John Mao, Principal Product Manager, continues our video series with a look at how, as IT organizations rely more and more on performance analysis, a new class of visuals is required to help understand at a glance how well the network infrastructure is supporting application delivery. With the CA NetQoS Performance Center, real-time maps help operations teams quickly identify infrastructure issues affecting application delivery. While traditional maps are limited to fault-based alarms on utilization or up/down status, CA NetQoS Performance Center maps add performance intelligence to provide a more accurate and actionable picture.

by Steve Harriman

If - like me - you have a set of Olympic rings around your eyes from staying up late to watch the games, you might be interested to know that CA NetQoS is helping NBC deliver Bode Miller et al to your TV sets, computers and smart phones. NetQoS products installed in the Vancouver IBC and at NBC headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Plaza are monitoring the delivery of live video feeds from Vancouver as well as VoIP traffic. As much as we like to toot our own horns, we think Craig Lau, NBC’s vice president of information technology, said it best:

“The CA NetQoS Performance Center is critical to our operations as NBC delivers the highest quality video coverage of the Vancouver Winter Games across our network. The true value of NetQoS is that it provides us dynamic insight into the performance of the network and a way to cost-effectively manage our bandwidth needs.”

You can read more about it here: http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=229554. In the spirit of gold medal-winning performances, we thought it would be fun to revisit this blog post from last August about the Beijing Summer Olympics, where NBC delivered record-setting live video coverage to millions of broadcast network, cable, mobile and web viewers (with the help of the CA NetQoS Performance Center, of course!).

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ReRun: How NBC brought the Olympics from Beijing to New York to You.

Originally Posted August 21, 2009

Back during Cisco Live, we did a co-presentation with NBC Universal, which talked about how they built and managed the network that delivered live coverage of the Beijing Olympics to not only millions of television viewers, but also to online and mobile viewers as well.

We now present to you this video of the engineering team responsible, explaining how they did it, (and how they employed NetQoS to ensure optimum network performance – hey, there’s a reason you’re reading about it on our blog!)

If you’re not up for watching the 5-part, 45 minute video, here are some interesting tidbits to take away from it:

• In 1996 Atlanta, NBC had 172 hours worth of coverage. In 2000 in Sydney, they brought CNBC and MSNBC on board and covered 442 hours. In 2004 for the Athens games, with the addition of USA, Bravo, Telemundo, and Universal HD, they covered 1,219 hours – 70 hours of programming content for any 24 hour period in Athens. But in Beijing, they covered over 3,600 hours, using online distribution, for 211 hours of coverage for any 24 hour period in Beijing. This included clips and highlights, as well as live streaming on NBCOlympics.com.
  
• There were 1.3 billion pageviews, 50 million unique visitors, 31.5 million hours of videos viewed, 35 million mobile views, 130,000 peak streams and 3.4 petabytes of video delivered. In context, if you stacked 3.4 petabytes in data on 1.44M floppies, then laid the stack down on the ground, you’d reach from New York to L.A. “Simply put, it was the largest media event in television history.”
  
• The cameramen were in Beijing, obviously, but the editors were in New York, who got low-rez proxy copies of all of the footage as it came in, chose the shots they wanted, then got high resolution video (at 300Mbps!) of those shots for broadcast.
  
• The network didn’t just handle video but also allowed on-air commentators and producers in both Beijing and New York information on how athletes were performing in the games as that information came in – that is, as each goal was scored and each lap was finished.
  
• Finally, the production on-air was “flawless,” the ratings came in above estimate, and advertising sales were $50M higher than expected.

Our video series continues with Patrick Ancipink, Vice President of Product Marketing, discussing how the market is demanding that service providers and enterprise IT managers provide performance-oriented SLAs and move beyond the simple availability agreements of the past. He demonstrates how the CA NetQoS Performance Center has multiple dashboards and views to show how the organization is supporting application delivery and performance.

By Steve Harriman

I just bought a new car and I really like it. I do have one complaint, however… its multi-media user interface. I won’t mention what make of car it is, but suffice it to say that I think the user interface is the result of German over-engineering. Now, I’m no expert in software design, but like everyone, I do have an opinion on it. In fact, bad user interface design is the reason I wound up working for a software company.

Way back in the ‘80s when computers were the size of school buses, I worked in IT. I was what they called a systems programmer and managed a small team of technicians who kept the mainframes running in support of the company’s engineering and business systems. One such system that was critical to the business was CICS, IBM’s popular OLTP. It ran well for the most part, but the development guys were cranking out new applications so fast that we were always debugging problems that caused outages or brown-outs.

To help me and my team find and fix these problems faster, I bought a nifty software debugging tool. There were three main products on the market at the time, including one from the leading performance management vendor of the day. But theirs was not the product I selected. Why not? The price was similar, it actually had slightly more functionality than the other products, and its support staff was very knowledgeable. But the product's user interface was outdated--it was basically a command line interface that required you to remember a bunch of cryptic codes.

You see, I needed a tool for my whole team to use. But we weren’t all CICS experts, we were generalists. We were a small team that had to support four different operating systems, CICS, CAD/CAM systems, manufacturing systems, a campus network and remote locations, and some cute little machines the numerical control machine engineers used that were called micro computers (we would later call them PCs). I needed a tool that everyone could use with minimum training and expertise. So I made my choice primarily due to the intuitive interface that one of the three products—from an upstart software company—offered. The product didn’t intimidate me. It was easy and fun to use. It lead me by the hand as I drilled down from high-level summary views to detail data in a way that made sense to me.

Not long after I made my choice, I received a call from a head hunter. The company whose product I had rejected based on its user interface, wanted to talk to me about a job as a product manager. They were seeing the upstart company taking business away from them, and I guarantee the reason was the user interface. I wound up taking the job and I've been actively involved with ensuring good software design ever since.

So, back to my car. I get frustrated when I want to switch from listening to music to making a phone call via the Bluetooth connection. First, there are multiple ways to perform the function—often a symptom of poor design. Second, following the intuitive menu path leads me to the wrong outcome. And despite having made the same mistakes repeatedly, I have still not figured out the most efficient way to call for pizza. This technology is supposed to make phone use while driving safer, but I think the design engineers failed in that mission. Even my technology-savvy 14 year-old daughter has difficulty, so for once, I know it’s not me.

While IT management software may never have the consumer design appeal of Apple’s products, there is clearly a huge competitive advantage to be gained by vendors who invest in this area. So many product designs are created by engineers more skilled in software architecture than human factors. At CA, we certainly have room for improvement. That’s why I’m excited that Russell Wilson, NetQoS' talented head of design, now has the broader purview of rationalizing the navigation and look-and-feel of all the products, with their different heritages, across CA's entire Service Assurance portfolio.

He could probably teach those German engineers a thing or two as well.

As enterprise networks become more sensitive to the type of traffic that’s flowing, mission-critical applications such as voice and video have to be protected from things like surfing the Web. The way to do this is through classes of service. In this video, Mike Magri, Director of Industry Solutions for NetQoS/CA, walks us through how the NetQoS Performance Center can ensure the performance of voice and video so that recreational use of the network – such as Web surfing – doesn’t get in the way of your business applications.

By Steve Harriman

Today is a good day. I just learned that I am officially cool. Well, not exactly… but I’m definitely cool by association. What’s more, I’m cool in the coolest technology space there is right now … drum roll please … the CLOUD. Yeah baby.

Yes, according a recent article in the vaunted CRN publication, CA|NetQoS is one of the coolest cloud infrastructure vendors. And for an old tech marketing guy like me, that’s as close to cool as I’ll ever get. I know this because I have a 14 year old daughter.

But, if you haven’t already figured this out, I’ll let you in on a secret. Infrastructure and infrastructure management really aren’t cool. Yes, virtualization and the cloud add new layers of management complexity (some pretty hard stuff, actually), but at the end of the day, the infrastructure just has to work. The applications that run our businesses and our lives depend on it. Heck, I don’t want my bi-weekly paycheck to depend on cool technology; I want that application running on rock-solid, totally uncool technology. If it’s in a private, public or hybrid cloud, fine. But let me feel warm and fuzzy by telling me that the IT guys responsible for the app have complete visibility into it, that they know my personal data is secure (wherever it resides), that it is backed up (someplace), that if the app fails they know where the problem is and how to resolve it, even if it’s in the cloud, and so on.

So, I think my mission, and the mission of management vendors like CA, is to get everyone’s heads out of the cloud and back down to earth. Sure, cloud computing is an important and disruptive force in our industry and we’re all over it. But let’s not get carried away with the hype. The sooner we do, the sooner cloud computing will become business as usual. Totally uncool.

My daughter wasn’t buying it anyway.

Zach Belcher, Technical Consultant and Product Manager for NetQoS/CA, discusses how to detect performance degradation early and use automated workflows to help find and fix problems before the end user notices.

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 November 29, 2006

by Ed Tittel

The ISO/OSI Network Management Reference Model is usually rendered as FCAPS: Fault management, Configuration management, Accounting management, Performance management and Security management.

This model fails to give full weight to the impact of performance. Performance drives perception, which means that, from a user's standpoint, the source of poor performance doesn't matter as much as the fact that performance is, in fact, poor. According to Denise Dubie at Network World, network managers and engineers are being increasingly tasked to prioritize performance and user experience:

"Distributed IP networks and complex real-time applications have forced a change. Now network managers need to be in the know from the start about application performance, helping developers understand what will work on a network, spotting poorly performing applications before users feel the effects and delivering LAN-like performance over the wide area to remote and branch offices."

In other words, it's not just about monitoring devices anymore. It's about delivering services, at a reasonable cost, in a reasonable amount of time, where users are increasingly asked to decide what's reasonable, time-wise. (For more, see Network World's "User experience is key".)

A performance-first approach (see whitepaper [PDF]) to network management turns FCAPS into PFCAS -- or rather, PCAS, given that fault may be considered merely the most extreme expression of bad performance. The performance-first paradigm inverts the traditional, bottom-up device-monitoring approach and begins with top-down visibility into overall performance of applications running over the network.

Infrastructure availability and utilization aren't the only gauges of network health. Why focus the entirety of network management efforts on the small fraction of network issues caused by hardware or software infrastructure failures?

The fundamental purpose of the network infrastructure is to transport data from one end of the system to the other as quickly as possible. The more efficiently data flows at the transport layer, the better applications perform. Hence, end-to-end response time measurement is the best measure to use when deciding how to optimize the network, plan new infrastructure rollouts and upgrades, and identify the severity and pervasiveness of problems.

This approach recognizes that, between the limits of the network and application infrastructure being “up” or “down,” performance can--and does--vary widely. It is not uncommon for availability status indicators in the Network Operations Center (NOC) to be “all green” even while the help desk phones are ringing off the hook with users complaining about slow response times.

By focusing on the performance of key applications running over the network, IT organizations can focus on what's most important: making informed infrastructure investments to support business demands; delivering consistent, acceptable end-user response times; and quickly resolving business-critical problems. IT organizations that successfully make the transition to a performance first approach typically -- and deservedly -- receive high marks from the business lines they serve.