We’re excited to announce that our board has unanimously elected Bill McCracken as CA’s chief executive officer. Bill has been CA’s interim CEO since John A. Swainson’s retirement was announced in September 2009. In appointing Bill, CA maintains the continuity of an already-strong executive team that has led the company to a string of successful quarters.

To learn more about the beginning of this new chapter in CA history, visit the press release , view his bio, or check out the recent clean energy interview he had with CNBC in December:

Thoughts from Networkers at Cisco Live – Day 2
By Patrick Ancipink

Greetings from Barcelona! Here’s a few disconnected highlights mid-way through Networkers at Cisco Live!

After saying it every year for the last decade, could this really be the year of VoIP? It is the most popular topic at our exhibit and attendees are talking about voice in the same sentence as Cisco Telepresence, desktop video, and other latency sensitive communication apps. We heard some good anecdotes from some attendees that were starting to run into VoIP quality and consistency issues as their deployments scaled. Management and visibility still doesn’t seem baked in early enough in far too many unified communications initiatives. And it’s starting to smart.

Congratulations to T-Systems for winning the Cisco Innovation Award last night! The category was Most Innovative SP Service Offering and their winning service is the Application Performance Management offering (of which NetQoS products are components.) They brought the crystal award into our booth today and we are honored to display it.

Left to right: Arabella Mansky (Sr. Product Manager), Ralf Wanders (Manager, TSS – Solution Design, WAN and APM) , Alfred Fueloep (Solution Design – TSS Solutions & Implementation), Surender Narayanappa (Systems Management Specialist)

Along with CA’s Steve Guthrie, I presented a session that looked at the network performance implications of very high rates of virtualization and cloud adoption. The attendance was very good and we confirmed (again) that the network team is generally included at the tail end of virtualization initiatives, but it’s getting better. Several attendees worked for enterprises that had successfully virtualized over 70% of their server infrastructure and everyone seemed above 20%. One gentleman from a communications server provider that is, of course, getting into cloud services, posed the question of the day for me:

How are vendors like CA changing their pricing and consumption models to deal with elasticity and the constant reprovisioning of the cloud?

This individual is seeing too many vendors trying to maintain peak usage or infrastructure-based pricing models and they are just too brittle for some dynamic cloud services.

The mostly Spanish-inspired musical entertainment on the exhibit floor was a bit loud at times, but it eased the mood considerably. And who doesn’t like a Conehead?

In case you were wondering, all of the NetQoS backpacks are gone. We had massive turn out from our promotion and handed out 500 backpacks in less than one day. It’s not at the scale of Network Rockstar T-shirt insanity at Cisco Live! in the States, but this more intimate affair really appreciated a good quality backpack to lug their souvenirs home with them from Barcelona.

As we transition to a new editor at NetworkPerformanceDaily.com, we’re going to be reprinting some of the best articles from our archives for a little while. We’ll have new content up shortly.

Originally Published October 26, 2006

By Manish Chacko

This is a story about a typical help desk in a large organization in the continental United States. This is probably true for other parts of the world as well, but I'll refrain from making claims I cannot possibly back up.

With no standard framework for Application Delivery in todays IT environments, generally speaking, the current corporate rules for IT troubleshooting are:

Step 1: Wait for someone to call the help desk.

There really is no Step 2. If nobody calls in, surely everything is going well, right? Huge corporations invest millions of dollars in hiring people to staff help desks, purchasing software to run help desks, and running meaningless reports. Yet, they leave the important troubleshooting to the end user, an end user who doesn't even realize that he's performing that task! End users who don't even know how to spell GUI, much less execute a complex diagnostic procedure.

Of course, the end user isn't exactly going to be responding with scientific measurements used to measure the performance of mission critical applications. He's going to say, "The network is acting slow," or the even more vague, "The network is acting weird."

Lets look at two different scenarios.

Continue reading "ReRun: God Help the Help Desk" »

It's my last day at NetQoS.  I know this because my crystal started blinking.

You can’t sum up three years in a few words – which is why my friends here decided to do it in collage form.

I’m really going to miss this place.

When I came in, I was the weird guy with the crazy ideas. Now, I haven’t gotten any saner, but the other people around me have become more insane. I think that’s a good thing.

I’m also really proud of what we’ve accomplished at Network Performance Daily under my run, and even though it’s no longer my run, I’m looking forward to keeping up with it in New Zealand.

Steve Harriman, our VP of Marketing, wrote me something awesome recently. “People used to ask why we have a blog. Now they ask what we’re going to do without you.”

Luckily, CA|NetQoS has some good answers coming up in the next couple of weeks – as we transition over to a new editorial staff, we’ve got some product videos that we’ll be putting up, as well as some re-runs of our “greatest hits.”

I consider it a good omen that both I and Conan O’Brien are leaving our jobs on the same day. It sorta feels like when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day.

I’d like to thank Scott, and Andrea, and Jordan, and Chandra and Jesse, and Brittany, and Cathryn, and Steve, and Patrick, and Michelle, and Sandy, and Mary Amanda, and Dave, and John and – okay, this is kinda turning into Romper Room. But there’s also the people who helped me out and along the three years, also moved on to other projects – Ben, who was in many ways my best partner in crime, and especially Pam, who I pretty much owe this job to.

And thank you, most of all, to all of the readers who have enjoyed our work over the years. (And if you’re interested in motion graphics look for me over at my new job at www.templatedigital.com!)

What? You thought I wasn’t going to plug the new project? Bloggin’ is in my blood!

-- Brian Boyko
-- Former Editor, Network Performance Daily

A study by L.E.K. consulting, a business strategy and marketing consulting firm, recently conducted a survey on media consumption habits; and what they found turned out to be a bit of a shock. 

According to the survey, 32% of users listen to an average of 5.8 hours of Internet radio a week.  That’s huge.

The reason it is huge is because unlike a lot of high-throughput downloads; streaming radio tends to be a constant drain on bandwidth.  Sure, a 5GB file is a lot to transfer, but it saturates the available bandwidth in the pipe for a limited amount of time.  On the other hand, 160mbps streaming audio improperly configured into a high QoS priority knocks out 160mbps of your total bandwidth.  Multiply that stream by the number of users streaming; and you can see why a new interest in streaming Internet radio is something to take note of. 

The other major thing from the report worth mentioning is that “e-readers,” like the Kindle, have been encouraging people to consume more written words – digitally downloading them.  While only 10% of consumers own e-readers, 48% of those who do report reading more books, and only 7% decreased their book reading.  This also extended to magazines and newspapers as well. 

Why?  According to the survey, 40% said that e-books are more affordable, and that drives their consumption, while 47% indicated that “more interesting books were being released.”  Considering that the publishing industry hasn’t hit a halcyon boom, it’s more likely that e-books enable readers to more easily find books they would be interested in, through searching, recommendations, etc.    

What’s interesting about this shift is that we’re increasingly in a world where if the medium can be digital, the medium will be digital.  And this requires thinking about the network in ways that a lot of enterprises haven’t thought about the network before. 

It used to be that the network was what enabled computers to talk to each other – it still is, of course – but the language of computers was dull and uninspired; in the beginning, only business apps transmitted through the network, because the business apps were what the network was used for. 

But to most end users today, the network isn’t just for one limited purpose.  It’s not even for a variety of purposes.  The Internet is the tube which gives us information, entertainment, conversation, and sustenance, in the form of productivity.  It is, quite frankly, the most important thing in many people’s lives. 

So the stewards of the network have to consider that they hold an awesome responsibility, and that it might be time to stop thinking of the network as just a business tool, and instead, think about it as the circulatory system of human culture. 

Hold on – I think I just had a hippie moment brought on by high stress levels and lack of sleep.  It’s okay though.  I’m sure you get the idea. 

As you know, I'm moving to New Zealand in five days.

Wow.

Five days.

That's... less than a week.

In fact, it's two days less than a week.

Sorry, this is just hitting me...

*ahem* Well, if you're in the Austin area, why not pick up some of the stuff from my office? Everything must go, after all!

Mr. Bill, Hank Blalock, and a Louisiana mosquito – property of Ben, who had this office before I did. 

A nice IKEA paper lamp, with a pretty nasty tear in the side. 

Pre-Aquisition vintage NetQoS Emergency Repair Road Kit. 

Our friends over at GeeksAreSexy recently posted a review of the “10 steps to a better IT support process.” There’s probably not a lot of information there for people who already work in IT, but it does a good job of giving people outside of IT a picture of what the IT helpdesk has to go through.

“When users call for support, they usually feel helpless and may sound irritated over the phone. Always be polite towards them.”

And while there are always going to be technical support issues stemming from user error or hardware failure, these tips underscore a very important lesson. By the time the problem reaches the helpdesk, you’ve already got a ticked-off end-user.

And if that’s your first, last, and only method of finding performance problems, you’re leaving the important troubleshooting to the end user. The end user doesn’t have training in network performance problems, and even if he or she did, they wouldn’t have the information in the network’s performance because they don’t have either the tools or the access to see the network problem from the datacenter’s perspective.

And we’ve talked about this from the enterprise view – that is, that knowing about performance problems before the end-user calls the help desk leads to better customer satisfaction and a quicker mean-time-to-repair, but we often forget that there’s someone down at the help desk taking the abuse to begin with. And they have enough on their plates.

The helpdesk – the front lines of IT – deal with the problems that border on the absurd so that the network engineers can use their brains to figure out the difficult, challenging problems. They’re the guys sending out e-mails like:

“The copier on Mary’s fax machine is for the use of the Student Services secretary only. This policy is in effect even if every copier within a 40 mile radius is defective and both of your legs are broken in four places….”

“I replaced the printer in room 123. If you print to this and need immediate printing capability, write me an email. Any others will be added once the printer is put into the system. I apologize for the inconvenience, but the current printer was destroying everything it printed. The new printer is set to automatically duplex print jobs, let me know if this is a problem.

Also, If you have been printing out pictures of your abnormally large biceps, please stop and do that at home. You are making me jealous and insecure.”

The helpdesk – fighting stupidity on the front lines so that we don’t have to.

Registration for the ninth annual NetQoS Symposium is now open.  If you’re familiar with Symposium, you know it’s where we have educational sessions, engaging speakers, hands-on product labs, and tons of networking opportunities.  Er, that is, people networking. 

Symposium is great for broadening your understanding of how to use our products to monitor and manage your network performance.  While basic operation is simple, there are little subtle tricks of the trade that you might only pick up from our instructors or your peers. 

Furthermore, you’re able to voice your ideas out to your peers and get critiques from the experts in the field.  We love this peer feedback too – a customer notices a problem that they have, another customer suggests a solution, and we have a feature that we might want to add to the roadmap. 

And this year, you will also hear how the NetQoS products are being integrated with other CA products like eHealth and Wily.

Symposium goes far beyond talking about our products; it’s also a way for our customers to learn new skills related to all aspects of network management.   

Plus, it’s at Barton Creek Resort – always a fun time, and the weather in Texas in May is almost always wonderful.

So you can register here.  Normally, I would post something about “hoping to see you there,” except that technically, I resigned last week, and I won’t be an employee of the company in May.  That means, I’m going to be counting on you guys to attend and tell me all about it!

You’ve probably heard by now about how Google, in retaliation to unauthorized intrusion into Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents by what they believe is the Chinese government, Google has decided to stop working with the Chinese government and stop filtering the Google search results for google.cn, which could lead to pulling out of China completely. 

The last time anyone as big and influential as Google had to pull out of China due to pressure from the communist government, they formed Taiwan.

It’s becoming such a huge deal that the U.S. State Department is getting involved.  Hopefully this won’t escalate into full-out nuclear warfare between the two countries.  At least not till January 26^th, when I arrive in nuclear-free New Zealand.  Although that’s not likely to happen, considering that the United States owes China so much money that China can’t afford to have us default on the loans…

Google’s official blog tells their side of the story. 

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

What lessons can we gain for network performance from this debacle?  Simply this: Don’t get into business agreements that compromise your business ethics for the sake of some temporary reassurances of safety.  Or in other words, if the people you’re dealing with seem to be making unreasonable demands, chances are they’ll commit unreasonable acts in the future.