Network Physics Releases NP-500 to Give Smaller Organizations Enterprise-Class Application Performance Management.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Resource-Strapped IT Teams at Branch Offices and Medium-Sized Organizations Can Now Quickly Answer: Who is on my Network? What are They Doing? Why is it Slow?

Network Physics, the leader in application infrastructure integrity, today unveils the NP-500, which delivers full application performance management capabilities to medium-sized organizations and branch offices with less time, staff, tools, and budget than their larger network peers. The NP-500 is the first product to give branch offices and medium-sized organizations the same application performance management capabilities available to the Fortune 500, at a much lower cost. The appliance provides much-needed visibility and real-time troubleshooting across any network environment including wide area network (WAN), local area network (LAN), MPLS and IP-VPN traffic. Application performance and network security issues can now be easily identified and resolved, ensuring the integrity of the entire applications infrastructure -- end-to-end, across the network from servers to clients.

According to industry analyst R. Lynn Nye, Jr., of Portland, Ore.-based APM Advisors, the need for better network application infrastructure troubleshooting is currently growing fastest among branch offices and medium-sized networks. "The 'old school' approaches to network management don't meet today's needs, due to the ubiquitous nature of application access," Nye, Jr., said. "Branch offices and medium-sized networks are eager to implement intelligent instrumentation with broad functionality, at affordable pricing, that can show immediate value, and demonstrate almost instant ROI."

"Besides giving us faster troubleshooting and making us more efficient, the Network Physics NP-500 gives us peace of mind," said Pam Haney, assistant technology director, Worth County Schools in southwestern Georgia. "We can see exactly where students -- or teachers for that matter -- are going, what they're accessing, and how. We can keep malware and non-approved applications off the network more easily, and identify the users responsible. With the NP-500, it'll be a lot more difficult to blindside us."

The NP-500 joins the company's award-winning family of NetSensory(TM) Enterprise Architecture solutions, which includes the NP-2000 (designed for data centers and major headquarters), and the NP-Director (designed for end-to-end visibility or for global perspective of performance problems across distributed networks). All three appliances are equipped with the NetSensory operating system (OS). The NP-500 operates across meshed networks such as MPLS/FrameRelay, and regional hubs with a typical WAN access around T1 to fractional T3. It delivers detailed, real-time and historical information about performance, utilization, route quality, ISP performance and end-user experience.

At the heart of the NP-500 is the NetSensory OS, which lets users organize network data into Business Groups and Applications for automated aggregation, analysis, correlation, and alerting. The business impact of any problem is immediately apparent, allowing rapid prioritization of troubleshooting efforts. The NetSensory OS in the NP-500 also enables easy upgrades to a global, distributed operation with the addition of more NP-500s or NP-2000s and an NP-Director appliance, which can manage up to 20 NP-2000/500 appliances. This flexibility is especially important for branch office customers.

The NP-500 monitors actual network flows through a passive gigabit Ethernet connection to a spanning port or tap. It records and stores over 60 network metrics: real-time response time, utilization and congestion measurements from TCP/IP header information; route quality, AS and ISP performance information from BGP and traceroute; and even packet-level data from scheduled packet captures. Like the NP-2000, the NP-500 can be installed in less than one hour, imposing no burden on the network and requiring no agents, synthetic transactions or SNMP. All measurements are collected non-intrusively from actual network traffic.

The NP-500 can monitor networks with up to 20 Mbps throughput, thus supporting T1 through fractional T3 WAN environments. With data protection and storage capabilities typically reserved for data-center products, the NP-500 can store 160 GB worth of data in a RAID-1 configuration. In a typical network, it can store up to one year's worth of network data. NP-500 U.S. pricing starts at $25,000, depending on throughput. It is available immediately.

About Network Physics

The Network Physics award-winning network application management solution helps enterprises ensure the integrity and security of the applications infrastructure by eliminating response-time problems across converging networks. The company's patented technology applies proven techniques from high-energy physics to assure the delivery of business-critical networked applications and services, and gives the IT staff unprecedented visibility into applications and services to better align IT operations with business priorities. This enables users to dramatically reduce the time and cost of new application and service delivery, improve service quality and uptime, align IT operations with business priorities, and reduce operating costs by finding and fixing problems faster. Network Physics was founded in March 1999, and its products are currently deployed at a wide range of Global 2000 corporations. For more information, please visit the company's web site at www.networkphysics.com.