Port wastage

With a data center switch port costing in excess of $450 per port and access ports $200 per port, candidate ports for recovery are instantly identifiable by porttracker based on when a device was 'last seen'.

Given the costs involved, this feature alone can easily make porttracker pay for itself by simply identifying accurately the inherent waste that develops in any dynamic network environment and reduce the requirement for new switches when existing switch infrastructure has capacity.

In a recent survey* that questioned over a hundred IT and Network Managers working in companies with more than a thousand employees, it showed that 40% of IT and Network Managers admit that they buy switch and port hardware on a quarterly basis as a means of increasing the size of their port estate. Which each port costing in excess of $450 per year to run and many companies having many thousands of ports, this can become very expensive for business.

Far too much time is being spent crawling through ceiling panels and under floor boards tugging on wires trying to identify the right port connections", said Julian Rigg, CEO, porttracker. "We believe this has led to a trend in IT and Network Managers just buying new switches and hardware to free up port space to save themselves the time and effort of tracing each cable. If they had a clear overview of which switch was connected to which port, they could dramatically reduce their costs both in terms of hardware spend and man hours."

“There is increasing pressure being put on IT Directors to keep the costs of running the technology to a minimum and to deliver a measurable ROI in a timely fashion." continued Rigg. "This is exactly what porttracker does. By using porttracker, a company can save money on buying new switches and ports because they will be able to identify and re-use the redundant ones. In addition, we estimate that a company of over 2500 ports needs to identify just over 1 percent of its redundant ports to cover the cost of its investment into porttracker."

porttracker can improve accuracy and efficiency of IT Operation staff - people are better at patching in new ports than unpatching old ones! Whilst porttracker's ease-of-use makes it possible for more faults to be resolved by support staff; freeing senior support operatives to concentrate on more serious problems or planned project work.

Other Key Benefits

* Survey undertaken in March 2008 by porttracker. The survey questioned over a hundred IT and Network Managers working in companies with more than a thousand employees.