Physical Infrastructure Management Feature Editorial

Consistent and reliable uptime is imperative to an organization’s survival, growth, reputation and profitability. According to a recent Infonetics Research (News - Alert) study, “The Costs of Downtime: North American Medium Businesses,” medium-sized companies – comprised of 101 to 1000employees – experience an average of 140 hours ofnetwork downtime annually, resulting in approximately$867,000 in lost revenues.

 

For today’s data-centric enterprises, implementation of physical infrastructure management solutions is necessary to compete and thrive. Today’s physical infrastructure platform supports the organizational network, data centers, Web sites, video surveillance, security and access system and industrial networks.  With the increased acceptance of virtualization, cloud computing, Web 2.0 and software as service, comprehensive physical infrastructure management is becoming more important today and will continue to increase in importance going forward.

 

According to the Infonetics report, applications are the biggest source of downtime, accounting for roughly one-quarter, or $213,000 annually, split 65/35 between outages and degradations. Focusing on the source of application outages could save many organizations a significant amount of money, the report concludes.

 

While a small fraction of the overall cost of the infrastructure, the physical layer is nevertheless critical to ensure the effectiveness of the much more expensive logical infrastructure, according to the smart data center experts at Panduit. Near 100 percent uptime of physical infrastructure is key to an organization’s growth and profitability, company officials said. Even as it consumes increasing levels of resources and power, the physical infrastructure offers “huge potential” for finding energy savings for sustainable functioning.

 

Panduit’s Panview iQ Hardware and PIM software offer an “end-to-end, intelligent” physical infrastructure management system that enhances availability and security of the network, while lowering the total cost of ownership.

 

In a recent interview with TMCnet, Vineeth Ram, vice president of global marketing at Panduit, explained: “Panduit’s Physical Infrastructure Manager Software Platform monitors and tracks IP-enabled devices throughout the enterprise to enable IT managers to perform efficient capacity planning, manage remote devices, enforce regulatory compliance and increase the reliability and security of network infrastructure operations.”

 

With an estimated 70 percent of all network downtime related to physical layer issues, an IPLM system helps look inside the physical layer to efficiency and effectively identify and resolve problems that arise and proactively prevent other problems from occurring.

 

A recent case can be found in an 18-branch Vermont-based savings bank. To keep up with growth needs for bandwidth, storage and management within their IT organization, the bank needed to upgrade its network cabling infrastructure with a solution that offered flexibility and scalability. This required upgrading and enhancing existing connectivity in all bank locations, according to company officials. The bank's primary business needs included remote manageability, accountability and reporting, and network reliability for its 18 locations across two states.

The bank realized benefits of the Panview System almost immediately, company officials said. The bank's IT team now has the ability to remotely manage all patch field connectivity issues from a centralized operations center. As the bank expands its business in the future, company officials said the Panview System will continue to serve as the foundation for “greater control and manageability of their infrastructure.” Because of the modular design of the Panview System, the financial institution can upgrade legacy panels with new, modular Panview Patch Panels to meet their changing requirements.

 

According to Panduit officials, a unified approach to infrastructure architecture offers enterprises distinct business advantages:

 

• Greater visibility, tracking and control of critical systems that identify, report and monitor capabilities allow users to react to problems before they affect enterprises;

• A flexible, scalable system that has the capacity to expand as business needs increase and accommodate changing user needs, from mobility services to environmental controls;

• Managed movement of network devices, servers and resources from site to site;

• Optimized installation of disparate network cabling, which results in reduced initial deployment time and ongoing maintenance costs; and

• Physical to logical mapping through integration with existing network management systems enhances manageability.

 

Further, according to Jeff Wilson, an Infonetics Research analyst, service provider outages are also a vexing source of downtime, and largely out of the control of the companies experiencing the downtime.

 

“There isn’t a single problem area that organizations need to focus on, which would be a simpler fix,” Wilson said. “Every decision is critical, from hardware selection, to product setup and from employee training to SLAs with service providers.”