Between dial tone, number lookup, ringing, and busy signals, there’s quite a lot that has to happen before you even start speaking and what most people think of as a “phone call” even occurs. Call setup protocols not only do these things, but also perform after-call resource cleanup and statistical reporting.

Each protocol uses TCP or UDP, and a well-known port or ports for communication. Some call setup protocols are used primarily for communication between endpoints (IP phones) and call servers, while others allow for communication between call servers and voice gateways handling calls to and from the PSTN.

These messages, which vary in size and number, handle functions like the mapping of phone numbers to IP addresses, generating dial tones and busy signals, ringing the called party, and hanging up.

Continue reading "VoIP eBook Excerpts: Critical Elements of Your VoIP Infrastructure - Part 2" »

Stuffed from Thankgiving turkey, millions of people went shopping the next day, which is known as “Black Friday” because:

a. it’s the day that retailers typically end up in-the-black
b. the shopping traffic can be hell on both retail workers and the customers themselves, and
c. all those footprints in and out of the malls leave the floors as dark as the heart of a mean-mistreatin’ woman, if my subscription to “The Quarterly Journal of Blues Medicine” is accurate.

Now the trade pubs are reporting the impact of all this shopping including a report by Mike Vizard that Black Friday crushed many online retailers in this report on eweek.com. He noted that many retail giants reported significant performance slowdowns on their online commerce sites just as the holiday season got started. Costco, Victoria’s Secret, Lowe's, and Macy's were all hit hard by the surge of buyers on Black Friday. Most of these retailers seem to aware of the problem as they are expected to spend $10 billion annually on IT by 2011.

This year, the National Retail Federation also put forward the idea of “Cyber Monday.”  All those people who couldn’t find the exact gift in the store, who thought the retail prices were a little high, and, of course, people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a mall the day after Thanksgiving often come back to work on Monday and start shopping on the high speed connections work provides. 

Continue reading "The Cyber Monday Blues: How to Use NetFlow and Network Monitoring Tools to Ensure Online Shopping Doesn’t Impact Network Performance" »

Over the next week on Network Performance Daily, we’ll excerpt sections of the new NetQoS VoIP ebook entitled VoIP: Do You See What I’m Saying. Today, we take a look at the hardware needed to equip your VoIP infrastructure. Obviously, VoIP systems don’t just require some server configuration and special software. Quite frankly, you can’t plug an RJ-10 phone line into an RJ-45 ethernet port and say you’ve got VoIP.

(We all know someone who might actually do that. If you’re lucky, he or she is not in your IT department…)

So, what is some of the VoIP hardware you need?

First, in terms of sheer numbers, IP phones will make up the largest group of new devices on your network. These IP phones connect to the network via Ethernet and many of them get power-over-Ethernet (POE) from LAN switches that support it. Each of these phones runs an embedded operating system with a TCP/IP stack for communications, which means each phone needs its own IP, and software called a codec to convert a voice conversation to IP packets.

Depending on how fancy your phone is, many of these phones can also run applications. Additionally, there are also “soft” phones – basically headsets that connect to the computer and an application which runs on it.

Continue reading "VoIP eBook Excerpts: Critical Elements of Your VoIP Infrastructure" »

We’re just announcing that Belron US, Inc., a subsidiary of Belron S.A., makers of vehicle glass – you know, the stuff that you can see through but won’t shatter to pieces when a bird does a kamikaze run into it when you’re driving down the highway at 65 miles per hour – has been using NetQoS SuperAgent and NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to monitor its network for more than two years.

Belron has to connect over 7,000 employees across all 50 states from their home base in Columbus, Ohio, so delivering optimal network and application performance over the WAN is critical for them. The network includes two national call centers, several customer-facing Web sites for, auto glass quotes, service scheduling and, claims processing, 83 warehouses, 220 retail stores and over 2,200 mobile service technicians who access applications from the field.

Because of the vast size of the network, it helps to have SuperAgent continually measuring and analyzing response times for all the TCP-based transactions and comparing that to the baseline, then tracking the problems back to the network, server, or application. They are also using ReporterAnalyzer to show how application traffic impacts network performance in real time and over time.

In addition to tracking response time, Belron is using SuperAgent to launch automatic investigations when problems occur and to track internal application service-level agreements.

To those of our readers in St. Lucia, we wish a happy Feast of St. Cecilia, to those in Germany, we wish you peace on Remembrance Day, and to those of our readers in the United States, we wish you a happy Thanksgiving, hope that you can be with your family at this time of year, and for those who can’t, we hope that you feel their love in your hearts.

There's a story in the newly free-for-online-viewing Wall Street Journal about how companies expanding globally often use multiple headquarters, leaving their original headquarters locations behind in an effort to become "global brands." For example, Lenovo is a Chinese company - but they've got headquarters in Singapore and Raleigh.

Companies have varied reasons for moving beyond the nest. Some, like UniCredit or Lenovo, found their businesses and work forces reshaped after cross-border mergers or acquisitions. Others, like consultancy Accenture Ltd., which has no headquarters and whose CEO has no office, are reflecting their far-flung customers.

Obviously, distributed companies require distributed networks; Wide Area Networks obviously play a big part in getting each of the “world headquarters” of these companies the information that they need in a timely fashion, and it is only getting bigger.

But that got me to thinking - if you can have headquarters anywhere in the world - why couldn't you have a datacenter anywhere in the world, separate from the headquarters?

Continue reading "Welcome to the Data Center, Here's your Parka." »

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The Austin Chronicle - Austin's local alternative weekly newspaper - reported today that police busted a pot-growing operation in a rental property based on "data-mining" that they did using Austin Energy's customer database.

Colby's lawyer, David Dudley, argues that APD Detective Jeff Haynes used energy-consumption information from thousands of Austin Energy customers - without those customers' knowledge or consent - in an effort to find and focus upon AE customers who, in Haynes' opinion, regularly consume more kilowatt-hours than he believed "typical" for the size of their residence. In other words, rather than developing an investigation and then accessing a discrete and particular set of energy-consumption data in order to verify other evidence that suggests a growing operation might be under way inside a particular house, Haynes was working with AE, and in particular with business process analyst Mark Coffey, to troll through thousands of records from across Austin in an effort to find energy-consumption "targets" to pursue.

AE officials insist their cooperation with APD is required of the city utility - pursuant to a 1994 ruling from the Texas attorney general's office and supported by federal legal precedent.

Continue reading "High-power consumption could be confused with pot growing" »

Ars Technica: AT&T Takes Another Step Towards Filtered Network with Investment in Vobile

AT&T announced in June that it would develop technology designed to prevent copyright infringement on its network - by, presumably, deep packet inspection combined with technology designed to identify video. Now they're investing in Vobile, a company that makes a screening technology that supposedly can identify videos as they're being transmitted over the Internet.

Vobile's core product is a screening technology that it calls "VideoDNA." Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.

Continue reading "Network Performance Links: In Russia, Computer Reboots You." »

“You got application discovery in my end-to-end performance monitor! Oh yeah? You got end-to-end performance monitoring in my application discoverer!”

NetQoS and EMC have developed integration that feeds EMC’s Application Discovery Manager (ADM) server and application data into NetQoS SuperAgent. That makes it a lot easier to set up the applications you want to monitor with SuperAgent initially, and maintain these configurations as applications change and new ones are added. It also helps to ensure that consistent nomenclature is used to describe application components: If SuperAgent finds something that people should know about – let’s say there’s an application performance issue – the related component names will be understood by different IT groups which makes collaboration on problem resolution a lot easier.

ADM constantly tracks changes in hardware, OS, and software applications. Combined with SuperAgent, you can find problems and match them to the change that may have caused it, even if it’s something simple like replacing the RAM or patching the operating system.

The ADM product itself is an interesting one and pretty valuable to those that work in and around the data center. It’s an appliance that plugs into a span or mirror port on a switch and passively watches traffic and maps the application infrastructure relationships in the data center. You could find out in great – maybe shocking – detail about what every single server in a particular application might be – along with the clients that connect to it, the services involved, the dependencies, the hardware. You can do some deep-dive analysis using things like Windows Management Instrumentation, or SNMP or Secure Socket, and actively get into those machines, log on to them, find out the configuration currently and then regularly check for changes.

ComputerWorld: 2007 Jobs Report Snapshots

Ever wanted to feel depressed about how much money you're making? Wait no longer! ComputerWorld has published their annual survey of IT salaries.

IT salaries have risen at a slow but steady pace since hitting rock-bottom in 2002. Here are the IT pay raises from 1987 to 2007…

The 2007 median annual base salary is $80,000 (half the salaries are above the median, and half are below). For senior management, the median annual base salary is $115,000; for middle management, it's $88,000; and for staff/technical positions, it's $70,000.

Continue reading "Network Performance Management Daily Links" »