by Scott Steves, State of Kansas 

Who says you can’t lower the cost of network operations?

In my first post, Who says you can’t lower the cost of network operations?,  I said that management told my team “you need to consolidate operations and increase staff productivity”. We did it and these are the five tips I can pass on from my experience. In the second post, Who says you can’t lower the cost of network operations? part 2, I covered tips 1 and 2. In this post, I’ll cover the rest of the tips.

Tip #3: Software should support the organization’s consolidation goals

The wide variety of management software can be daunting when deciding what’s best for the organization. It’s important to look at your organization’s consolidation goals and use software that aligns with those goals. My department required software that was capable of multi-vendor management because we did not want to worry about which vendor’s network equipment we needed to support. We also needed software that was capable of scaling across our entire infrastructure, making sure it would not encounter issues even after monitoring 1,000 nodes.

Tip #4: Pay attention to the richness of the portfolio

When evaluating management software, it’s also important to evaluate the “functional density” of the portfolio. By that, I mean an integrated portfolio that delivers as much of the capability that you need as possible. This will allow you to do more without adding unnecessary complexity to the toolset or interfaces. We were able to reduce the State of Kansas’ network’s MTTR by at least 15-20 percent by taking advantage of HP’s network management software features. When you are able to reduce MTTR, it improves both the quality of network service delivered and staff productivity. This translates into significant cost savings. Even more importantly, reducing MTTR improves network availability. The state cited our improved network availability as an example of program success in the Kansas State Legislature. Finally, having a single, unified and standardized interface with easy to use features saves our operators hundreds of hours per year.

Tip #5: Automate whenever possible

Use network automation software to track and regulate network configuration and software changes. This will make it easy to correlate changes with faults. We learned the value of this during a recent upgrade of network hardware. Change management in a network of our size can be an overwhelming task but, with the automation software, we did not have to monitor configuration changes manually. Instead, the software managed this.

To summarize, implementing standardized business service management software was the right decision for my organization, especially during these tough economic times. It could be the answer to your challenges as well. Be sure to look for standardized management software that aligns with your organization’s goals, research the richness of the tools and use automation software whenever possible.

I'm Scott Steves; I work in the Network Analysis Group as a Systems Network Software Consultant for the Division of Information Systems & Communications at the State of Kansas. I provide research and support for the network and configuration management solutions in the Division. Feel free to connect with me via www.linkedin.com/in/ssteves  

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