The dev guys here have been working hard (as usual) and I'm pleased to announce that we now have new versions of Orion NPM (Network Performance Monitor) and NCM (Network Configuration Manager) available for download. For existing customers with active software maintenance these are free upgrades. For folks that haven't bought Orion yet, you can download an evaluation version from SolarWinds.Com to try out for 30 days. Orion NPM version 9.5 offers several cool enhancements. My Top 3 would include wireless (it's built in now so that you can manage wired and wireless networks...

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This Thursday we're hosting a new webcast on some of hidden secrets of Cisco IOS. Specfiically, we're going to dive into Cisco IP SLA, NetFlow, and EnergyWise. I'm pretty excited as my buddy Jimmy Ray Purser (co-host of Cisco TechWise TV , Network World Blogger , and Security Expert/hacker extraordinaire) is going to be co-hosting and when you get two redneck supergeeks like us together it's bound to be interesting... You can sign-up and read the full description of the webcast here . Flame on... Josh Follow me on Twitter

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When it comes to managing IP addresses, few of us would forget to track the IPs we assign manually to our WAN interfaces, servers, switches, and etc. However, once we decide to assign a DHCP scope to a subnet we tend to "set it and forget it". In many cases, this is a big mistake. For those of us that have been around awhile, we can remember situations where DHCP wasn't available and we had to assign all of our users' IP addresses by hand. Wow did that suck. I remember having to have multiple IP address tracking spreadsheets in Excel because I had too many addresses...

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One of the coolest things that Cisco has done recently is the development of its Smart Business Architecture (SBA) for Mid-Sized Networks. I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the development of and continued updating of the Cisco SBA so I thought I'd take a few minutes to write about my thoughts on the subject. Back in the old days, building networks was a lot simpler. You could just call up your buddy at Cisco or your local VAR and tell them you needed some routers and switches and firewalls and the primary variables were the number of ports and the interface types...

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Here at SolarWinds we offer a product called EOC - or Enterprise Operations Console. EOC is used when you want to deploy Orion in a distributed management architecture. Today I received a question about when you should think about deploying such an architecture so I thought I'd take a few minutes to write on the subject. Before we go into the reasons to deploy such an architecture we should agree on what exactly a distributed network manaement architecture is. For the purposes of this conversation, a distributed network management architecture is any NMS that has more than core...

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