Cisco Releases VoIP Health Monitor, Hosting EngineCisco Releases VoIP Health Monitor, Hosting Engine

Cisco Systems Monday released a new hosting engine for customers with E-business data centers, a voice-over-IP network monitor, and an upgraded quality-of-service network manager.

The Cisco 1105 hosting solution engine is designed to give IT staffers more flexibility in managing content on Web servers. The product was initially built for in-house use to help Cisco's network administrators keep Web servers up and running with new content, says Brian Promes, product manager of Cisco's enterprise business unit, but large businesses and service providers are willing to try the product in an effort to alleviate content-management headaches. "Our customers said the physical steps to take Web servers in and out of service were leading to operational inefficiencies," Promes adds. The hosting engine will be available next month for $19,995.

Customers that are building a voice infrastructure using Cisco switches and routers can now check their networks for problems using a voice-over-IP health monitor. The health monitor uses real-time reporting to notify administrators about the status of the voice network. Cisco also released version 2.1 of its QoS policy manager, which helps network administrators prioritize business-critical traffic across their networks. The quality-of-service policy manager also includes VoIP templates that can be customized to speed up the deployment of VoIP networks.

The VoIP health monitor is helpful if you're in a WAN environment, says Aaron McDonald, systems administrator with Menlo College. "But it's a little bit of an overkill for a LAN environment." The VoIP health monitor would come in handy if Menlo were connected to another campus network and McDonald needed to reroute voice and data traffic, he says. But because Menlo's gateways operate in a LAN environment, McDonald says he'll likely stick with the NT performance monitor he used prior to a four-week trial of Cisco's product. Says McDonald, "NT performance gives me the stats I need to know whether the gateways are up or down."