5) More intelligent planning for and support of business growth Network managers constantly have to cope with change. They have to determine how increases in network utilization will affect application performance. They have to decide how to best engineer the network to support business expansion, re-organization or mergers and acquisitions. However, they can only do so if they have an effective means of performing capacity planning tasks and assessing a full range of "what-if" scenarios. Such scenarios are also critical for formulating realistic contingency plans that can ensure business continuity under a variety of possible conditions.

Looking at these challenges, it quickly becomes evident that conventional production network management tools alone are no longer sufficient for today's networking teams. These tools are great for monitoring the production network and discovering certain types of problems - but they don't enable network managers to validate new technologies and applications before they're deployed on the production network. They also force network managers to solve problems that should have been addressed in application design.

Conventional tools aren't very helpful for troubleshooting intermittent and/or transient network problems either, since they don't provide a means of reconstructing and analyzing such intermittent conditions. Nor do they help accelerate production roll-outs, facilitate experimentation with "what-if" scenarios, or support formulation of network contingency plans.

So what's an overworked, under-resourced network manager to do? The answer is to look at network modeling technologies. These technologies provide an environment in which new applications, technologies and problem-solving strategies can be safely and thoroughly evaluated. Because they allow an application's network behavior to be fully validated before it's deployed in the production environment, these technologies also empower network managers to perform more rapid, glitch-free roll-outs. Plus, modeling technologies are uniquely able to provide insight into any number of "what-if" scenarios - so network managers can make plans for growth, corporate re-structuring and/or disaster recovery.

"Empirical" modeling solutions offer today's network management teams particularly excellent business value, because of their accuracy and relative ease of implementation. This accuracy and ease is achieved by running the actual applications against a model that uses captured conditions from the production environment. The result is a clear understanding of the user experience well ahead of deployment.

For this and other network performance articles, white papers, and industry resources, please visit Shunra at http://www.shunra.com/resource_center.aspx.

About Shunra

Shunra's solutions empower organizations to address service level and performance concerns before rollout. The Shunra VE solution creates an exact replica of the production network environment, enabling IT professionals to safely develop, test and experiment with applications and infrastructure before deployment, and effectively plan for growth and change. Tailored for networking, performance and testing professionals, and software developers, Shunra VE facilitates collaboration across IT disciplines so IT organizations can quickly and more efficiently uncover and resolve problems before they impact the business. Over 1,500 leading enterprises and technology vendors worldwide are using Shunra's award-winning solutions including 3M, Boeing, Cisco, Dow Chemical, EMC, FedEx, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Kelly Services, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Nestle, Pitney Bowes, and Vodafone. Shunra's headquarters are located in New York City and Kfar Saba, Israel, with worldwide offices in the UK, Sweden and India. Shunra is also supported through a global network of channel partners.

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