Trip Report Netherlands

Getronics is one of the largest partners in the Netherlands. DTS is a special division that does
the Network management for the Dutch Railways(DR). They are an outsourced provider for DR
and have decided to use CW2K and HP-OV to implement the solution. They are also in the
process of rolling out Cisco Routers and Switches across the network.
This team within Getronics did not seem to have much experience with the product but were keen
to see how CW2K can potentially help them manage the network. They have extensively used
CV and CM (VLAN Mgr). They are still getting the servers installed and operational.
They also complained about the performance of the system, especially on CV for the 7600. They
were also concerned with some features of CV that are not consistent. The example was that for
some modules (e.g. CV-WS-X 5011) we cannot configure ports. They also mentioned that CV2.4
allowed users to select a set of ports to monitor and per port graphs were displayed. Its now
textual (tabular) info.
This is a good opportunity for a Success Story probably in a few months.
Environment: LMS 2.0 on NT. P-III 933Mhz, 1 GB, Dual Processor.
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KPMG and ING were at the same meeting at the Cisco office. Both customers have been using
the product for over 2 years and are very pleased with the progress we have made. ING is using
5 CW2K servers (solaris) managing about 800 devices each. They use 1 RME and 5 CMs in
their environment. KPMG has recently upgraded to LMS 2.0. They mostly use UT, RME,
Syslog Analysis, NAM.
KPMG was uncomfortable with the usability of NAM for collecting data. They have to manually
span the ports they want to monitor.
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The issue of Administrative views for CM topo maps came up.

Also the issue of easily migrating users from on CW2K server to another.
They would like to see tools to automate cleaning of logs.
Asked about SNMPv3 support
Config Editor templates for new deployments
ACS based securiy for CW2K
Some devices have only embedded CV what is the Cisco policy on that

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We had a Partner VT meeting at the Cisco office. This was attended by many of our partners in
Netherlands including KPN (Royal Dutch Telecom) and IBM who are among the largest in that
region.
A big concern was scalability the comment was 50% of the time we run into max devices or
max users limitation. They are particularly concerned that CW2K does not handle 20-30 users
as that is the size of a large NOC.
They would like to see a Support contract from Cisco which includes both Support and Major
upgrades. Many of the larger customers are willing to pay for this.

SNMP v3 can cut traffic for CV. There was a discussion that CV uses primarily SNMPv1 hence
we cannot selectively query MIBS and end up pulling more data than we need. I need to help
from Sameer and Vidya on this to respond.
They see LMS being the Base CW2K offering and would like to see IPM and ACLM as add-on
products. Option of not paying for both is good since the same customer in many cases doesnt
use both tools.
They would like us to work on an IPM NNM integration and build a marketing story around it.
They feel this can be very powerful.
They want EMBU Marketing to work on a Syslog vs. SNMP white paper. This is particularly
directed at customers who do not want syslogs in their environment. And obviously RME does
not work well without syslogs.
CW2K is about 2 times faster with IE 6
Scheduled VLAN changes VLAN Director(?) used to do it
Drag drop of a port from CV into a VLAN
Multiple users in CV can we have some kind of locking?
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Shell is in the process of deploying LMS worldwide. They were a 3Com account which has been
converted to Cisco. They are still replacing their 12-15000 deployed devices to Cisco. They
expect about 5-6000 to be done by end of CY2001.
They plan to have one RME server at corporate and three regional servers with RME and CM
based on regions (Europe (UK), US and Asiapac (Malaysia)). The RME server at Corporate will
only handle Config files. All Config related syslogs would be forwarded to this server from the
other three regional servers. They also use HP-OV in their environment.
They would like to see automated import of ANI data into RME
Syslog filers should be +ve and ve. We currently ask the user to define the messages to drop.
In Shells case it would be much easier to say allow only these config related syslogs.
We heard the request for user defined roles once again.
They felt our Discrepancy reports were GREAT!!
There is a school of thought within Shell who feels that CDP is a security risk. Do we have a
response to that??
They would like to see the top n users of the network resources
They are an NT shop but TAC (Brussels) said that they could support Solaris better hence they
chose Solaris. Is this true? Do we distinguish between Solaris and NT?
They have desktop security policies that prevent users from installing any software on the
desktop. The Java Plugin cannot be installed.
Our roles do not distinguish between System administrator and Application administrator.

We can tap Shell to be a reference customer by the end of the year. They are already references
for several Cisco devices.
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Cisco conducted a weeklong event at Phillips at Eindhoven to help the Corporate IT team get the
inputs they need to decide on the Global IT strategy for Phillips. I was invited to present on our
NM story and vision. There were about 15-20 senior managers of various Phillips companies
present like Consumer Electronics, Medical Systems and the people who ran Voice for all the
units.
There is a CW2K pilot in progress at one of the groups and a Voice pilot in another group.
They have about 300 C2500 devices which RME/CM do not manage
They were very keen to know about our Service Mgmt solutions and had many questions.
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Can they define how an SLA is calculated?

How can I pinpoint delays in the network?
What if some of the devices are not within my control (SP in between)

They were keen to see MRTG like features in the products

They were keen to hear from us on our understanding of why the network downtime occurs. (I
had a slide on the cost of downtime that triggered this.) Can anyone help me here?
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Overall, this was a very fruitful visit. The local NM specialists Erik and Maarten were very
helpful and setup all the meetings ahead of time. The Partners were really happy to have a
chance to speak to Product Management.
I also met several independent consultants who work with the various companies above and
have a very good grasp of the NM area. I think we can gain a lot by keeping them informed of
our products, roadmaps etc.