DATA STREAM SOLUTIONS -- tools for network documentation and information management : netViz

With over 82,000 employees in 35 countries marketing more than 6 billion packages of food products annually, ConAgra is one of the world’s leading companies in the food industry. It stands to reason that a business of that size would have a large, complex computer IT infrastructure. The tool chosen by ConAgra to document and manage change across the enterprise – netViz.

netViz diagrams aren’t just empty pictures; they’re reflections of an underlying database of information about diagram objects. And according to Jonathan Thompson, a ConAgra Senior Enterprise Network Architect, that seamless link between graphics and data was the key to the company’s decision to standardize on netViz for WAN and LAN documentation. “We’ve got close to 1,000 sites in the U.S. alone that have large LANs going through continuous changes,” says Thompson. “We needed to develop standard ways to get a handle on what we’ve got, manage change orders and notify engineering personnel of what new equipment needed to be added at a given site. netViz plays an integral role in that process.”

Here’s how it works. A virtually unlimited number of data values can be embedded into any netViz graphical object. In addition to embedding information about an object’s model number and configuration, Thompson included fields called “Add to circuit order” and “Add to hardware order.” As changes are planned for a facility, ConAgra personnel use netViz to document the “as-built” network along with the proposed changes. For each item that will have to be added, the person doing the documentation enters “yes” in the “add to hardware order” or “add to circuit order” field.

Says Thompson, “our engineers do all the drawings, and the netViz search generates the tables detailing the required equipment. That allows us to hand a netViz-generated packet of information to our procurement and provisioning people who can see exactly what needs to be purchased and where it needs to go. That saves us a lot of time. As an added bonus, when we back up our netViz diagrams every night, we’re automatically backing up a database of the entire as-built and proposed IT infrastructure that’s contained in our netViz projects.”

One of netViz’s strengths is its ability to deal easily with immense amounts of data. Taking advantage of that, Thompson has begun creating netViz diagrams for ConAgra’s regional IT centers that will eventually be merged into a single netViz project. “We’ve got twelve operations centers, each of which has a WAN that services between 50 and 400 company locations,” says Thompson. “Right now, we’re working hard to document each operations center and each branch office LAN. Once that task is completed, we plan to integrate all of our netViz diagrams into a single netViz project and publish it to our intranet. That way, our help-desk and technical personnel will be able to see our entire network from a global view all the way down to the port level in a selected component at a specific site. The ability to edit the Web-published projects will be restricted to our engineering department, but we’ll have an easy way to make our entire IT configuration available to those who need it.”

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