After the welcoming ceremonies, and letting the dust settle from Day 1, we picked up right where we left off - continuing technical conversations and providing in-depth demos to the many Tech-Ed attendees looking to maximize their datacenter’s potential.  One common theme noticed: they all realized that they were nowhere near fully utilizing their environments capacity and came to Orlando hoping to go home with a better understanding on how to increase productivity. Just ask Ward Bell if you don’t believe me…..

Like the many before him (and after), it was a immense challenge pinpointing utilization issues without getting a full visible assessment of their infrastructure.  Back when times were simpler, you could toss a dart blind folded and hit your target 9 out of 10 times.  Funny how quickly times have changed- there are now so many more moving parts and it definitely didn’t stop with technology and this ‘new’ thing they call virtualization and THE cloud!  It used to just be the server, the NIC, and the physical network.  But now we have virtual servers, virtual NIC’s, and virtual switches (oh my! ), before we finally land on the physical uplinks.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V was a savior for companies looking to reduce operating costs and scale out more applications with greater efficiency. But the limited views of the virtual networks made it difficult for their instrumentation layer tools to see the different types of traffic being passed.  Our Phantom Virtualization Tap supported VMware, XenServer, KVM, Oracle and now Microsoft’s Hyper-V to allow Systems/Network admins regain that visibility they once had.

Again, for all those that haven’t visited us yet – make sure to stop by Net Optics at booth #342 and pick up some cool giveaways!  The ‘light saber’ to fight the dark side of network invisibility……mwahahaha  (insert evil laugh here!)

David Pham

Sr. Solutions Engineer