Editorial

There’s a game called “Team Fortress 2” – and if you’re not familiar with it, imagine a Norman Rockwell painting superimposed on secret mercenary forces with outrageous personalities by the Pixar team that worked on “The Incredibles,” set the whole thing in the mid-1960s, and create a gameplay mechanic where you introduce teamwork and strategy into a first-person shooter. I really like it, simply because it combines the two things I love the most; absurdist humor and interesting applications of networking technology.

Last weekend, Valve, the makers of “Team Fortress 2” unleashed a new system where players would randomly receive bonus gifts like better weapons or silly hats. This system of “item drops” was controversial with longtime players, who were used to the old system, where the “unlocks” were acquired through performing in-game tasks of various difficulty (or absurdity) called “Achievements.”

Achievements, in a video game context, are like points – for example, you earn an achievement in Team Fortress 2 if your Russian defector heavy-weapons guy (Codename: “Heavy”) pushes your team’s cart in the game past 50 checkpoints, he gets an achievement called “Pushkin the cart” – if he, on the other hand, prevents the enemy’s cart from going past 25 checkpoints, he gets a different achievement called “Stalin the Kart.”

Yes, it’s very pun-heavy.

One of the reasons behind the new system, theoretically, is that it makes “Team Fortress 2” more like a MMORPG. (Think “World of Warcraft.”) WoW is addicting – in fact, game developer Jeff Vogel calls it “addiction-based game development,” in an article about World of Warcraft.

And then, there is that strange, visceral feeling of accomplishment obtained from character building and earning rewards. It is a strange phenomenon, best seen in massively multiplayer RPGs. These games are based on repetition - killing the same monsters, fighting through the same raids, doing PvP on the same battlegrounds, gathering and crafting the same recipes.

And, in return, players get little rewards. Statistics go up. Experience bars fill. You push a lever and a reward pellet comes out. There is the feeling that something has been accomplished, a sensation that is amazingly addictive. In EverQuest, when I gained a level or got a really good item, the feeling of achievement was palpable. For me, it was an actual, physical sensation. I kept playing because it gave me the satisfaction of achieving something, even when, of course, I wasn't. And this is what I mean by addiction-based game design.

So, I was thinking – how do you get network engineers, who have boring jobs (oh, sure, you and I find it more interesting than most people do, but even so, a lot of the job is routine maintenance,) to enjoy work even during the downtime? How do you compare your network performance savvy with your peers? NetworkRockstarChallenge.com is one way, but that only tests specific, memorized bits of network trivia.

We thought about this – and we think we’ve come up with a solution. We’re seriously thinking about implementing Network Rockstar Achievements; that is, we’ll come up with a list of moderate, difficult, and insane network administration tasks; you tell us how solved the problem in order to achieve them, and we’ll give you “unlocks” – little prizes from our goodie bin.

Plus, you know, the bragging rights.

But before we set out on this path, we’re kind of interested in gauging interest in such a system – if nobody would really be interested, we’d like to know before we start spinning our wheels on how to implement the complex system. And if you’ve got ideas for Achievements or Unlocks you’d like to see, I’d really like to see them.

We’ve got a comment section below, but if you’d like, you can also e-mail me directly at brian.boyko@netqos.com.

Meantime, I’m going to sign out for the day – I really want my Heavy to earn the “Marxman” achievement – I’m so close!

It’s a standard rule in marketing that you don’t point out your competitor’s advertising, as it just draws attention to your competitors and makes it look like they’ve struck a nerve and therefore have a point.

But I’m not a standard marketer – I’m a blogger. Woo! Look at me! I’m spontaneously subverting the accepted conventional wisdom! Whee! I’m bucking the paradigm trends! Yahoo! Us wacky bloggers, is there nothing we hold sacred?

So, here’s Fluke Networks’ latest advertisement, which is currently running on the Network World web site – you can check it out on the “Network Management” subcategory of “Infrastructure management.”

(I’m pointing out where people can see our competitors’ advertising! Lock me in the loony bin, ‘cause I’m a-blog-o-crazy! )

So, here’s the deal. The advertisement consists of three slides – the first: “Only Fluke Networks can do it.” The second, “Not NetScout, Not NetQos [sic], Not OPNet.[sic]” The third is, “We’ll prove it, if you consider us and still buy one of the others, we’ll pay you cash,” with what looks remarkably like our NetQoS SuperAgent product.

First, let’s get the nit-picky out of the way; NetQoS is punctuated with a capital S, as it’s a shortening of “Network Quality of Service.” Granted, this distinction may eventually become naturalized out, much like “Microcomputer Software” became “Micro-Soft” and then “Microsoft,” but still, the fact that the name is misspelled actually calls attention to that part of the ad. It should also be noted that the name “NetQos” is actually bigger than the Fluke logo in the Fluke ad in that screenshot. As a matter of fact, I’d bet that UPNET and NetScot would love it if a competitor misspelled their names in a marketing communication. If you’re going to run an ad with your competitors’ names on it – don’t call attention to it.

Anyway, it’s not clear from the ad, but clicking in, you can see a screenshot, captioned “Would you rather have this?” And there is a difference; Fluke is claiming an advantage in granularity. Fair enough. If they want to get into feature comparison, we think we’ve got them beat.

Mostly, the granularity thing is cherry picking a tiny difference in features. Features are important, but what’s absolutely crucial is having a platform which offers data from the entire infrastructure to provide a comprehensive reporting solution that can deliver the information in a way that network engineers and other IT users can use to pinpoint problems.

So to steal a line from them, would you rather have a network graph that only network engineers can comprehend, or would you rather have… say, something like this?

This is the Application Performance Diagram that uses response time data – a.k.a. SuperAgent – to provide higher-level views of how the network is supporting application delivery.

We actually licensed our products to Fluke Networks who re-branded and sold them for years, so Fluke is very familiar with our technology. Fluke subsequently acquired products of their own and are now competitive (their advertising draws a big red line-o’-nasty through our misspelled name). NetQoS terminated the licensing deal which expires at the end of June. (If you’re a NetQoS product customer through Fluke, you might want to talk with us as your product support will stop).

As for the claim that “only Fluke Networks can do it… know the root cause of application problems in three clicks,” they obviously haven’t seen the videos we put out last week, showing you exactly how know the root cause of application problems in three clicks using NetQoS Performance Center 5.0. Not only that, but we can show you the root cause of server problems and network problems too; we can show you performance by physical location through intuitive maps, and inform you at a glance how applications are performing through our Application Performance Dashboard. You can drill-down to isolate the cause of higher-than-normal latency, view the full packet captures for the problem application and recreate the user and application behavior for diagnosis. There’s a lot more I could add but I won’t – we have to give the sales demo guys something to talk about.

Novatel has come out with a new device it’s calling “Mi-Fi” – specifically, the “Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.” Mi-Fi is essentially a wireless Wi-Fi router which connects to the Internet using a 3G data network over the cellular service.  Five users can connect at once, and the particular device is about the size of an old, first-gen iPod.  Current solutions for connecting a router to 3G or EV-DO networks are bigger, bulkier, often require an additional card, and don’t have a cool, marketing friendly name. 

Which begs the question, if it’s the first Mi-Fi device, where do they get off numbering it as “2200?” Were there 2199 prototypes that we don’t know about?  Will it hit the market in the year 2200 A.D.? Is it really 2.2, but someone accidentally misplaced the decimal point? I miss the days when technology started at 1, and worked its way up to… 3.11, then skipped ahead to 95, then 98, then ME, then 2000, then XP, and then back again to 7. 

But back to the matter at hand – a mobile router that is smaller than a cellphone would have multiple uses in an enterprise environment.  Note that I did not say that would have multiple uses for an enterprise environment. The way I envision this thing heading into most organizations is via being smuggled in, to bypass restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, or other sites. 

Of course, a computer that can connect to either the corporate network or to the unsecured general internet provides unique security problems, but also some infrastructure problems.  Who wants to tell the CEO on the 3^rd floor that the data entry team on the 2^nd floor is using a 3G router and the signals are interfering and that’s why he can’t go online?  What happens when a crucial piece of equipment auto-connects to the wrong network? 

We’ve mentioned the hurdles and headaches in supporting 3G devices like the iPhone in the enterprise; though when we did so in January 2007, it was speculation, and since then Network World has written an article with more concrete real-world examples of the problems that IT pros face in integrating iPhone tech with the rest of the enterprise.   Supporting not just 3G devices, but, essentially, 3G networks which can spring up anywhere at anytime is likely to be far worse. 

And now, the obligatory pitch: how do you catch someone using illicit or misconfigured 3G network devices?  Simple – the same way you catch someone operating an illicit FTP server, or a malware outbreak.  You baseline your data, analyze the traffic, and look for anomalies.  Interestingly enough, most problems in the network are marked by a severe increase of traffic over the norm.  Illicit and misconfigured 3G traffic will show up – not as an unusually large traffic volume on the corporate network, but an unusually small one.  But with visibility into the network, these things should be detectable. 

Anyway, since it’s a Friday before a 3-day weekend, combined with many of you just getting back from Interop, today’s not likely to be a high traffic day. So I decided it might be a good idea to de-clutter some of the stuff up in my brain.

• Terminator 4 just came out – having not seen Terminator 3, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to follow the plot. Luckily enough, most of it was in the trailer, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. But it makes me wonder – at some point in the Terminator series, someone had to think that it was a good idea to create a giant mainframe with no ability to be shut down in case of emergency and give it control of the entire military arsenal. And I’ll bet you that there was a guy working in the IT center of Cyberdyne who thought it was a bad idea.
  
  If only they had some network monitoring, they may have realized that Skynet was becoming self-aware. Surely, that’s going to show up on anomaly detection.
  
  
• Hey, remember that video we did with the oranges? We’ve got a new video coming up soon – but before we put that out, we figured we’d share the storyboard [PDF] with you – which is pretty funny in and of itself.
  
  
• Those following the Pirate Bay Trial saga will find this amusing – the judge assigned to review whether the trial judge in the Pirate Bay trial should be removed because was biased has been removed from the case for bias. Interestingly enough, the reason the reviewing judge was removed was because he was a member of the same groups that the trial judge was a member of. Either the Pirate Bay will get a new trial, or Swedish law will establish a precident that being a member of copyright interest groups is enough to prevent you for ruling on copyright case rulings, but not ruling on copyright cases.
  
  I heard the reviewing judge was so pissed off, he let out a vulgar stream of recursive words. (Rimshot.) Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitress.

Everyone’s putting out surveys at Interop; we’re no exception. Surveys are how we know what you need in products, how we should focus our efforts, and how to game the system when illegally betting on American Idol results, an often overlooked source of secondary revenue for mid-sized businesses in these bleak economic times.

So we’ve been surveying, and from what we learned both in Vegas and from our Symposium last month, network budgets and, consequently, network personnel, are down over the last 12 months. At the same time, network usage, unsurprisingly, went up.

Combining the results of the two surveys (totaling 170 respondents with only one mix-up between our survey and a keno bet), 69% of IT professionals indicated that their company’s WAN usage increased over the last 12 months, and 8% said it decreased.

Two notes: First, WAN usage was defined as volume of traffic, number of end users, and/or number of links. Second, our survey won $25 for nine hits out of 20 spots.

Anyway, when asked how the network management resources available to manage the increased usage have changed over the same period, 74 percent of survey respondents said their budgets have either decreased or stayed the same, and 69 percent said their personnel have either decreased or stayed the same.

Now, when you’re doing more work with less people and less availability, there’s got to be some sort of way to bridge that gap – force multipliers, if you will. That’s probably why nearly 40 percent of survey respondents indicated increased investment in network management tools, with only seven percent saying that they planned to decrease investment in network management tools.

The top network management priorities cited for this year are monitoring end-user service levels, more proactive performance management, faster troubleshooting, and data center and infrastructure consolidation. Surprisingly, despite all the industry discussion, only nine percent stated that managing a cloud computing initiative was a top priority for this year.

(There may be a bit of a bias there, as the survey was conducted at Interop and Symposium – which would, naturally, over-represent companies that are willing and able to send representatives to Las Vegas or Austin, respectively. It’s a hunch, but I personally think that cloud computing can still make a huge impact on small-to-midsize companies, and bears looking into if only because the small-to-midsize companies of this decade tend to become the midsize-to-large companies of the next.)

Interop in full swing in Vegas; and already both my work e-mail and my personal e-mail are filled with press releases, press-releases disguised as e-mail, and in one odd case, ninja disguised as press-release. 

If you’re asking how a ninja can get into my e-mail, you don’t know much about ninjas.  Ninjas can get anywhere.

Still, I figure I might as well check in to see what’s going on at Interop.  For example, Jim Metzler just put out a post on his blog on his Interop first impressions:

I stepped out of the hotel I saw something that I have never seen before in Vegas – there was absolutely no line for a taxi. Every other time I have come to Vegas there has been a long line, often lasting a half hour or more. My fear was that the Interop show would be as empty as the taxi line. It is not. It appears to be down some from last year, but there still is a lot of energy here...

…Then we got to the Q&A and the gap between what is being promoted by vendors and analysts and what is being practiced by IT organizations became painfully clear. For example, vendors and analysts have been talking for years about what IT organizations need to do to meet their internal SLAs. When asked, hardly any of the participants stated that they offer internal SLAs. That did not surprise me. Even more interesting is that vendors and analysts have also been talking for years about the need for visibility into applications. When asked, relatively few of the participants stated that they had that kind of view even though most of them had some kind of APM tool. That did surprise me.

Meanwhile, Network Instruments polled the Interop attendees on virtualization deployment, and released the results via a press release on their website – pessimistic reading if you’re keeping track of virtualization in the enterprise.  Some findings:

• 27 percent identified a lack of visibility and tools as the largest troubleshooting challenge in virtual environments.  Other troubleshooting concerns include a lack of training on virtual infrastructure (26 percent) followed by an inability to secure infrastructure (21 percent).


• 55 percent report experiencing more problems than pluses with virtualization, while 45 percent thought the technology’s benefits outweighed any problems.


• 47 percent report roll-out costs were too high.

That’s not great news for virtualization deployments, and goes to show you that visibility is extremely important in virtual environments in order to keep costs down and make sure you’re going to receive benefits before large deployments.

We’ve got some added features and functionality in the recently announced NetQoS Performance Center version 5.0 and we’d like to show you how they work in practice.

First, the Application Performance Dashboard, which provides an at-a-glance view of response times per application and site across an organization.

Second, Maps with Real-Time Event Notifications, which show performance and traditional availability events on a geographical map, all in one screen. The maps give users a real-time perspective on the health of the entire IT infrastructure and its effect on application performance.  [EMBED]

Finally, NetQoS Connector for Microsoft Excel, an API which allows you to harvest data from NetQoS Performance Center and include it in Excel reports.

You can find out more about NetQoS Performance Center 5.0 via our press release on our corporate Web site, or, if you’re in Vegas, just head to Interop, booth #663 or Cisco pod #1719.

...if you work in networking, and have little to no recollection of the previous night's events, and are currently wondering why you woke up in a strange hotel room in Las Vegas, it's probably because Interop officially starts today.

FYI.

NetQoS will be in booth #663 & Cisco pod #1719.

I’m not referring to the Crown-Royal Drinking Chupacabra, although he is lurking under your desk, and he is hungry.

No, I’m referring to the big boxy thing under your desk. Probably is either white, grey, or black, and has “Dell,” “HP,” or “Gateway” written on it somewhere. You know. That thing.

The hard drive.

No – I know that it’s not called a hard drive; I know that it’s not really the CPU either – it’s the computer, and hard drives and CPUs are simply components. I know that, in the eternal words of Moss, “Memory is RAM!” and though I may joke, it is not powered by magic smoke.

But if you ask non-technical people what the thingamajig is called, many times they’ll say it’s the “hard drive.” This phenomenon was bemoaned in a blogpost on IT Wire by David M. Williams.

Sure, you could blame ignorance; but when the radio doesn’t work in a car, users aren’t likely to say “the engine died.” This problem seems related to technology alone.

I think there may be a number of factors; much of which is simply that bad information is passed down – I remember taking more than one quiz in the high-school mandated computer course where I was marked down for putting down the more technically correct “The CPU resides in a socket on the motherboard” instead of “The CPU is the box.” Even so, “CPU” is probably –less completely wrong- than “hard drive.” Then again, why not just call it “The box?”

If you think this is only a problem affecting desktops, think again. When applications perform poorly, what does the end-user blame?

(If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you should already know the answer.)

For the other 99.999% of the world: “The Network” gets blamed. This means that the issue ends up going to the network team first, even though the problem could be with the server, the application, or, heck, with the desktop. This wastes time and money.

It’s why you can’t rely on calls to the help desk being your first notification of problems; because end-users aren’t always technically aware, they may not have the information you need to solve problems quickly, and when they do have information, it might be wrong.

Meantime, I don’t want to know how many people went out and bought a brand new computer because their geek friend told them that their “hard drive needed to be defragmented.”

I’m not sure I want to know.

The Bilderberg Group, an annual invitation-only conference of 130 high-influence politicians and businessmen is currently meeting in Athens, Greece.

Quite a lot of secrecy surrounds the Bilderberg Group – quite a lot of security goes into making sure that photos and recordings of the meetings do not get widely distributed, and combined with the high-profile nature of the attendees, keeping a low profile requires massive effort.

Unsurprisingly, the Bilderberg Group is the subject of many, many, conspiracy theories. It’s human nature; if you don’t have information about something that’s scary, you tend to assume the worst. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the human mind abhors ignorance, and will gladly make up something – anything – that sounds like it’ll fit. This is probably how Greco-Roman gods got started.

This has implications for IT – specifically, underlining the importance of having the right information to make the right decisions – but allow me to go forward a bit with the Bilderberg group.

Now, don’t get me wrong – the conspiratorial view of history is, in some cases, the right one. For example, The Butler Affair, Operation Valkyrie, Operation Ajax, MKULTRA, Guy Fawkes, and, of course, “Votefortheworst.com.” Does the Bilderberg group qualify?

Probably not. In 2001, an article in the Guardian, in part, gives Bilderberg’s side of the story, explaining that Bilderberg members prefer secrecy so that it’s members can speak more freely; that it is a high-powered meeting of the minds but has no more influence on world affairs than any other think tank like the CATO Institute, Brookings Institution, or Tellus Institute (though to be fair, that’s still considerable influence on world affairs.)

The best a shadowy evil mastermind could hope for is to make a persuasive argument explaining what he feels are the best governmental policies would be, and hope that world leaders find the ideas compelling.

“While furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world, my Bilderberg interviewees did admit to me that international affairs had, from time to time, been influenced by these sessions.

I asked for examples, and I was given one: ‘During the Falklands war, the British government's request for international sanctions against Argentina fell on stony ground. But at a Bilderberg meeting in, I think, Denmark, David Owen stood up and gave the most fiery speech in favour of imposing them. Well, the speech changed a lot of minds. I'm sure that various foreign ministers went back to their respective countries and told their leaders what David Owen had said. And you know what? Sanctions were imposed.’”

But the difference between Bilderberg and CATO, Brookings, and Tellus is that while other think tanks actually publish their findings, the levels of secrecy approaching the Bilderberg group border on Kafkaesque. The meetings are, indeed, secret, and the Guardian’s reporter for this year’s Bilderberg conference, Charlie Skelton, started out reporting on the Group in a light, humorous style, talking about how he managed to check into the wrong hotel (“this is who Bilderberg are up against,” he writes,) but over the course of a few days, is no longer making jokes.

Yesterday, he started writing on being harassed for taking photographs, and being questioned who “Sylvester McCoy” was by Greek police whose behavior was uncannily like Daleks (or perhaps, Cybermen.)

“All around me: "Delete! Delete photos!" followed by a lame tug of war for the camera with no great self-belief on either side, which I won. Camera back in pocket.

Then it became: "Get in the car!" Get in the car!" I wasn't about to get in the car. I remember saying: "One of you has a machine gun, you're shouting at me, I don't understand why, I took one photograph, this all seems a bit strange. What's going on here?"”

Today, he reports on being followed.

“But before I begin, please believe me when I say: I haven't gone nuts. I really haven't. Nine times seven is 63 and the capital of Italy is Rome. I know what I know. And I know that I'm being followed. I know because I've just been chatting to the plainclothes policemen I caught following me. As absurd as it sounds, I've just "made my tail".

They're watching me now. REALLY. They're sitting on the wall outside the cafe Oceania or whatever this is called, watching me type this sentence. I asked them in for a coffee but they declined. They laughed sheepishly when I called them Starsky and Hutch.”

And later,

I feel a bit like I've driven down the wrong alley and suddenly don't recognise anything, and people are staring at me and not simply to admire my hair. I'm jumpy. I think someone has been in my room and moved my laptop. I know this sounds bonkers, I know it does, but I took a photo of it before I left the room and it wasn't where I left it.

Listen to me. I sound like a fruitcake. Three days and I've been turned into a suspect, a troublemaker, unwanted, ill at ease, tired and a bit afraid.

So, is it any wonder that the Bilderberg group is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories?

In order to understand the world; whether the world of high finance and high politics, or the world of the Enterprise network, it is important that you have information, otherwise, you’re blindly groping in the dark for things that sound right. This is the familiar cause of “the network always getting blamed” for anything that causes a slowdown, whether it be network, server, or application.

As mentioned above, if we don’t have information about something important, we often make up something that sounds right. This is not a bad thing; the first step in scientific experiment is to make a hypothesis that fits the observable evidence. The second step is testing the hypothesis. Anything that stops at the first step isn’t science, and isn’t particularly useful. As such, being able to gather the evidence and test to see what effect changes on the network don’t just help you solve network and application problems faster – they are the only real method you have for solving the problems in the first place. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the electric light the best policeman.

After being followed, detained, and with his room ransacked, Charlie Skelton had this observation about Bilderberg and the very, very high levels of secrecy around the organization:

I don't care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don't think politics should be done like this.

Worse than not bothering to gather information is intentionally keeping people in the dark. And we see this in IT in some semi-rare cases, where those in IT consciously choose not to provide information about network performance to managers and executives, the theory being that IT personnel have more value to the company if they’re perceived as the only people in the organization who know what’s going on.

This theory, however, doesn’t hold water. If you provide network information to decision-makers in a format that they can understand, you end up proving your value to the organization. If you do not provide information to decision-makers, they’re going to end up, well, assuming the worst…