As RGIS grows in size, so do the demands on its network infrastructure. RGIS was looking for an analysis tool to monitor a worldwide network without adding additional staff to run it, and without utilizing too much of the current staff’s time and energy. Unfortunately, the tools that RGIS had used in the past required someone with extensive experience to run the network, which did not add up to savings in cost or time. The company needed a tool that could be operated by everyone in the department, from junior staff to senior executives.
NetMRI was recommended to RGIS by Amerinet, their trusted systems integrator with a long standing relationship based on value and service. RGIS agreed to install a NetMRI evaluation unit in its headquarters to test for one month. RGIS’ requirements for NetMRI included the ability for NetMRI to monitor their vast network as a whole system, including both physical and logical devices and links. NetMRI had to prove that it was a time and cost-effective tool using the least number of personnel to operate. NetMRI also had to demonstrate that it could quickly and easily discover issues in the network before they became problems, without duplicates, clutter or steep learning curve.
Within 48 hours, NetMRI discovered issues on the network that had never been revealed before. Before the week ended, Jimmy Willard, Project Manager in Research and Engineering for RGIS, recommended that RGIS buy the unit. “After only two days of analyzing our network, NetMRI found routing and VLAN issues I didn’t even know existed,” Willard said. Terry Slattery, the inventor of NetMRI, has found this to be the case on many other well-run networks, like RGIS’. “NetMRI’s analysis identifies the difficult-to-find problems, which don’t show up on alert and alarm monitoring systems as ‘broken’. They are suboptimal configurations or intermittent problems that steal bandwidth, response time and reliability.”
NetMRI allowed RGIS’ IT department to be proactive instead of reactive, a much preferred trouble-shooting mode. The IT team found that NetMRI surprised them not only in the key issues it discovers, but the way in which it helped identify and pinpoint the specifics. The team now focuses on fixing the issues rather than finding them, which saves enormous amounts of time. Willard states, “Since NetMRI has been running on the network, we don’t replace devices nearly as often as we did before. We can now easily differentiate between a hardware problem and a configuration problem, which is something we had issues within the past.”
NetMRI was able to effectively monitor extremely complex tasks throughout RGIS’ entire network with a few clicks of the mouse. NetMRI established accuracy, integrity and reliability in less then a month’s time, the same standards to which RGIS is committed. What may have previously taken numerous IT professionals to uncover, a single NetMRI unit now easily finds.
RGIS Inventory Specialists is the world’s largest inventory company dedicated to providing accurate, cost-efficient services in areas such as retail, warehousing, merchandising, distributing, and pharmaceuticals. RGIS covers North America, South America, Europe, and is still growing today.
