Financial Institution Cuts Analyzer Costs by 77 Percent
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Enterprise organizations with highly critical computer networks face a common challenge: ensuring continuous data flow and application availability. Effective, efficient monitoring of the network infrastructure is critically important to achieving the 99.999% uptime and application performance required. To meet the challenge of nearly perfect uptime performance, organizations invest millions in network monitoring and analysis equipment. The initial investment in this equipment consumes a significant percentage of the IT budget. Additional expenses are incurred each year in the form of software licenses as well as ongoing hardware and software support contracts.
A $55K initial investment in a network analyzer will typically cost an additional $25K over 3 years for hardware and software support and maintenance. Applications such as transaction processing, trading executions, as well as VoIP and streaming market data continue to drive strong demand for increased bandwidth. In response, enterprise networks are moving from legacy infrastructure to 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the core and 1gigabit at the edge. Higher data rate technologies support all advanced services (packetized voice and video, data) and Layer 3 through Layer 7 intelligence. This new architecture easily scales enterprise networks and supports services for LANs, MANs, and WANs.
A major financial institution recently upgraded its network infrastructure to take advantage of the advanced services supported by a 10 gigabit core. The original topology called for eight packet analyzers distributed across the network, one at each switch. In addition to these eight analyzers, IT engineers needed at least four additional analyzers to ensure all critical aspects of packet analysis were addressed. Three different types of analysis tools were required to achieve a comprehensive network monitoring strategy in this highly complex and critical network.
The capital expense associated with the packet analyzers was just under $800K. The new installation budget allocated no more than $400K for analyzers. In order to meet the budget constraint, fewer devices would be purchased and manually relocated each time they were needed. While this approach met the budget requirement, network engineers would be left scrambling for the right analyzer during a crisis. Network managers were at risk for increasing mean time to resolution. Unpredictable network events coupled with the manual relocation of analyzers would reduce the efficiency and overall reliability of the network. To bank management, this meant an increased risk of extended downtime and lost customers.
With the APCON Layer-1 Matrix Switch, the IT staff was able to create an agile network monitoring strategy with complete network visibility and all at a cost that was under budget. The IntellaPatch switch allowed IT engineers to add only three packet analyzers and still perform complete analysis in both reactive and proactive modes. Using the APCON GUI interface to manage the physical layer matrix switch, IT engineering could capture and analyze events at any switch with just three analyzers.
The net result of adding the centralized APCON matrix switch was optimized performance at a fraction of the cost. Instead of the $800K required to purchase 12 analyzers, the financial institute bought three analyzers and a pair of IntellaPatch matrix switches for under $200K.
"The solution has been bullet-proof!" reported the lead engineer. "I have all of the [packet analyzer] tools I need, 24 by 7, at a much lower cost."
As an added benefit, annual maintenance costs went from $115K per year to $28K per year. Hardware warranties on packet analyzers typically run about 10% of the purchase price. An additional annual fee is added for each device for software and firmware maintenance. Reducing the number of devices from 12 to 3 results in annual maintenance cost of 1/4 the original estimates.
IT managers must meet stringent performance requirements to support corporate objectives. Budget constraints are generally in place that force a manager to make trade-offs between performance and spending. The APCON Layer-1 matrix switch provides a simple, effective solution that gives IT managers the monitoring capability needed at a fraction of the cost. In this particular case, the monitoring capabilities improved, while at the same time, the equipment and maintenance costs for the first year were reduced from $885K to $200K, a 77% savings.
Centralized analyzers with Apcon switches
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