There are 32,000 miles of roads, highways, and bridges in the state of Missouri. Responsibility for maintenance and new construction is in the hands of the Missouri Highway and Transportation Department (MHTD). To facilitate the exchange of data between its headquarters and the 10 outlying district offices, the department employs new technology in the form of RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) technical workstations, AIX systems management tools, and IBM multiprotocol routers.
Currently the system consists of nearly 2,500 desktop and technical workstations dispersed among 18 LANs connected through a wide area network (WAN). However, MHTD is working with the Missouri state telecommunications group to develop a private frame relay network that will incorporate the department's 43 construction offices into its multiprotocol network.
"As this network grows, we want to keep management as centralized as possible and focus our staff on servicing users, rather than having them spend a lot of time monitoring network management software," says David Johnson, the department's network services coordinator. "NetView for AIX is an extremely strategic product in our systems management framework, and is particularly suited to managing TCP/IP networks."
NetView for AIX monitors multivendor, heterogeneous TCP/IP networks 24 hours a day, seven days a week to help eliminate outages. Its graphical user interface employs point-and-click ease of use, so highway department users can view network topography at a glance. It also improves network support productivity by providing state-of-the-art fault performance and configuration application functions.
"When we recently completed our information strategic plan, a major project that emerged was to improve our network management capability even further," says Johnson. "So, we're working closely with the development people at IBM Raleigh on a wide range of management tools and procedures to get us there."