Huntsman

The Importance of Proactive Network Management

Originally known for pioneering innovations in packaging, and later, rapid and integrated growth in petrochemicals, Huntsman-held companies today have revenues of approximately $8 billion, more than 13,000 employees and facilities in more than 40 countries.

The world's most significant and essential industries rely on Huntsman businesses to manufacture basic products for a variety of end-use applications. Huntsman businesses include Performance Chemicals, Petrochemicals, Polymers, Polyurethanes, Surface Sciences and Tioxide.

The Importance of Proactive Network Management

Organisations invest vast sums of money in building a networking infrastructure, which can support their business goals and objectives. Staying ahead of the technology curve and leveraging the new digital economy to achieve competitive advantage comes at a heavy price. Despite the high levels of investment in infrastructure, however, many organisations fail to deploy even the most basic tools to effectively manage their IT resources. The network has become one of the most important elements in allowing your business to succeed – you cannot afford to have it fail or have its integrity breached. Network Management applications play a critical role in monitoring and measuring the performance of the network, across local and wide area links and also the services running on that network. Huntsman looked for a solution that was able to offer them complete visibility of network traffic analysis in a format that can be tailored for all levels of technical competence.

Ferranti’s ITManagement Online

Huntsman chose to use the Dataflow module of Ferranti’s IT Management Online solution. By implementing part of this modular and comprehensive network management solution, Huntsman is able to get insight in the feasibility of consolidations (such as mailservers). In addition, this monitoring of individual connections enables the IT team members to perform ad-hoc troubleshooting as well as to receive information from their Cisco routers. This information is then presented to users on a web front- end, where various user profiles can be used to draw distinctions regarding the user functionalities. Consequently, Ferranti’s ITManagement Online provides Huntsman with a powerful but easy to understand view of network activity.

Features and Benefits

• Daily, weekly and monthly graphs.
• Drill down to specific intervals.
• Show the source and destination addresses and applications used, right down to the individual network conversations
• Highlights the top users and uses of the network.