Cisco Cisco Prime Virtual Network Analysis Module (vNAM) 6.1 Information Guide
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Customer Case Study
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Customer Name: Human Kinetics
Industry: Publishing
Location: Champaign, Illinois
Number of Employees: 300
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
● Gain visibility of network traffic inside
company’s private cloud to improve network
and application performance as well as
security
and application performance as well as
security
NETWORK SOLUTION
● Cisco Prime vNAM virtual appliance for
application awareness, performance analytics,
and network visibility
and network visibility
BUSINESS RESULTS
● Quickly resolved longstanding network traffic
issue in cloud
● Prevented future performance issues by
modeling application updates
● Established daily processes to maintain
optimal network performance
Seeing Clearly Now
Human Kinetics relies on Cisco Prime Virtual NAM to provide visibility in the cloud.
Business Challenge
How do you know what’s happening to your applications in the cloud?
Do you know where the data is? Is it going where it needs to go? Is it
getting there fast enough? For Human Kinetics, an online publisher of
products related to physical activity and health, the company’s private
products related to physical activity and health, the company’s private
cloud is every bit as important as the central nervous system is to the
human body. It hosts many of its business-critical applications. It
provides a computing environment, enabling the 10-person IT team to
rapidly respond to the needs of the business. And it helps keep costs
in line. However, since deploying the private cloud, the team has been
challenged to see the traffic running inside it.
“The technology to analyze traffic once it left the cloud had been
available to us for years,” says Brad Trankina, assistant director of
technology at Human Kinetics. “But we really had no way to inspect
available to us for years,” says Brad Trankina, assistant director of
technology at Human Kinetics. “But we really had no way to inspect
the traffic between servers in the cloud to detect network and
application performance issues.” Adds Stuart Lyons, security engineer
at Human Kinetics, “From a security perspective, we weren’t able to
application performance issues.” Adds Stuart Lyons, security engineer
at Human Kinetics, “From a security perspective, we weren’t able to
confirm that the packets were actually going where we intended them to
go.”
As a result, Trankina’s group found itself with nagging performance issues that the team struggled to solve, despite
spending significant amounts of time on them. “We knew there were lost opportunities for optimization,” says
Trankina, “and the lack of visibility meant there was always the potential for data corruption or a security breach.”
spending significant amounts of time on them. “We knew there were lost opportunities for optimization,” says
Trankina, “and the lack of visibility meant there was always the potential for data corruption or a security breach.”