Reducing costs and getting more out of existing technology has become a mantra for IT professionals, especially those with mature networks such as frame relay.

Companies are deploying a variety of frame relay management tools that not only help get a handle on costs, but also improve performance.

Although United Parcel Service (UPS), Staples and the South Carolina Army National Guard operate different types of frame relay networks, all have benefited from using products from NetScout, SolarWinds.Net and Visual Networks, respectively.

UPS deployed NetScout's nGenius Performance Manager to get a better, more detailed look at its network. One goal was to pinpoint which applications were driving bandwidth consumption, says Peter Gunn, project manager at the shipping company in Mahwah, N.J.

Although Gunn says it's difficult to quantify total savings since deploying the product, his intent is "to slow the pace of increasing costs and keep network costs at a reasonable and manageable level. I believe we've been able to do that."

UPS operates 51 frame relay networks that connect 2,500 sites worldwide. The company works with a handful of service providers, including AT&T, Equant and Sprint, to support that architecture. Although keeping a close eye on the network always has been important to Gunn and his team, UPS' older management tools didn't meet all the company's needs, he says. UPS had used Concord Communications' Network Health management tools from just about the time it set up its frame network in the mid-1990s.

"Previously we had a private network where we owned the circuits and could see into the network. With frame relay a public network, we didn't have that type of visibility," Gunn says. Two years ago, UPS decided it needed a more granular view than the Concord product could provide, he says.

The company was looking to identify how much bandwidth specific applications consumed and at what rate its bandwidth consumption was growing.

After Gunn deployed the NetScout system, he gathered this information and took corrective action that has let UPS avoid bandwidth increases at certain sites. "Cost avoidance is as important as cost reduction," Gunn says.

"Our objective was to map our business applications regardless of protocol. We wanted to see it in terms of things that are well known and understood by the business community," Gunn says. NetScout provides that level of detail, where e-mail is defined as such and not simply as POP3 traffic, he says.

Instead of throwing more bandwidth into the network, UPS deployed Check Point's FloodGate-1 policy management tool. This lets Gunn keep applications such as e-mail, by far the leading bandwidth hog on the network, in check by ensuring it never consumes all bandwidth at any given site. Gunn says some departments have taken further action by reducing the size of individual mailboxes and restricting the size of attachments.

Like many network managers, Gunn has joined together a handful of products to meet his monitoring needs.

The reason some departments have taken their own actions is because Gunn also uses the tool to calculate departmental chargebacks for application usage. Before deploying NetScout, UPS estimated application usage for each department. "Some departments were very happy when we changed our chargeback methods. Others were not as happy," he says.

UPS recently started using additional modules included in the NetScout product to improve network visibility from specific sites on the network.

"There is a newspaper module that allows us to publish [network] activity the following day for any given location in our environment," Gunn says. "Our field organization is quite extensive with 4,000 folks worldwide."

This feature lets those users see unusual or abnormal network behavior on a specific Web page for their location, which might not affect performance but is worth getting a handle on before it does.

Gunn chose the NetScout product after much research and in-house testing. And while UPS has been happy with the product, Gunn says that with any project there are issues.

"Right out of the gate, we had scalability issues," Gunn says. "But we worked very closely [with the vendor] and then migrated to the next-generation product, which pretty much established a good stable environment."

Gunn recommends that when shopping for a product users should consider the specific issues in their network environment. There were NetScout reference customers that appeared to be managing significantly larger environments than UPS, so Gunn assumed that scalability would not be an issue. "And it turned out to be our biggest issue," he says.