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If you think of Gliffy as Visio delivered as a web based app you’d be about right, just like Google Docs. Google, if you’ve got a spare few million bucks (and we all know you do), will you just buy Gliffy? And then integrate it into Google Docs. This stuff is way too good to waste behind a paid-for monetisation strategy.

When I was doing the research for the Open source network management in Google 2001 vs Google 2008 I came across the Network Monitoring Tools website run by Stanford. Network Monitoring Tools @ SLAC 2001 Network Monitoring Tools @ SLAC 2008 I think the above images illustrates the heightened level of competition in today’s network management market rather well.

Jane Curry has completed her Open Source Management Options [PDF] white paper.

Mike Wilbur provides a great post on scheduling a PowerShell script to periodically run using Windows 2003. Somehow I think that’s gonna prove very handy when used in conjunction with PowerTime. 😄

The classic problem with facilities people running the air-conditioning systems. [via The Daily WTF]

If only data centres looked like this… Via Devicelnn & Frederik Perman

Google have released a fully searchable version of their first available index from 2001 to celebrate their 10th birthday. I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast a search for “open source network management” using the 2001 index and the 2008 index. I have now added the search results for the October 2022 index. Figure 1: Google Results for open source network management search in 2001 Figure 2: Google Results for open source network management search in 2008

David Cuthbertson of Square Mile Systems was kind enough to demonstrate his AssetGen software to myself and Denis last week. Once the data has been inputted into a CMDB like AssetGen all sorts of very impressive reports can be generated very quickly. Implementing a CMDB involves a heavy up front investment because you have to manually enter at least 50% of your infrastructure and associated dependencies. The cause of the steep initial investment in CMDB is the invisibility of infrastructure in the data centre to auto-discovery software, meaning that infrastructure cannot be auto-discovered in the same way as devices on the network.

Intel have carried out a limited pilot to find out how a data centre would perform without the usual data centre environmental controls [PDF]. The top and bottom of it was that the servers, over a nine month test period performed as well whilst exposed to regular none air conditioned air and limited air filtration as servers in a fully air conditioned data centre. Does this mean that you can switch off all of your air conditioners and circulate none conditioned air instead?

Terry Slattery has some suggestions as to how you can use Amazon’s cloud computing offerings in implementing network management