It's always great news to find out that something you bought actually works the way it is supposed to work. It's even better news to find that it delivers more value than you ever thought possible.

The following use-case story is about PacketTrap, a provider of network management software and services, including applications for performance management and response-time analysis.

The 3-year-old company's products provide IT administrators, system admins, and network engineers diagnostic, discovery, inventory, and monitoring tools to manage their applications, servers, and network infrastructure. PacketTrap has offices in Silicon Valley and Calcutta, India.

The customer is Putnam Bank, a regional bank in Connecticut. Putnam installed the company's PT360 beta software to help them manage network hubs, servers and switches. Little did they know that the installation would also help them with their disaster recovery plan -- for no extra charge.

Here's the actual memo from Putnam net admin Vinny Mazzarella to PacketTrap. It's written in light "networkease," but it's not too opaque:

From: Mazzarella, Vinny
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 9:00 AM
To: Steve Goodman
Subject: PT360 Success Story

Steve,

I just wanted to share a quick success story with you. On 10/28 we conducted a major disaster recovery exercise in which we simulated the loss of our main office building. Earlier in the day I used pt360 to backup the config for the router at our backup site using the Cisco Config tool. I then edited the config (in pt360) for the appropriate commands to reroute network traffic through the DR site.

During the test I used the Dashboard to monitor the network at our DR site. As soon as I saw "red" on the availability list, I brought up the Cisco config screen which was running in the background. I pressed the upload button. Presto! The network was back up and running, we conducted a test of our essential programs, then I just brought up the config that I saved earlier in the day, uploaded that and we were back to normal. The whole test took about 20 minutes from start to finish (which is a major record breaking time for us)!

Thanks for all the support and for allowing us to participate as a beta tester!

Vinny Mazzarella
Network Administrator
Putnam Bank

Happy endings like this are cool. We're always looking for stories like this -- ones that could help our readers make a tech-buy decision. If you come across one, email me, and I'll consider using it.

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