The National Trust needed world-class network functionality at inexpensive prices. Luckily, Network Instruments was in the right place at the right time.

In the charity sector, functionality is as important as in the commercial area – but managers have to keep a close eye on IT budgets. Consequently, when the National Trust needed to overhaul its aging IT network, it turned to Network Instruments for its analysis and monitoring tools.

At over 100 years old, The National Trust is a charity that focuses on preserving sites of national interest. Owning over 248,000 hectares of land, it has 300 properties to look after across England, each of which is connected to the network.

Paul Goodland, IT infrastructure group leader at the charity, explains that the organisation is busily upgrading its network infrastructure. At its head office site, for example, it is migrating from very old BNC cabling to more modern category 5 cabling, running 100Mbit/sec Ethernet. The network upgrade is part of a five-year plan within the company to modernise its IT infrastructure.

The charity needed a tool that would enable it to make the most efficient use of its bandwidth. “You can waste a lot of money on bandwidth that you don't need,” explains Goodland. “Being a charity, we need to drive a lot of our costs down while maintaining our levels of service.”

A network analyser and monitor would enable the company to know exactly what traffic was being passed over its network, giving the network management team the information it needed to make the new, upgraded system as efficient as possible. Unfortunately, many such products cost hundreds of thousands of pounds – and this is a problem for a government-independent charity that relies completely on the generosity of the public.

Goodland’s team contacted Network Instruments, and found a product that cost a fraction of the price of the competitors’ offerings. “We had looked at other products, and this did what some of the products that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds did,” he recalls.

The National Trust worked with Open Reality, a systems integrator that sells the Observer product on behalf of Network Instruments. Open Reality’s Paul Wilson explains that the product’s feature set matches and even surpasses that of products many times its price. The product includes packet analysis, RMON and SNMP support in one easy-to-use package, he says.

Wilson demonstrated the system to the team at around the same time that it was planning the upgrade to its network, and four months later, the team approved the purchase of five copies of Observer, and a separate copy of Network Instruments’ Link Analyst software.

Along with the RMON and SNMP probes, Observer offers users the ability to conduct trend analysis on captured packets, and ‘top talkers’ functionality that identifies those devices and applications on the network that are consuming the most bandwidth. All of this information, along with the other data collected by the software, can be charted in graphical form so that network managers can gain a comprehensive understanding of their infrastructure.

Having installed the product, Goodland’s team was able to analyse the network on an application-by-application basis. He is able, for example, to examine a network link to find out how much of it is being used by a financial application at any one time. “I can then use the trends analysis feature on that data over a period of time, and I could say that the new financial system uses 100Kbit/sec as the norm,” he says. “So we can associate a bandwidth cost with that product.”

The network analysis also extends to finding out what is on the network. With an infrastructure that is so old and distributed across such a wide space using different links, it’s unsurprising that the network management team didn’t have an exact picture of the hardware and software on it.

The head office that houses the charity’s IT infrastructure is spread over three sites, each connected using a Fibrechannel backbone operating at 1Gbit/sec. Inside each building, a Cisco switch supports 100Mbit/sec subnets where possible, although the large amount of legacy cabling still to be upgraded means that 70% of the network was still running at 10Mbit/sec during summer 2001.

This network supports a mixture of high-end Hewlett Packard Unix servers, alongside Novell Netware 3.12 file and print servers, and NT 4.0 boxes, running on rack-mounted Compaq equipment. 500 client PCs connect to this server infrastructure, running Windows 98.

Goodland used Observer to explore this network, and found protocols that were not meant to be there. Client-side machines were running Appletalk and NetBIOS because they had been incorrectly configured. This had been increasing the traffic overhead on the network and making it less efficient. “We now have huge pictures of what we have on the network, and how it links together,” he says.

The product has served the charity well outside the LAN, too, where the network becomes more complex. The National Trust divides its nationwide network up into regions. 48 of its 300 properties, along with travelling workers, connect into the head office via ISDN or dial-up links, while a separate WAN backbone connects its larger sites, regional offices and head office sites together. The charity upgraded from a BT-operated WAN to a 2Mbit/sec frame relay Cable & Wireless system at the end of 2000.

Supporting such a network can be difficult, especially when individuals in remote locations do not have specialist technical training. Until it purchased Observer, Goodland explains that the charity had to send engineers out to sites that were experiencing problems, which inflated its travel costs. Instead, using software probes at those locations enabled staff to assess and fix problems without leaving the head office.

The charity is also using the Network Instruments’ Link Analyst product to keep track of its network’s performance on a day-to-day basis. The software’s ability to monitor links on the network and detect abnormalities makes it possible for the network management team to notice and avert any issues on the network before they become major problems.

“The product has probably paid for itself,” says Goodland, of Observer. “It's always beneficial to understand where you're coming from when you want to move to somewhere else.” One thing is for sure – with a better understanding of its network, the National Trust is going places.

Please click Observer for more product information or for further details please email sales@openreality.co.uk or call 01235 556400 and ask for more information.