NetQoS and Network Instruments polled attendees at Interop yesterday; to try to find out the network’s greatest management challenges. Close to 80% of attendees are either using virtualization now or planning to use virtualization in 12 months, and a plurality of respondents – 38% - said the virtualization presented the greatest monitoring challenges.

What’s interesting about this is the idea that virtualization may simplify application development and hardware maintenance, but it complicates network management greatly. Keeping track of the traffic between Server A and Server B isn’t enough, now there’s Server A, Image 1, Server A, Image 2, Server B, Image 1, Server B, Image 2 and so on. So there’s the A-B traffic, the A1-B1 traffic, the A1-B2 traffic, and the internal traffic of A1-A2 and B1-B2. You get the idea.

Considering that virtualization is one of the key themes of this year’s Interop, the poll simply puts an underline for emphasis under virtualization’s widespread adoption.

This is not to say that virtualization is the only challenge facing IT groups in the present and near future. 24% of those polled said that unified communications was going to be challenging to monitor, and 14% said the same thing of MPLS.

Of course, just because this year presents new challenges doesn’t mean that challenges that were new last year have gone away; 67% of companies surveyed have rolled out VoIP, and 42% have WAN Optimization of some sort.

By Brian Boyko,
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Right now, some of NetQoS’s best and brightest are at the Interop conference in Las Vegas. (Our booth number is 1853, and that should be easy to remember – it’s the same year the Crimean War started.)

I’m not with them. Not so much that I’m not one of the best and brightest here, but after casually mentioning offhand at last year’s Interop that I seemed to prefer Atlantic City for my entertainment/gambling needs, the entire town of Las Vegas grabbed their emergency pitchforks and torches (stashed conveniently under the baccarat tables) and ran me out of town.

Other than that, it was a pleasant trip.

The thing that gets me about Interop is that it’s a trade show, yes, but it’s more than just a networking trade show. The conference really revolves around the massive network set up on-site. It’s an interesting trial-by-fire where different network vendors get to find out in a real-world environment exactly how well their products interoperate (hence the name) with others.

Douglas Gourlay at Cisco, who has been to many more Interops than I have, talks about the Interop spirit, if you will:

Back when Interop started no one was certain which protocols would win, whether bridging or routing was the way to go, whether it would be Ethernet, ATM, Token Ring, or FDDI/CDDI to the desktop, etc. What Interop did was force multiple vendors to work together to build a network to support the show floor in a matter of days. There were also interoperability tests of new protocols and such between multiple vendors hardware, software, protocols, etc. In the end it became a gathering place for 20,000+ network professionals to see what worked, what didn't, hear about the latest and greatest…

And watch forklifts get driven into McAfee’s booth.

We're all a bit busy - a big chunk of us are at Interop setting up our booth (shameless plug!), and I'm working on taking symposium presentations and making video and multimedia presentations out of them. 

But there are a few interesting articles out there that we thought you'd like to see.

First, Pmarca.com has an interesting rundown of the likely scenarios that would happen if Microsoft tried a hostile takeover of Yahoo!

That's not enthusiasm, shock, or other exclamation.  It's just that I needed to end that sentence with Yahoo! and Yahoo! has the exclamation point in their name.

Secondly, Network World's Steve Taylor talks about the misperceptions of the NOC, a topic which Jim Metzler talked about at Symposium.  You can hear a podcast Dr. Metzler did on the subject here. 

And finally, Richard Stallman stopped by Network Performance Daily to leave a comment on an article which talked about two things: rumored changes in MySQL's open-source status (which turned out to be unfounded), and, as an aside, Dungeons and Dragons. 

Naturally, RMS wanted to talk about Dungeons and Dragons.

One of the things in IT that baffles me is the intense emphasis on security.  Don’t get me wrong, I can understand the psychology of it.  We, as human beings, fear loss more than we appreciate gain. 

But security seems to be one of the primary overriding concerns of networking, with entire magazines, trade publications, etc. devoted to the subject of locking down your network tighter than a snare drum.  It’s not surprising that these things exist.  What is surprising is the sheer number and percentage of “mindshare” that security takes up in IT. 

And even security professionals are beginning to notice this – and the “security fatigue” which is settling in.  Bruce Schneier at Wired writes about his experience at the RSA Conference, the largest information security conference in the world, in “Prediction: RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon.”

Talk to the exhibitors, though, and the most common complaint is that the attendees aren't buying….

No one wants to buy security. They want to buy something truly useful -- database management systems, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, a company-wide network -- and they want it to be secure. They don't want to have to become IT security experts. They don't want to have to go to the RSA Conference. This is the future of IT security.

There are something like 800+ IT security vendors out there, and they fill the market with gobs of confusing variations of messaging.

I asked him whether he walked through the show floor, looking at the company's competitors to see if there was any benefit to switching.

"I can't figure out what any of those companies do," he replied.

The people making purchasing decisions are less interested in the details and more interested in what the product will enable them to do.  It doesn’t mean security isn’t important to buyers.  It just means that they don’t want to have to think about security as a separate idea.  They want products with utility – that are also secure. 

There are many other industries where security is a big part of the business – and yet, security remains taken for granted.  Banking – the walk-in kind, not the online kind – is one of them.  When you deposit money in a bank, you know that they’ll keep your money in a big safe that presumably can’t be picked with a bobby pin.  (If the bobby pin is being wielded by a spunky team of “spunky girl adventurers,” however, all bets are off.) 

But what you’re not interested in who made the lock, how many pounds of pressure it can withstand, whether it’s steel, titanium, an alloy, and the component makeup.  You’re interested in what it can do – interest.  The bank is interested in what it can do with your money – lend it out and charge interest. 

You can have an extremely secure network that doesn’t actually do much, and focusing on security without focusing on the core competencies and getting more done with the information you have seems to be a bit of a  “biggest lock on an empty chest” mentality.

Recently, there’s been some discussion on Slashdot regarding MySQL in the past few months, after MySQL (the company) was bought out by Sun Microsystems.  MySQL (the company) has announced that they will be developing some proprietary add-ons to the backup capabilities of MySQL (the database) which will only be available to MySQL’s (the company’s) customers of MySQL (the database) enterprise edition, and not to MySQL (the database) community edition. 

This has been blown a bit out of proportion.  (The headline, on Slashdot, “Sun may begin close-sourcing MySQL” was misleading at best).  We e-mailed Steve Curry at MySQL (the company) and he pointed us to some information clearing up the situation.

· Anything that has been released as open-source under GPL continues to be released as open-source under GPL. Sun and MySQL (the company) are not going to start “closing” the open-source MySQL (the database,) and it seems unlikely that they will be able to legally do so even if they wished to.

· Improved backup capabilities are being planned in MySQL (the database) 6.0 for both the open-source community and open-source with proprietary add-ons enterprise version. 

· Proprietary add-ons are being added to the Enterprise version of MySQL (the database).  These add-ons are not core critical, they are essentially added-value for paying customers, which add compression, encryption, specific native drivers – things that a particular business might need but which aren’t critical to the core functioning of MySQL (the database.) 

· The decision to do so was done before MySQL (the company) was acquired by Sun Microsystems. If anything, Sun has been very open-source friendly, with Star Office forming the basis of OpenOffice.org, and Solaris and Java both open-source now.

· There is nothing preventing people from forking the MySQL (the database) source code and producing open-source versions of the proprietary capabilities.

The use of proprietary add-ons to an open-source system isn’t even all that rare.  Click N’ Run for Linux systems adds proprietary software to the open-source Linux; MacOSX is based on the BSD-licensed Darwin, a BSD-like distribution.

We also note the irony of a number of proprietary Web applications running off of LAMP stacks, where the L, the A, the M (the DB) and the P are all “free software.” 

There are a number of proprietary Web applications running with MySQL (the database) – and a move to “close source” MySQL (the database) would have messed with the business models of many companies – including NetQoS.  NetQoS uses MySQL (the database) Enterprise edition in our network monitoring and reporting products and we’re customers of MySQL (the company).  So we’re glad this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. 

I tried to think of a prominent case where someone successfully “closed the source” of a flagship product after it was open-sourced - but couldn't until I went much, much farther afield.  There is a company “closing the source” on its major flagship product.

That company is Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro.  And the flagship product is “Dungeons and Dragons.” 

Wizards (the company) makes Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing, computer-less tabletop game where you play knights, elves, and powerful wizards (the characters) – a game that has a history of being very attractive to the technology-oriented crowd because of our love of math and power fantasies.

What makes Dungeons and Dragons particularly interesting is that a while back, Wizards (the company) released an “Open Gaming License” (OGL) which allowed third parties to develop additional content for Dunegons and Dragons, and, in fact, create entirely new games in different settings and genres using the rules established in Dungeons and Dragons 3^rd edition.  If you were a third-party company, you could publish supplements to provide traps, monsters, or new spells for wizards (the characters) to cast.  And many did.

This had numerous benefits all around; players needed to learn how to use only one system, and they had tons of D&D supplements to choose from, game companies found they had an audience in D&D players that they might not have otherwise had, Wizards (the company) found a sea of “developers” for their system which made ownership of D&D’s “core books” more valuable, and while it may not have resulted in a rebirth of the roleplaying game industry, it sure propped it up for a little while longer.

Because game players only had to learn one set of rules to play, the roleplaying game industry standardized quite a bit and the system used in Dungeons or Dragons (known as “d20”) became quite widely used, dominating the RPG field for a time. 

D&D “version 4.0” will soon be released, and many game beta testers believe the system has been radically overhauled and improved.  However, this new system will not be released under the OGL.  It will however, be released under the “Dungeons and Dragons 4^th Edition Game System License” (GSL). 

The GSL license has not yet been made public, but there are rumors, speculations, and concerns, fueled by online posts made by the brand manager and licensing manager for Dungeons and Dragons, and relayed by the lead writer of third-party publisher Necromancer Games that the GSL will contain a “poison pill” clause – that is, in order to use the GSL, a game company must not publish anything under the OGL.  

This would be like Microsoft saying that developers for Windows Vista are forbidden from publishing anything under the GNU public license.  And the upshot is now that developers have to choose between not developing games with the improved system or destroying their back-catalogs. 

Even if you don’t have a huge interest in D&D – in which case, I envy your normal social adjustment and relatively less awkward adolescence – it pays to keep up with this developing situation to see how a fight to close an open-source software product might actually go down.  Will Hasbro fail in its efforts to dominate the RPG industry, either shrinking their portion of market share or shrinking the size of the entire market?  Or will Hasbro succeed with this business plan, and the publishers of Monopoly (the game) end up with a de facto monopoly (the economic term) on this niche industry?

Update: On May 2, 2008, a week after this article's publication, Wizards of the Coast released an FAQ about the 4th edition licensing terms. The FAQ states:

Q. Can companies still produce 3.x products under the OGL?
A. Yes, but we anticipate that interest in the 4e GSLs will be greater.

Q. Can publishers release new products under both the OGL and 4E GSL?
A. No. Each new product will be either OGL or 4E GSL. If a new product is published under the 4e GSL, it cannot also be published as 3.x product under the OGL; and vice versa.

Q. I have multiple product lines. If I update one product line to 4th Edition, do they all have to be updated?
A. No. Publishers are able to choose on a product line by product line basis which license will work best.

Q. Will there be a different license for other lines, such as d20 Modern?
A. The d20 GSL will allow for other genres of roleplaying games.

Q. Why are there two different licenses?
A. The D&D 4e GSL is specific to the Dungeons & Dragons brand. The d20 GSL allows for non-fantasy genres. Both licenses tie to the 4th edition rule set.

Q. Do I have to give up my right to publish 3.5 OGL products in order to publish 4e compatible products?
A. No. Publishers are free to print product lines under either the OGL or 4E GSL. We would love to see our industry colleagues convert their entire product offerings to 4E, as we are doing, but we do not expect or require entire companies to convert to the new edition.

Q. Can publishers update their previous publications from older editions to the D&D 4th Edition rules?
A. Yes. Publishers participating in the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition GSL will be allowed, and encouraged, to convert their publications from earlier editions to the 4th Edition rules.

Just a quick note: Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) was released today. Look for heavy showers of BitTorrent and FTP traffic, as well as additional LAN traffic later in the day. “Heron” comes with increased virtualization support and is a “Long Term Support” release, which makes the platform significant for enterprise applications.

You may want to download one copy and put it on the LAN to keep traffic off the WAN connections.

Here's today's Symposium Schedule:

Here's today's symposium schedule:

In a few minutes, Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler, and Associates, will be delivering his keynote on the Next Generation NOC at NetQoS Symposium 2008 at Barton Creek Resort in Austin. Last week, we pre-recorded a podcast with Dr. Metzler regarding the speech he is about to give and what he means by a "next generation NOC."

He talks about the changing role of the NOC and moves in enterprises towards integrating what were once seperate stovepipe functions to focus on application delivery.

The podcast is below.

Here's today's Symposium Schedule: