Reports 90 Percent Reduction in Troubleshooting Time as it Consolidates Networks Due to Acquisition
WESTFORD, Mass., Oct 02, 2007 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT), the industry pacesetter for
advanced network and service assurance solutions, today announced that
NetScout's nGenius AFMon is being used to dramatically reduce
troubleshooting times and smooth network transitions as Johnson
Controls (www.johnsoncontrols.com), a global Fortune 100 company that
creates smart environments where people live, work and travel,
assimilates recently acquired companies.
Founded in 1885, Johnson Controls has headquarters in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin and 136,000 employees in more than 1,000 locations across
125 countries. It recently acquired York International, a global
supplier of heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and refrigeration
(HVAC&R) equipment and services, picking up 10,000 new employees and
dozens of new applications. Those employees and applications are in
the process of being incorporated into Johnson Controls' existing MPLS
network.
Any time new applications are added to a network, issues may
emerge from contention for bandwidth to spikes in unknown traffic to
poorly performing services due to the use of a new WAN topology like
MPLS. When the new applications are added as part of the integration
of the acquired company, the network team must maintain good
performance for both existing employees and applications as well as
for the new employees and applications. By combining deep-packet
analysis and enterprise data monitoring into a single appliance
specially designed to deliver high-performance and high-capacity
monitoring, the nGenius AFMon has given Johnson Controls the breadth
of evidence it needs to get to the bottom of tricky performance issues
as these two networks become one.
For example, when staff at York reported slow network performance,
nGenius AFMon enabled Steven Leventhal, Johnson Controls' senior
network monitoring tools engineer with global responsibility, to look
at the actual transactions and see that TCP send window and receive
window sizes were misaligned. "nGenius AFMon showed us that York and
Johnson Controls were on different versions of Windows and as a
result, had dissimilar default buffer settings," says Leventhal. "That
setting issue was causing the program to send smaller packets that
would ping-pong back and forth. nGenius AFMon's bounce charts showed
that the problem was adding 30 milliseconds per packet; if you
multiply that by a thousand packets, that's substantial delay. The
evidence from nGenius AFMon allowed us to make the appropriate
changes. Once the applications were sending appropriate sized packets,
performance improved dramatically."
NetScout's nGenius System was also able to help the network team
rapidly restore service when York users began reporting that
application time-outs were preventing them from posting necessary
inventory changes. "nGenius AFMon showed that the site was getting
swamped with broadcast traffic, causing a switch to drop packets,"
says Leventhal. "We were able to see that one switch sent the packet,
but the next switch failed to pass it on to the routers--we were able
to see precisely where packets were being dropped." A quick setting
change rectified the situation, and enabled the end users to get their
important inventory updates underway.
"NetScout's nGenius AFMon has dramatically sped up our
troubleshooting process," says Leventhal. "Troubleshooting that used
to take 20 minutes to do now takes only two minutes with the nGenius
Solution."
Additionally, NetScout's nGenius Performance Management System has
had an unexpected side-benefit: it has brought the network and
applications teams closer together. "There has been a dramatic
increase in the number of requests from people who want me to use
nGenius Performance Manager to help them troubleshoot their
applications," says Leventhal. "The situation has definitely
evolved--where historically the process would be to rule out the
network first, it has evolved into a collaborative process where we
have visibility to troubleshoot all aspects of the network and
applications traversing it. It could be anything from bad DNS lookups
to TCP window sizing to issues with the way the applications
themselves were written. There is definitely a new understanding and
appreciation today."
About NetScout Systems
NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) has been the industry
pacesetter for advanced network and service assurance solutions for
over a decade, and counts the world's largest enterprises, government
agencies, and service providers among its customers. Enterprise and
government IT organizations deploy NetScout's nGenius(R) Performance
Management System to increase service levels to their users by
reducing or preventing service disruptions. Service providers depend
on NetScout's proven IP performance management technology and
expertise to protect the quality of their customers' experience with
IP-based services. NetScout is headquartered in Westford,
Massachusetts and has offices worldwide. Further information is
available at http://www.netscout.com.
(C)2007 NetScout Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. NetScout and
the NetScout logo, nGenius, and Quantiva are registered trademarks of
NetScout Systems, Inc. The CDM logo, MasterCare, the MasterCare logo
and Progressive Analytics are trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc.
Other brands, product names and trademarks are property of their
respective owners. NetScout reserves the right, at its sole
discretion, to make changes at any time in its technical information
and specifications, and service and support programs.
SOURCE: NetScout Systems, Inc.
NetScout Systems, Inc.
Christine Johansen, 978-614-4113
johansenc@netscout.com
or
Davies Murphy Group, Inc.
Brian Alberti, 781-418-2403
netscout@daviesmurphy.com