluff on quality of service guarantees and redirect bandwidth to critical business tasks. With Visual's Uptime products, managers are now able to identify from a single network console which traffic-Internet, TCP/IP, SNA, IPX or proprietary Airline Protocol-and which application-Lotus Notes or cc:Mail-is going over which frame relay connection at any given time. They are able to correlate all this activity on the entire network into a management platform. The single console can be accessed by both business and network executives from a Web browser. The upshot is the ability to plan, in detail, future bandwidth and service requirements and wrangle attractive carrier discounts. In August, Delta's Boston reser-vation centers faced poor response time at certain times of the day. The problem was immediately tracked to software distribution traffic and corrected. In another instance, Delta detected unusually heavy traffic at midnight and early morning at certain airports. The activity was traced to maintenance personnel who were happily surfing unauthorized Web sites. The IT group could identify the actual IP addresses and users causing the problem and the authorization was immediately cut off. "This has given us control of our networks and put us in the knowledge seat, knowing everything we want to know about our networks, including which application is going over what link at any time,'' said an enthusiastic James Chester, manager of the network operations at Delta Technology Inc . Delta Technology provides all the networking and IT needs of Delta Airlines in 120 countries. It has an annual operating budget of $250 million. Delta's worldwide network supports multiple protocols, from SNA, TCP/IP, IPX to Airline Protocol, and uses 250 routers and 110,000 devices. A massive intranet will be completed by early next year and already handles online ticketing. Until a few months back, Delta and other users of public frame relay faced half hour to hour delays in correcting their problem links. Because users could not see what was on the carrier side, they often didn't know the cause of the problem. Further, there was no way to check whether carriers really delivered the agreed upon class of service and QoS levels. On top of that, if certain bursty data was sent beyond the Committed Information Rates (CIR) agreed upon, the data simply was thrown out and there was no way to know what got lost, said Chester. CIR refers to guaranteed bandwidth that carriers agree to support on a given frame relay link. Often, they also agree to handle certain levels of additional bursty data. Overstepping the CIR had serious ramifications if the link happened to be in Delta's reservation or ticketing and flight maintenance areas. Chester points out that anyone in Delta's shoes can empathize with how dicey it is to juggle 800 mission-critical tasks over a complex web of 150 public frame relay links that you cannot see or control. But the Visual Network Uptime product took the guesswork out of finding whether the traffic was in the Delta environment or the public frame relay cloud. To accomplish this, network probes are placed on each end of a frame relay line and connected to CSU/DSUs. They collect information on public and private networks and send it over to a server unit that archives all network alerts, alarms and bandwidth information. A network console analyzes that information and generates real-time reports. In the meantime, Uptime alerts and alarms are fed into OpenView or any other management platform as Simple Network Management Protocol alerts and captured as SNMP traps. Chester said Delta can instantaneously identify where a particular problem occurred, whether on the carrier side or on its own private frame relay network. Sprint, one of Delta's frame relay suppliers, has incorporated Visual Uptime in its networks and offers Uptime frame relay service that provides Delta all the information it needs on its frame relay links. "Our customers wanted more access to their real-time frame relay performance data and alarms to better manage their networks,'' said Brad Hokampe, Sprint's director of advanced data services. Sprint has offered Uptime since last June. Advanced capabilities for reporting and Web front-end functions were added in August. Delta plans to use Uptime for managing its private ATM lines toward year's end when Visual introduces its Uptime version for ATM networks. Christopher Nicoll, marketing manager at Visual, said the company will add the ability to identify application-level data traffic to its product sometime next year. This will let Delta and other users determine the bandwidth consumed by particular applications, such as Lotus Notes. It also will show who the big users are so managers can plan accordingly.

To: david wolf who wrote (8)	2/11/1998 3:24:00 PM
From: Francis Gaskins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 367

Any ideas on what this GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN corp) announcement means for VNWK? Notice the part about "GTE can classify security and connectivity trouble on its own network and any non-GTE ISP network." ------------------------------------------- GTE Internetworking puts new spin on security services By Denise Pappalardo, Network World Fusion, 2/11/98 GTE Internetworking (formerly BBN Corp.) announced yesterday it is upgrading and expanding the reach of its Site Patrol managed firewall service. Site Patrol 4, GTE Internetworking's latest version of the service, can now be deployed at any customer's site regardless of whether they are a dedicated GTE Internetworking Internet access customer or get their dedicated services from another Internet service provider. Previously, Site Patrol was only available to GTE Internetworking customers. GTE Internetworking's managed firewall service can be monitored and managed 24x7 from GTE's Security Network Operations center in Boston. Using diagnostic tools developed in-house, GTE can classify security and connectivity trouble on its own network and any non-GTE ISP network. GTE Internetworking also announced support for Sun Microsystems' Sun Ultra workstations. Previous versions of Site Patrol only supported Intel's PC hardware platform. Sun Ultra is expected to better support higher bandwidth connectivity such as T-3 (45M bit/sec) Internet access, said a GTE Internetworking spokesman. Site Patrol 4 also supports V-One Corp.'s SmartGate client server security software. This enhancement supports encrypted dial-up sessions for Site Patrol customers that are on the road and want to dial in to their corporate network. Site Patrol 4 also is available in 52 countries through GTE Internetworking deal with ITS, a sister company of Equant, GTE Internetworking's global partner. Site Patrol 4 is available for a one time installation fee of $5,000 with reccurring monthly charges of $2,750. Site Patrol International also is available for a one time installation fee of $7,500 with reoccurring monthly charges of $3,750.