Pima Community College Finds Quality with InterMapper
Company: Pima Community College
Location: Tuscon area, Arizona
Business: Pima Community College offers 168 transfer and occupational programs to over 75,000 credit and non-credit students each year.
InterMapper's Role: InterMapper maps are available 24 hours a day to provide early warning of network problems and assist in trouble-shooting.
Quote: “With InterMapper, we know a lot more about the quality of communications.”
Pima Community College is the 6th largest centrally managed, multi-facility community college in the country. It's wireless and wide area networks support 18 college locations in the Tucson area. Constant, high quality network services are not only required by the thousands of staff and faculty who are employed by the college but by the tens of thousands of students who study there.
Ross Zimmerman, Principal Analyst in the Network Services section of Pima's IT department, reports that the college had been relying on other solutions for network monitoring but felt the products were either buggy, lacking in important features, or focused on adding functionality that had little real value. They were also frustrated by their inability to access high levels of tech support or provide feedback for product development.
“I first saw InterMapper years ago. It was in use at the Vail Unified School District and I was impressed,” remembers Zimmerman. “When I started looking around for a new tool, I ran into InterMapper again and remembered it's what I had seen.” He installed an InterMapper evaluation on a G4 Cube and played around to make sure that it could see live links and tell “how happy they were. That's a fundamental feature of InterMapper, something we really needed and something other monitoring software didn't offer.”
Pima CC replaced two other products – one used for monitoring and the other for network map creation – with InterMapper about a year ago. “We immediately realized that InterMapper was giving us good information about communication quality,” remembers Zimmerman. “It's giving us information that we wouldn't otherwise have.”
InterMapper maps are “up all the time” and “freely available to anyone who needs them” says Zimmerman. Network Services staff use the RemoteAccess client to set configuration options and view maps or monitored devices.
Besides keeping track of day-to-day operations and staying on top of potential problems, Zimmerman and the rest of the Network Services team have used InterMapper to better understand and solve known problems and plan for technology rollouts.
“Before we installed InterMapper we knew that our frame relay connections were limping along. We set up a WAN map and watched to see how often frame relay links were maxed out. Well, they were maxed out much of the time. We immediately understood and were able to justify that we needed better technology for those locations.”
“Right now we're in the process of rolling out VoIP and need to know that the network can handle it,” says Zimmerman. “InterMapper showed us that ghosting was causing piles of discards in several locations and we have to fix that. It's better to have that information now so that we can prepare the network to support our new phone system.”
According to Zimmerman, “Pima Community College is an important resource in Tucson. It fulfills the need for affordable, practical educational opportunities that are not the province of 4 year research schools.” He sees InterMapper's role continuing and growing in importance as the college extends its wireless services to cover 95% of its facility space.
Pima's confidence in InterMapper is matched by its appreciation of Dartware's tech support and development teams. “Getting through to other vendors is like pulling teeth but we've been able to give Dartware ideas and get real help. We'd like to make better use of customization features and know that Dartware will help us. We have other product ideas too, new probes that we'd like to see. We know that Dartware will listen.”