Friday, December 29, 2006
By Brian Boyko
In the first tentative months of Network Performance Daily, I can come to a very simple conclusion: We are probably going to end up learning more about the new medium of blogging than we currently know.
We've had some successes; both of our articles on Windows Vista's TCP/IP stack landed on the front page of Slashdot. We've managed to reach out to a few people in the blogosphere including Lowell Heddings at DZone. However, I think we have a long way to go and we should not confuse high-profile links with effectively communicating with the public.
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Continue reading "Editorial: State of the Blog, Q1, 2007" »
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
by Joel Trammell
Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox) compliance puts a heavy burden on IT teams to implement identity management systems to track who made changes to financial information, when they did it, and how they did it. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. But we often take a look at solving the problem without taking a step back from it and consider whether or not it is a good idea in the first place - the history of engineering is filled with elegant solutions that produce more problems than they solve.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed as a result of numerous corporate scandals such as the ones at WorldCom (MCI), Enron and Tyco International. Unfortunately, the Act was passed without much thought given to the economic impact of the new rules and was crafted so quickly that many of the provisions are overly vague. The most burdensome area for companies is Section 404. Here is a summary from Soxlaw:
Issuers are required to publish information in their annual reports concerning the scope and adequacy of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting. This statement shall also assess the effectiveness of such internal controls and procedures.
The registered accounting firm shall, in the same report, attest to and report on the assessment on the effectiveness of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting.
This simple idea has increased the accounting costs for every public company (or company considering going public) by at least $2 million dollars per year. It is effectively a tax on public companies - paid to accounting firms and IT vendors.
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Continue reading "A Critical Look at Sarbanes-Oxley" »
Friday, December 22, 2006
By Brian Boyko
Well, 1996 is almost over and we’re really excited about the technologies of the upcoming year. At the risk of becoming Cassandra, I thought it might be fun to predict what 1997 holds for technology – don’t hold me to it, though!
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Continue reading "8 Tech Predictions for 1997 (made in 2006)" »
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Katheryn Jager helped design this custom LEGO Factory kit of NetQoS headquarters and Austin, TX landmarks for each of our department heads. Here is a picture of lego bricks in general disarray in Steve Harriman’s (V.P. of Marketing) office, and below it, the assembled project in CEO Joel Trammell’s office.
Visible are (clockwise from bottom left) Town Lake, Pennybacker Bridge, the University of Texas Tower, the Texas State Capitol building, 100 Congress Avenue, One Congress Plaza, the Frost Bank Tower and the offices of NetQoS.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Also, a notice: As the end-of-the year and the Christmas holiday approach, Network Performance Daily will publish only on Wednesday and Friday in order to keep our subscribers e-mail boxes from filling up too quickly during holiday vacations. Please keep your RSS feeds and E-mail subscriptions active. We'll be back posting on a 5-day a week schedule on January 3rd. Comments may be posted at any time, and we welcome your suggestions for topics to cover in the new year.
More below the fold...
Continue reading "Daily Links: Network Visibility, Linux via Network, and IBM on Second Life" »
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
by Kevin Davis
It might not be possible to understate the importance of network visibility.
Without visibility, the last words captured on the black box flight recorder are likely to be "What's a mountain goat doing way up here in this cloud bank?" (Apologies to Gary Larson.)
Imagine attempting to manage network performance across an enterprise without knowing who is using the network, when they are using the network, and without knowing if the routers and switches are running at their limits, or are failing intermittently. Utter chaos.
So, how do you get visibility into your network?
Well, the main areas of visibility required to effectively manage a network for performance may be divided into three major categories:
End-to-end Response Time: On a per-application basis for business critical applications-the ability to understand the performance the user is experiencing, as well as to identify and isolate the source of a problem to the network, server, or application
Traffic Flow Data: The traffic utilization of network links (for WAN, MAN, and LAN) from SNMP and flow analysis from NetFlow monitoring or IPFIX data
Device Performance Information: The status and utilization of network devices themselves (especially routers, switches, and firewalls) via SNMP
In this post, we're going to look at ways to improve visibility in these three categories to provide necessary and sufficient visibility into the performance your end users are experiencing as well as the performance of your network.
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Continue reading "Network Visibility Techniques" »
