Net monitoring service on tap

From...

February 29, 2000
Web posted at: 8:14 a.m. EST (1314 GMT)

by Marc Songini

(IDG) -- SilverBack Technologies wants to take on much of the headache of monitoring your company's network resources.

The North Billerica, Mass., start-up plans to roll out a monitoring and reporting service called InfoCare, which features a customer-site appliance dubbed InfoNest 650. The service is designed for networks of less than 1,000 seats. The offering will let IT staff get an instant picture of their network devices, servers, applications and security, the company says.

SilverBack is one of a handful of players in the fledgling management service provider (MSP) market, joining the likes of @Manage, InteQ and NetSolve. The MSPs claim their customers can save on software deployment costs, personnel and training.

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SilverBack claims to have the broadest set of MSP services, covering the e-business, security and applications portions of the network. Moreover, this a service with a new wrinkle: It is offered on the customer site, removing fear of any failure in the pipeline between it and the MSP host. There are, however, live connections between the user and the SilverBack data center for periodic application upgrades and maintenance.

SilverBack is expected to offer details of its new InfoCare service this week at the ASP Forum in Anaheim. The offering handles a variety of functions - performance monitoring, asset inventory, discovery of downed devices, problem analysis and security scanning. The service is delivered through a special appliance, called the InfoNest 650.

This box contains a version of the Linux operating system running on an Intel chip, and it hosts the independent software vendor applications that monitor and present the network statistics. For instance, Network Associates provides the security piece of InfoCare with its Cybercop security product.

One beta user gives the service a thumb's up.

"InfoCare has performed exceptionally well so far," says Cyndi Fernandez of Chelmsford On-Line, an ISP in North Chelmsford, Mass. While the company already has another monitoring system in place, Fernandez says InfoCare seems to discover problems more quickly. She especially likes InfoCare's historical trend reports that can pinpoint network bottlenecks and other problems.

InfoNest attaches to any part of the network via a 100M bit/sec Ethernet port. Once in operation, it begins to poll the network via SNMP commands and starts generating status reports.

InfoNest checks a network device, such as a printer, hub, switch or router, and learns things such as its IP address and port availability. This data is presented to the IT manager via the SilverBack Web-based customizable InfoPortal, which resides in the InfoNest device. The InfoPortal can be accessed via any browser. The InfoPortal can also alert IT managers about outages in the network via a page or an e-mail.

InfoCare will be available this spring for $2,000 to $4,000 a month, depending on network size.

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