Per Year, Maximizing Return on Investment
WESTFORD, Mass., July 16 /PRNewswire/ -- NetScout Systems, Inc.
(Nasdaq: NTCT) today announced that Hold Brothers Online Investment Services
has selected NetScout's nGenius Real-Time Monitor (TM) and nGenius Capacity
Planner(TM) performance management solutions to monitor wide area network
usage and evaluate overall WAN performance. One of the fastest growing direct
access trading companies in the United States, Hold Brothers estimates its
resulting savings and return on investment at more than $1M per year in
unnecessary bandwidth purchases for its seventeen remote offices.
Hold Brothers, which handles trades of up to 60 million shares per day,
uses nGenius solutions to improve infrastructure performance, to conserve
bandwidth and to maintain the very high standards of performance its traders
require to successfully participate in trades on NASDAQ and multiple
Electronic Communications Networks (ECNs). The company provides its
proprietary trading software to more than 300 professional traders across a
high-speed, wide area network. This network connects Hold Brothers' remote,
main and backup sites where NetScout's WAN probes monitor the company's
desktops and servers.
Using NetScout's port mirroring function to copy and collect switch data
at a single integration point enables Hold Brothers to better understand and
measure WAN latency, improve visibility into server and application response
time and increase the reliability of trader access to the ECN.
Connecting to its remote offices with two point-to-point T1 lines or, in
other cases, frame relay, Hold Brothers has deployed NetScout WAN probes in
the company's main and remote offices. A 4-port LAN Probe in its central site
monitors clients and servers from their Cisco 6509 core switches.
With the cost of running application software over its branch network
exceeding $80,000 per month, Hold Brothers found it essential to understand
and control its use. Hold Brothers deployed NetScout's nGenius Real-Time
Monitor to continuously monitor how the WAN was being used and by whom. By
instantaneously breaking down WAN usage by host, Hold Brothers discovered its
LAN-based software was inefficient. As a result, Hold Brothers re-wrote
applications to increase their efficiency. They also relocated some remote
servers to avoid using WAN links. Hold Brothers implemented data multicasting
in each of its seventeen remote offices to send only one copy of quote data
over the WAN link at any one time.
These changes saved so much bandwidth, Hold Brothers found it no longer
needed to add a third or fourth T-1 link per office, saving the company more
than $6,000 per month, per office, or $1,100,000 a year.
"By instantaneously breaking down WAN usage by host, NetScout's nGenius
Real-Time Monitor has enabled us to better understand how our WAN links are
actually being used. For example, we can now see when someone is downloading
from the Internet and saturating the WAN link or running an application that
hogs bandwidth," said Chris Lukas, CTO Emerging Technologies, Hold Brothers.
Moreover, the nGenius solution showed that Voice over IP (VoIP) used
almost no additional bandwidth at all system-wide, which validated the VoIP
solution for the company.
"By using nGenius Real-Time Monitor we avoid over-provisioning, our
applications work more efficiently and our application developers can
immediately see the impact of their changes and design accordingly," added
Lukas. "The NetScout solution has given us unprecedented network visibility,
improving network performance dramatically, which directly impacts our
profitability. In fact, in terms of return on investment, the NetScout
solution paid for itself in only three months."
The ultimate success of Hold Brothers is enabling its traders to execute
trades quickly. By connecting directly to NASDAQ and the ECNs, investors can
see trades as they happen rather than after they have already occurred.
"The NetScout solution allows us to detect ECN problems before our traders
do and saves a lot of problems with trades that don't execute quickly. This
can be a major source of frustration to our traders, who trade in and out of
securities quickly and can't wait even a few seconds," adds Lukas.
"By taking responsibility for infrastructure productivity -- planning,
justifying and managing IT costs and requirements -- IT e-business
environments save money now and plan more efficiently for the future," said
Michael Szabados, NetScout's senior vice president, product operations.
"nGenius Real-Time Monitor supports the infrastructure's return on
investment with real data and ensures the network is able to fully support the
time-sensitive needs of its customers."
About Hold Brothers Inc.
Hold Brothers, www.holdbrothers.com, Jersey City, NJ, is a rapidly growing
direct access trading company committed to providing the fastest and most
sophisticated software technology in the industry. Founded in 1994, it
achieved revenues of $134 million in 2000 up from $61 million in 1999, making
it one of the fastest growing direct access trading firms in the United
States. Over 300 full-time traders at Hold Brothers locations nationwide
trade up to 60 million shares a day. Hold Brothers was the first direct
access trading company to offer mentoring programs for entry-level traders.
Hold Brothers operates 17 U.S. locations and has plans to significantly expand
its business with additional offices and a new emphasis on attracting the
active offsite trader. It is the only direct access trading company to make
the Inc. 2000 list of the 500 fastest growing private U.S. companies, ranking
number 152.
About nGenius
NetScout's nGenius (TM) Performance Management System is a market-leading
suite of monitoring and reporting applications that draw on rich, integrated
performance data generated by NetScout's application-aware probe suite,
advanced intelligent software agents, and network devices. The nGenius System
helps organizations increase their return on infrastructure investments by
optimizing the performance of their network and its ability to deliver
applications and content to end-users and consists of the following
components:
-- nGenius Real-Time Monitor (TM)
Proactively detects, analyzes and rapidly resolves network and
application problems from the Web site to the back-office
-- nGenius Capacity Planner (TM)
Profiles and predicts application, network and device traffic patterns
to establish future network resource requirements
-- nGenius Application Service Level Manager (TM)
Delivers application and network service level reporting that reflects
actual business processes
About NetScout Systems
NetScout Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of infrastructure
performance management solutions for leading companies and service providers
worldwide. NetScout serves approximately half of the Fortune 500 and counts
among its customers 3M Corporation, Amazon.com, AT&T Wireless, Bristol-Myers
Squibb, Cable & Wireless, Cisco Systems, Computer Sciences Corporation, Exenet
Technologies, Fidelity Investments, Intel Online, MCI, Reed Elsevier, Sprint,
Sun Microsystems and Webhire. NetScout is headquartered in Westford,
Massachusetts and has approximately 360 employees, with offices in North
America, Europe and Asia. Further information on the company is available on
the World Wide Web at www.netscout.com.
NetScout is a registered trademark, and the NetScout logo, nGenius,
nGenius Real-Time Monitor, nGenius Application Service Level Manager and
nGenius Capacity Planner are trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc.
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SOURCE NetScout Systems, Inc.
Web site: http: //www.netscout.com
CONTACT: Peggy Flynn NetScout Systems, 978-614-4113, flynnp@netscout.com; or Dustin Smith, or Dan Sarro, both of Schwartz Communications, Inc., 781-684-0770, netscout@schwartz-pr.com