Network Management Strategies for the CIO
eTelemetry will add bandwidth throttling, site blocking and filtering capabilities to Metron, its Web activity monitoring appliance. The SMB-focused vendor announced the release of Metron 2.0 at Interop Monday.
Ermis Sfakiyanudis, eTelemetry's president and CEO, said his company is adding active policy enforcement components to its existing set of monitoring technologies to create a better-rounded product.
"Metron 2.0 really gives us a full solution set," he said. "We were primarily known as a monitoring solution. Now we're giving [customers] the active
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components as well. So we have policy monitoring and policy enforcement both
in the same appliance."
The new features will allow SMBs to blacklist and whitelist websites. Also, Metron's ability to match IP addresses to people and to corporate roles will allow network engineers to throttle bandwidth selectively. If one employee visits Youtube regularly as part of his job function, IT can assign bandwidth priority to him. Others who visit the video-sharing site just for laughs will find that the site is unavailable or so slow that it's useless.
Sfakiyanudis said the new release brings eTelemetry's product set more in line with its chief competitor, WebSense. While WebSense owns the enterprise market in Web filtering and monitoring, eTelemetry has carved out a solid niche in the SMB space by taking an appliance-based approach that's easier for network engineers to manage.
Sfakiyanudis said Metron's robust reporting capabilities allow for some interesting uses for the appliance.
"For instance, one of the popular features we've got is being able to see bandwidth used by each department on a monthly basis and being able to do chargebacks on that bandwidth," he said."
"It's targeted specifically to small and medium businesses," said David O'Connell, senior analyst with Nucleus Research. "In the SMB they have scaled-down IT departments. Theses are appliance-based applications that have a minimal software and deployment footprint, which means shorter deployments and less cost and less risk."
O'Connell said products like Metron are a big help to IT organizations who get multiple requests from human resources to document Internet usage by employees. Human resources often turn to IT organizations for proof that employees have beenn misusing Internet connectivity at work, either by spending too much time shopping or by visiting inappropriate websites.
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"I always get a kick out of hearing what people are doing with their computer at work, but this is happening all over the workplace," O'Connell said. "It's resulting in lots of HR actions, which can be labor intensive for IT departments, and it's a complete distraction."
When Ira Levy became IT director for Howard County in Maryland, he needed to get a better handle on Internet usage by the county's 3,000 employees.
Levy said not only were HR requests on Internet usage labor intensive for his 70-person staff, but he also needed a product like eTelemetry to control bandwidth consumption.
"We were very limited on bandwidth," Levy said. "What I wanted to make sure of, even though I had plans to triple our bandwidth, was that we get the usage under control. So that when we did increase our bandwidth, [usage] wouldn't immediately grow to the new threshold. We were able to use the information we found through Metron to put out a good computer usage policy before we switched over the new bandwidth."
Metron has also helped Levy root out other bandwidth hogs, such as misconfigured PCs that were going out to the Internet for Microsoft Windows and Symantec updates instead of getting updates from an internal patch management server.
Levy said he has been able to give HR some direct access to Metron so they can pull their own reports on employee Internet usage when he doesn't have the resources to spare. However, pulling those reports is much easier for his staff now.
"It probably takes us 30 minutes to pull a report for them, where before it would have taken us days," he said. "It's dramatic. For the most part it allows me not to pull people off their day-to-day operations to address an HR request for two or three days. We were dealing with two or three HR requests a month."
Levy said he relies on his network engineers to handle throttling and filtering via his routers, so he has no immediate plans to upgrade to Metron 2.0. But he said SMBs with more limited IT resources would probably find the new components in the product helpful.
"I think from a small to medium-sized business perspective, they would be able to lean on the Metron device more than on Cisco interfaces, because the [Metron] interface is much more user friendly than Cisco's devices. This would make sense for SMBs with no network engineers in house. Or if they're outsourcing it and they want to use more of their preexisting resources and maybe their resources are more server-based roles."
Let us know what you think about the story; email: Shamus McGillicuddy, News Editor
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