Mellanox Technologies Chooses Entuity for a New Level of Network Insights and Management

Overview
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and Yokneam, Israel, Mellanox was founded in 1999 and is a leading developer/manufacturer of sophisticated end-to-end networking technologies, including adapters, switches, and cables. Mellanox knows the value of operational efficiency as their products are designed to provide the highest throughput and lowest latency delivering data faster to applications for unparalleled performance. As demand grew for their products, keeping the expanding Mellanox global network operating efficiently was becoming challenging. The Mellanox IT organization realized that their original set of distinct network management tools was not answering all their needs going forward.

Company Details:

• 1,900+ Employees

Global Network

• 12+ countries supported
• 25+ facilities including office buildings, laboratories and fabrication centers

Network Management Software

• Entuity Network Management for BMC TrueSight Operations Management

Business Expansion Requires Reliable Network Performance
Preparing for the future Mellanox needed to guarantee an improved end-user experience and acquire a network management solution flexible enough to easily support their expanding global enterprise with network devices located in various locations: production networks, labs, offices and manufacturing sites. Other key areas that were necessary for the new network management system included:

• Eliminating network downtime which led to poor productivity
• Proactively preventing networking events before they escalated into real issues
• Optimizing network performance through a deeper visibility into the network and its devices

What does it take to run a global company’s network
An extensive evaluation program was set up to fully explore which network management solution would best fit Mellanox. It was determined that after five products were tested–a large legacy platform, an unitegrated NMS solution, a vendor specific application, an MRTG analyzer and Entuity, Entuity network management expertly met all the prerequisites set by the IT organization.

With an all-in-one, integrated design, Entuity equipped Mellanox with the capabilities necessary to effectively manage over 1500 of their network devices to achieve their goals. For example, IT can now easily keep track of network devices’ keys measurements status (CPU utilization, latency, average SNMP response, reachability metrics/history) for maintaining high levels of performance. This visibility allows early detection of problematic areas for proactive resolution.

Additional metrics are now being used to measure real-time port utilization data, as well as, generating automatic reports that compare the data over time for accurate analysis. This information illustrates where and when there are bottlenecks and can also help effectively build out their network as the company grows.
An accurate representation of the network was also a vital requirement. Entuity’s continual, auto-discovery feature keeps their topology maps up to-to-date, with little to no effort from the IT team. Mellanox, as you might imagine, uses their own switches on their network and Entuity quickly added them to the products supported device list so that all Mellanox switches were immediately able to be taken under management. “Real-time topology maps have been very effective for us to understand were and how dependencies are found. This of course makes our job easier when it comes to responding and resolving events and has reduced the time spent searching for root cause details by almost 30%,” states Maor Amar, Network Engineer at Mellanox.

Why Entuity
“We considered a number of alternatives to improve our management of the Mellanox network. The test evaluations clearly showed that Entuity Network Management would best meet our requirements for enhanced network management, reporting capabilities, vendor support, unlimited scalability and enterprise-class functionality.”- Maor Amar, Network Engineer at Mellanox.

Business Benefits
As the IT team became more familiar with The Entuity product, it was apparent that standardizing on an all-in-one network management solution delivers operational excellence through:

• Reduction of staff time spent managing the software increasing operational efficiency (no more data silos or multiple products to manage separately)
• Outage and risk reduction for improving end-user productivity
• Proactive Management for superior network performance
• Better control of OpEx/CapEx expenditures
• Improved network visibility allowing for efficiency and effectiveness of managing constantly evolving and growing network infrastructure
• Lowers TCO and increases ROI–a streamlined automated solution reduces incidents, data inac -curacies outages and associated costs

“Mellanox can now effortlessly plan and enable future growth of our network and IT services. We will continue to capitalize on Entuity’s expertise in managing heterogeneous networks to optimize out IT infrastructure and provide outstanding application performance of our entire organization,” states Maor. “We re pleased with the results to date and look forward to taking advantage of more specialized capabilities within Entuity in the coming months.”

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.