
How One Texas City Turned Fiber Guesswork into Street-to-Strand Clarity
It’s Tuesday afternoon and an email from the city manager lands in your inbox: “We’re finalizing the new fire station’s backbone connection. Can you send over the strand map and available fiber paths by Thursday?” You open the shared drive. There’s a Visio from 2018, a spreadsheet that hasn’t been touched since the last contractor…
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Your Campus Network Documentation Shouldn’t Depend on Someone’s Memory
The call rarely comes with complete information. A classroom wing is down. A residence hall is dealing with spotty Wi-Fi again. The gym has an event tonight, and someone needs to figure out which closet, switch, fiber path, port, and IP range are involved before troubleshooting can even begin. So the search starts. One person…
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How to Choose the Right DCIM Vendor (Go Beyond Large Vendors & Feature Checklists)
Unpopular opinion: a DCIM software search should not start out with a giant feature checklist. I have to be honest: almost anything can become a “feature” if you stick a label on something the software does. The problem is that a feature checklist tells you what the software can do inside a controlled demo, not whether it will actually hold up when things get real.
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netTerrain 10.1: Air-Blown Fiber, Expanded Access, Enhancements
The eagle lands again — this time bringing Air-Blown Fiber (ABF) modeling, dedicated workflows, and expanded visualization capabilities, along with support for Common Access Card (CAC) login and client certificate (SSL) authentication. Version 10.1 builds directly on 10.0 with focused enhancements across modeling, circuits, usability, IPAM, and authentication handling. Click here to check out the…
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DCIM vs. Spreadsheets vs. CMDBs: Which One Should You Choose in 2026?
The tool you use to track your network and IT infrastructure can make all the difference between smooth changes and daily firefighting. Many of the folks I talk to end up in one of three camps: spreadsheets, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), or Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. Yes…they do overlap a bit…but they’re…
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Why Financial Institutions Can’t Afford Outdated Network and Data Center Management
In financial services IT, small documentation gaps can slow incident response and increase operational risk. If you work in financial IT, you already know (all too well) how small gaps turn into big problems…fast: A missed dependency An undocumented port An outdated rack diagram Any one of these can mean longer outages, slower audits, and…
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