To help accomplish its goals, the school has put in place a state-of-the-art data network. Over the years, as the school has grown, so has the network, to over 200 network devices and 3,500 computers. The JHSPH IT staff needed help in monitoring and maintaining this massive infrastructure.
Kevin Stone, a Senior Network Administrator on the IT team supporting the JHSPH infrastructure, has evaluated and utilized numerous tools to aid in the ongoing support of the JHSPH network. “Of all the tools I evaluated, NetMRI provides the most useful information in a single place—I can tell how the network is doing by looking at one screen,” said Stone. “We can begin our day by looking at the Network Health Report produced by NetMRI, and know what kind of day we’ll have based on the overall health of the network.”
After a successful year using NetMRI to continuously analyze and improve their network, JHSPH added the new VoIP module to help manage and control their new VoIP projects.
NetMRI’s VoIP module determines the actual quality of IP phone calls by evaluating Call Data Records (CDRs) for delay, jitter and dropped packets. It also correlates abnormalities with other contributory network events, and provides helpful detail to solve the issues. NetMRI’s VoIP module pulls CDRs from Cisco’s CallManager.
“The ability of NetMRI VoIP to identify poor call paths and then isolate the issue down to the device or system is very helpful,” said Kevin Stone, Senior Network Administrator at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “NetMRI-VoIP provides key useful information that we can act upon, in a manner that is intuitive and accessible. It is more than just graphs and statistics—it identifies the real issues to resolve to maintain high quality.”
Johns Hopkins has found that NetMRI’s proactive and intuitive systems-level approach provides control and significant savings in troubleshooting time and expense across their network infrastructure, and that NetMRI’s product innovation has been a good match for their own new network technology deployments and operational needs.
As a leading international authority on public health, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to protecting health and saving lives. Every day, the school works to keep millions around the world safe from illness and injury by pioneering new research, deploying its knowledge and expertise in the field, and educating tomorrow’s scientists and practitioners in the global defense of human life.
