by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Anne Bednarz, Network World's associate news editor, is currently compiling a followup to "Five Raves" in which customers talk about their favorite, must-have products. The idea is that the solicitations for suggested topics come not from a company's PR department or from a reviewer but from the IT pros that have to use the products in the field.

To contribute your views, feel free to e-mail Ann Bednarz at her Network World e-mail address, and she'll give you a quick phone call, talking about why you chose the product in particular, why you like it, what business problems it addresses, etc.

Now, you may think that we, a network performance management blog for a network management software company that makes many of these products may be mentioning this because we want you to write in and tell Network World that our products are the best. Unfortunately, it would be unethical to do so.

It is NOT unethical because it would be wrong to ask for such a favor. It is unethical because it has been made clear to me on a recent visit to one company's data center that NetQoS may not, in fact, make the most important IT-related product of all.

This small company, which shall go unnamed here, used to have major network problems - servers failing, corrupted data from hard drives, and occasionally, physically damaged servers. Worse still, these problems seemed to coincide with whenever the boss angrily walked in! And while I'd like to say that their problem was solved by application performance monitoring, NetFlow traffic analysis, or device performance management, they managed to fix the problem with an in-house solution, that I call the "DoorSlinky™."

This device, I believe, will revolutionize IT. It greatly increases the capacity of acceptable force levels used in IT environments on ingress and egress installations. The DoorSlinky™ provides added insurance against data storage failure or network disconnections caused by, but not limited to: blunt force, sudden impact, excessive pressure, rapidly-subjected stress upon the various types of aperture technologies found in IT environments, which is important because as we all know, IT can get very frustrating.

While application performance monitoring and response time measurements can help identify whether your current IT problem is in the application, server, or network, until that is determined, your application team, server team, and network team could fly through IT's doorway in a fit of anger, trying to place the blame on any IT team other than their own. Here, the DoorSlinky™ prevents a bad situation from becoming even worse.

And while VoIP Performance Monitoring can help you ensure VoIP calls go through, until then, people will most likely be communicating by running into each other's offices. Here the DoorSlinky™ also preserves existing physical-layer infrastructure necessary for separation of discrete workspaces.

Finally, while SNMP polling products may help you identify problems with infrastructure availability and resource consumption, no device performance management tool on the market makes the cool "Sproinggggg!" sound of the DoorSlinky™ in use.

For that reason, we undoubtedly endorse the DoorSlinky™ as the IT product of choice for 2008.

Disagree with our selection? We humbly invite you to suggest one of the NetQoS line of network performance management products. Feel free to leave a comment below.