Archive | September, 2010

Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List

By on September 30, 2010 in Uncategorized

Congress Punts Net Neutrality Back to FCC
Network World reported this week on Congress’ decision to not approve net neutrality legislation when Republicans indicated they would not support it. The legislation drafted by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) attempted to bridge the gap between proponents and opponents of net neutrality.

Starting with the End-Game in Mind
Kobi Korsah this week put pen to paper for CA Technologies on Application Performance Management blog about the importance of end-user experience and customer satisfaction. Considering today’s economic climate, Korsah explains that IT needs to employ Service Assurance technologies to “make customers happy or sleep with the fishes.”

IT Management: 10 Myths of Telework: Why You Aren’t Working from Home
The benefits of telework range from cost savings to improved productivity to happier employers, but still many companies don’t embrace the virtual workplace. This week eWeek explored the most common myths associated with telework and how companies can overcome the fear and embrace the work-from-home revolution.

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Brian Bell

Why IT needs to get agile now

By on September 29, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Talk of IT working more closely with the business is reaching a fever pitch following economic downturns and hype around technologies such as cloud computing. CA Technologies recently hosted a panel discussion exploring the realities IT leaders face in 2010 and how using emerging technologies could help efforts to add agility and innovation to their organizations. Brian Bell, General Manager of the Service Portfolio Management Customer Solution Unit at CA Technologies, participated on the panel and recently shared his take on the event and what IT leaders are thinking now. (Read CA Clarity PPM Insights blog here.)

Want IT-business alignment? Evolve into an innovative, agile IT organization

The discussion around IT-business alignment is not new. Why is business-IT integration critical now?
Agile IT is relevant now because we went through this massive recession and the precipitous drop-off in IT budgets put immense pressure on IT to control costs. Now the industry is emerging from that and there is greater pressure and opportunity from the business side to focus more on revenue growth. That requires innovation. Coming from all the dimensions of the business, it has been technology that drives innovation more than anything. The premise of creating an IT organization that is agile, that can more quickly respond and align technology and resources as demand comes up, is resonating with IT leaders now more than ever.

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CA Technologies acquires virtual capacity management with Hyperformix buy

By on September 28, 2010 in Service Assurance

CA Technologies announced this week that it has entered into an agreement to acquire for an undisclosed sum Hyperformix, an Austin-based company with expertise in real-time, virtual capacity management capabilities.

The deal would equip CA Technologies with capacity planning and management technology as well as dynamic IT resource optimization capabilities, according to the IT management software maker, which has in the past 18 months completed a string of acquisitions including those of 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS, Nimsoft, Oblicore, Arcot Systems and 4Base Technology. And like many of those buys, the acquisition of Hyperformix will enable CA Technologies to help its customers better manage virtual environments and potentially more smoothly evolve those deployments into private cloud implementations, says Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing for the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit (CSU) at CA Technologies.

“The key to the Hyperformix deal is that CA Technologies has virtualization management capabilities across such a wide range of disciplines, but our capability for capacity planning has been limited to deployments we can control,” Mann says. “Hyperformix’s technology will let us look at capacity across the whole enterprise and control what needs to be controlled where it is being controlled. It is imperative to connect business policy with how we implement IT resources, especially in virtual environments and this technology gets us there.”

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What network managers need to know about cloud computing

By on September 27, 2010 in Service Assurance

IT and business leaders can’t say enough about the potential benefits of cloud computing. But for network managers, the technology could represent a new source of bottlenecks and traffic congestion without proper planning and execution on the underlying network infrastructure.

Cloud computing takes a bite out of IT budgets in 2010

Network management technologies depend on some level of visibility – in most cases, very granular insight into network traffic and performance metrics. But network performance details could increase in volume or become obscured with the introduction of cloud computing. While IT leaders explore the potential of private cloud now and consider evolving to a hybrid or public cloud, industry watchers speculate on how the transition could affect the network.

“The single biggest thing to consider when you put things in the cloud is bandwidth. The state of things is much better today and there are many tools to address that, such as MPLS and WAN optimization technologies, but network engineers need to build a network to avoid any type of bottleneck that might occur when using the public cloud,” says George Hamilton, principal analyst at Yankee Group.

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Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List

By on September 24, 2010 in Uncategorized

FCC Approves ‘White Spaces’
Informationweek reported this week about the Federal Communications Commission’s unanimous decision to approve the unlicensed “white spaces” spectrum. The decision could help bring the “Super Wi-Fi” technology to market, but the article explains the hurdles that might keep the white spaces from solving the looming spectrum crisis.

Coders Must Reprogram How They Write for Wall Street
This week Computerworld delved into the world of coders and financial markets. With the demand for parallel computing in financial services industry, the article suggests that programmers will need to enhance their skills in programming for parallel architectures.

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Cloud computing takes a bite out of IT budgets in 2010

By on September 23, 2010 in Service Assurance

The talk about interest in cloud computing isn’t just talk. Data released this week by research firm Gartner shows that in 2010 more than 10% of IT spending on external services was invested in some form of cloud computing.
Gartner conducted a survey of IT spending trends, with some 484 respondents participating in a drill-down portion on cloud computing, and the research firm found that more IT dollars in 2010 were being allocated to cloud computing.

“The cloud market is evolving rapidly, with 39% of survey respondents worldwide indicating they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organization,” said Bob Igou, research director at Gartner, in a statement. “One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14% is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year.”

Additionally, 46% of respondents with budget dedicated to cloud computing said they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers, according to Gartner, and more respondents indicated they anticipate an increase in spending for private cloud deployments (43%) than those that are for public use (32%).

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SMB IT budgets slightly on the rise, high-tech staff remains flat

By on September 22, 2010 in Uncategorized

As talk of a double-dip recession dominates the financial news, IT managers at more than 3,000 small and midsize businesses remain conservative as they plan IT spending for the remainder of 2010.

A recent survey of more than 3,000 small and medium business IT professionals worldwide shows that while some cautious optimism is returning, there is still some hesitation in spending and staffing plans. The survey, conducted by free IT management software provide Spiceworks during July and August 2010, revealed that IT budgets increased by 4% over estimates shared earlier in the year. Yet the spending plans won’t include cash for additional staff, according to the survey results.

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Google Instant

Is Google Instant search a drag on network performance?

By on September 21, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Google’s Instant search feature promises faster searches, smarter predictions and instant results, but could the behind-the-scenes work to speed searches cause additional network traffic — enough to impact network performance?

One software engineer tested Google ‘Classic’ against the newer search feature and found that some end users might generate additional traffic by performing traditional searches in the Instant interface. Jesse Najera, software engineer for CA Technologies, says he started wondering how the “additional request/response traffic” of Google Instant could be impacting end users’ network performance for other applications. Because if an end user quickly types, say, five words into the search field, the page gets reloaded at least five times before the end user looks at the result set, perhaps more if taking typos into account.

“Since paradigm shifts take some time to get used to, I’d say this type of behavior will be found for the near future – in other words, adjusting behaviors to view the results set after just one or half a word typed in, which should then reduce the overall load on the network from the Instant search feature,” Najera explains.

After thinking on the topic, Najera decided to test his theory. Using a search string of “seafood restaurants gavleston,” which includes a typo that Najera corrected in three trials, he looked for information outside of his location to test if Google would first search in the Austin, Texas, area based on the ISP/IP address.

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From sprawl to stall: How to clear the hurdles of virtual deployments

By on September 20, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT managers deploying virtualization technology first worried about their implementations sprawling out of control, but now industry watchers say that many organizations could be facing virtual stall — or in other words, IT managers are now seeing their virtual deployments slow down before they achieve maximum benefits.

While IT managers a few years ago struggled to track and control the number of virtual machines popping up across their environments, today IT managers are working to get more out of the virtualization technology they’ve installed to achieve reduced costs and optimized environments. As part of CA Technologies “Quit Stalling” campaign launched at the VMworld 2010 U.S. conference in San Francisco, Vice President of Virtualization and Product Marketing Andi Mann presented at the event on clearing certain hurdles to achieving more complete benefits. (Watch a video interview with Mann here.)

Now CA Technologies published a white paper on the topic, which Mann further explores in a recent blog post. Both discuss how enterprise IT managers can get beyond partial virtualization to more fulfilling implementations, which deliver the real promise of the technology.

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Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List

By on September 17, 2010 in Uncategorized

Private Cloud Computing Deployments Advance Rapidly
CTOEdge recently reported on a survey conducted at VMworld 2010, revealing that of 200 U.S. conference attendees polled, more than one-third said they had already implemented a private cloud computing platform. Another 23% reported that they would be doing the same within the next 12 months.

IE9: 5 Ways It Cuts Browser Clutter
Microsoft’s announcement of its latest browser – Internet Explorer 9 (people please remove IE6 now) – focused more on what the technology would let end users do with it rather than the bells and whistles the browser offered, at least, according to an article in Computerworld. With more support for HTML5 and a more simplified approach, Microsoft is surely hoping IE9 will displace any market share Firefox and Chrome might have gained.

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CA Technologies teams with Fujitsu, extends service assurance into the cloud

By on September 16, 2010 in Service Assurance

CA Technologies and Fujitsu Thursday announced a strategic alliance that the vendors say will enhance each company’s service assurance and cloud computing strategy.

What is IT service assurance in 2010?

For Fujitsu, the licensing deal enables it to sell a localized version of CA Application Performance Management (APM) in Japan, and for CA Technologies, Fujitsu technology will represent an add-on software application designed to manage business process performance and monitor business activities. The latter technology exchange will enable CA customers to track applications and transactions from physical and virtual data centers into cloud environments, ensuring pre-set service levels are met, according to CA Technologies.

Cloud, customers drive powerful technology relationships for CA Technologies

Under the terms of the deal, CA Technologies will offer Fujitsu’s Interstage Business Process Manager Analytics product as an optional add-on – dubbed CA Business Process Performance Analytics (BPPA) – to its CA APM product. The product will enable CA Technologies to offer customers technology to monitor business activities, business process performance and transactions wherever they may live, ensuring that IT service delivery is meeting end-user expectations and business objectives, according to a CA press statement.

CA BPPA will be able to provide visibility into business process performance and monitor business activities in real time, which could help pinpoint potential process or performance bottlenecks or failures. The software will provide dashboards that offer insight into business process performance, track trends and help IT staff resolve problems more quickly. The vendors say this type of capability will help customers feel more confident in moving applications and monitoring transactions in the cloud.

“Fujitsu Interstage Business Process Management Analytics complements CA APM by correlating and translating application performance problem in business and business process contexts,” said Masato Nitta, president of Fujitsu’s Middleware Business Unit, in a statement.

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Virtualization, cloud standard on the fast track?

By on September 15, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Talk of standards development can often inspire yawns, but for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), it’s relatively fast quick progress from a specification to a standard adopted by neutral industry organizations is “a big deal,” according to cloud experts.

Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced at the end of August that its work on OVF standard version 1.1 had been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) International Committee for Information Technology Standard (INCITS) standard. According to a DMTF press statement, “This achievement marks a major milestone in DMTF’s efforts to enable interoperable, platform-independent cloud and virtual management solutions.”

Just a year and a half after work began on OVF, the results are emerging. The progress reflects the great interest among vendors and IT end users for virtualization and cloud computing, but it also shows that the vendors involved understand they must work together to create a non-proprietary method to manage virtual environments that could become a large part of internal cloud efforts. Started in March 2009, the speed at which development and adoption of OVF shows both the want and need for such a standard.

“ANSI adoption of OVF provides additional validation of the importance of this standard for virtualization management,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president, in a statement. “Since its introduction, OVF has achieved wide scale adoption.”

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