Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Network Diagramming Provider OPNET Sheds Light on IT Guru Network Planner

By Ashok Bindra
TMCnet Contributor

To enable enterprises to handle growing network traffic in terms of capacity and configuration, network diagramming solutions provider OPNET Technologies (News - Alert) has developed an algorithm that automates analysis and planning of multi-technology, multi-vendor enterprise networks. Labeled IT Guru Network Planner, the solution supports organizations to accurately plan for growth, change, technology migration, and new application deployment.

In essence, according to OPNET, IT Guru Network Planner supports key initiatives such as unified communications including VoIP, IP telephony, multimedia conferencing, and telepresence, VPNs and firewalls, data center migration and consolidation, and disaster recovery and business contingency planning. Moreover, it also supports transitioning to IPv6.

According to OPNET, to meet future traffic growths, this exclusive algorithm automatically optimizes the network for capacity and configuration, and achieves performance and survivability. Additionally, enterprise network planners and operations engineers can obtain significant return on investment from IT Guru Network Planner’s ability to rapidly roll out new applications, meet performance and availability requirements, and maximize existing network investments, said OPNET.

Some key features of IT Guru Network Planner include its ability to plan for growth; project future traffic and right-size links and tunnels to meet service level objectives; perform a pre-deployment analysis to accelerate deployment of new applications and technologies; ensure network survivability and predict the impact of failing nodes, links, or resource groups; automatically design network topologies based on user-configurable priorities for cost, resiliency, and performance-related criteria; and optimize routing and security for virtual private network (VPN) environments including IPSec, DMVPN, VRF-lite and MPLS-based VPNs.

Other highlights of IT Guru Network Planner include the ability to verify the impact of protocol tuning, QoS deployment, or traffic engineering; evaluate a wide range of “what-if” scenarios in a virtual network environment with full behavioral understanding of devices, protocols, and applications, without affecting the production network; perform an automated VoIP Readiness Assessment, predicting the network Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for planned voice-over-IP services and automatically resizing link capacity as required; plan for transition to IPv6 with the optional IPv6 Planning and Operations module; automatically perform an IPv6 readiness assessment and accelerate IPv6 migration planning; and validate the impact of configuration changes on network behavior and performance prior to deployment, leveraging the optional NetDoctor module.

In other company news, the network diagramming provider recently celebrated the fact that it has recently been positioned by Gartner (News - Alert), Inc., in the “Leaders” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring.”

The report, which was published on Sept. 19, and written by Will Cappelli and Jonah Kowall, evaluated 29 vendors. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at a specific time period and depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner, according to Gartner.