The ultimate function of the IT department is to provide delivery of the business critical applications in a speedy and reliable manner to the users who need them. Virtualization doesn't change that. It merely changes everything else.

The funny thing about a virtual server is that it is the living embodiment of the idea that the silos in IT have to break down and once different technical fields now have to work together.

Virtual servers are part of virtual networks - that is, there are multiple virtual servers on one actual piece of hardware, and they connect to each other - on the same hardware - using the same networking protocols that they would use if it was communicating with a server halfway around the world. But it's all on the same server, so here's the question: Who fixes it when it breaks? Who owns it?

After all, there's no actual fiber/copper/tin-can-and-string wiring going on, it's all entirely on the server. So is it the server team that is responsible for "intra-box" networking connections? Or is the network team responsible? Gumming this all up - virtual servers are software. Does that mean the application team should be the one responsible?

With virtualization, you really can't have a segregated IT department and continue to operate efficiently. Traditional models of which part of the IT department "owns" which part of the "application path" from server to user are now irrelevant.

We've been talking about the idea that server, application development, and networking teams have to merge into an application delivery team for quite a while now - we invited Jim Metzler to speak at NetQoS Symposium 2007 to talk about it, and he'll be back for NetQoS Symposium 2008, (which starts a month from today, actually).

I think virtualization has thrown everyone who works in the enterprise space - from network engineers to CIOs to vendors like us here at NetQoS. Everyone knew it was going to be big; I don't think anyone realized how quickly it would catch on. March's issue of CIO Magazine reports that 85 percent of CIOs are happy with the return on investment of virtualization - even though it can be hard to quantify exactly what the return on investment is with current tools.

Verizon and NBC are working on serving up TV shows to home computers. The problem is, high definition video, (and I've done some HD video work for the Web - shameless plug), takes a whole mess of bandwidth.

Now, the obvious solution for NBC would be to move to some sort of peer-to-peer distribution system, right? I mean, it works for Linux distros.

The problem is that a normal peer-to-peer connection doesn't distinguish between the cheap local links - that is, links on the same ISP, in roughly the same geographic area - from the expensive remote links. So while P2P provides a more cost effective solution, it doesn't provide the most cost-effective solution for the ISP.

A third party, Pando, has developed a P2P system for pre-authorized, pre-approved content, and has come up with a way to force peer to peer connections to look for local nodes first. This increase the efficiency of the system, lowers the cost, and generally increases the performance of the streaming/downloading video.

This is exactly the type of thing we talk about when we say that how the application is coded can have a huge impact on the application performance over the WAN. Sometimes instead of needing more bandwidth, you need to find a way to make the apps work more efficiently.

In this case, decentralized P2P systems developed after the destruction of Napster. Though they were much less likely to get shut down by the RIAA, they were also much less efficient. This dominated development of P2P applications for years. But for offering only pre-authorized content, a centralized system - especially one that takes advantage of the structure of the physical network, makes a certain bit of sense.

NBC will be offering Verizon customers their shows via Pando's P2P service - which they're calling P4P, later this year. The name is a logical outgrowth, P2P, or "peer to peer," versus P4P, or "peer for peer." P3P was disregarded because it sounded too much like PCP. And if a kid with a lisp goes around school saying: "I downloaded the latesth Methallica album on P3P" and a teacher hears: "I downloaded the latest Metallica album on PCP," well, that's just not going to be a story that ends well, now, is it?

There's only one problem with Pando's plan: Each ISP will have to give up information about its subscribers in order to participate - that is, the Pando platform requires knowing which nodes are "local" and which nodes are "remote" in order to optimize for the local connections:

For other ISPs to reap the benefits Verizon did in the test, they too would have to share information about their networks with file-sharing companies, and that they normally keep that information close to their chests.

''That's one of the objectives we have to solve -- how are we going to consolidate this data and distribute it?'' Pasko said, adding that the result of the test gives ISPs plenty of incentive to collaborate.

(Okay, maybe there's two problems: No offense to NBC, but when your biggest hit is a veritable case study in game theory… you need some new shows.)

Twtr has scale probs. At SXSW, twtr netperf :( Cook said SXSW wifi :(, but 30 twtr srvrs not enuf. http://tiny.cc/UEbhb

Okay, that's borderline incomprehensible. We won't be doing that again.

As the Macworld article linked above shows, there was a problem at SXSW with people sending and receiving twitter messages. Twitter founder Blaine Cook claimed that the WiFi of SXSW was being overloaded (which is one network performance issue) but added that Twitter - with 30 servers and adding more - is having trouble scaling to handle the network demand.

There's more to the SXSW coverage, which includes the OpenMoko and an encouragement to pay attention to what happens in government if you plan to work with mobile platforms in any respect, which is good advice - we said as much a while back. What seems to be interesting is that the mobile phone providers - including Apple - want to lock down everything that they don't directly control on their platforms, when in reality, it would be simpler, and more useful, simply to use prioritization and QoS to make sure the network runs smoothly.

I think mobile computing is here on the consumer end - we see Japan using cellphones more than computers for all types of communication - but the United States remains technologically inert with advances coming slowly, in fits and spurts. This is mostly because of the desire of cellphone companies to create very limited services - so that they can charge app developers for the right to use their phone network, and can charge consumers more for the right to use those services.

Today marks the official start of the South by Southwest (SxSW) Festival in Austin - for readers outside of Austin, SxSW is a combination film, music, and technology festival. Despite its increasing commercialism, the week-long traffic slogs, and the temporary 50 percent increase in man-purse slinging hipsters, SXSW is the premier forum for new music showcases, and the film and digital conferences have attracted some notable and useful panelists. SxSW is one of the reasons Austin is at the top of so many "best cities" lists.

Additionally, tomorrow marks the start of the Austin BarCamp "un-Conference," which is what you get when you try to "get the anarchists to organize" a tech conference. BarCamps are open, participatory workshop events which focus on open-source technologies, and early-stage Web applications.

Of particular interest to network engineers and those interested in Web application performance are these particular events:

BarcampAustin: Usability: Will Users Wait?
Saturday, March 8, Time To Be Determined, GSD&M, 828 W 6th Street., Austin, TX.

Elizabeth Gibson and Lin Howe, AT&T User Experience Design, want to talk about how long of a delay will users tolerate before becoming frustrated or dissatisfied and abandoning the website? Is there anything that can be done to help mitigate a bad user experience?

SxSW: Catching up with Accessibility: The Basics Quickly
Saturday, March 8, 10:00am, Room C, Austin Convention Center

Shawn Henry of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will demo how accessibility design can be incorporated into Web sites to allow people with disabilities or people using ways of accessing the site other than the traditional Web browser.

We'll demo how accessibility makes your website available and more usable to people with disabilities; to people using mobile phones, PDAs, and other such devices; to people with low bandwidth connections (which is more of a problem than many are aware of in the U.S. and throughout the world); to seniors, an increasingly important demographic; and others.… This session runs through the easy things and the most important things you can do now to get your project up to speed on accessibility.

SxSW: Crunching and Streaming: Online Video Distribution Challenge and Opportunity
Tuesday, March 11th, 10:00am, Room 19AB, Austin Convention Center

Brendon Mills, CEO of RipCode, Todd Bryant, CEO of Netcast HD Inc., Jeff Kramer of Policyot Labs and others talk about digital video distribution.

Video compression is critical technology for media convergence, and the growing demand for online delivery of high-quality, preferably high definition, video is driving significant innovation in the areas of compression and distribution. This discussion focuses on the significant challenges and opportunities associated with the evolution of online video delivery.

SxSW: Take Municipal WiFi Back
Tuesday, March 11th, 3:30pm, Room 8, Austin Convention Center

Rich MacKinnon of the Austin Wireless City Project, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters, and others talk about the problems with top-down municipal wireless projects in San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and takes a look at the viability of Muni WiFi.

Grassroots approaches to WiFi have focused on leaving the bureaucracy behind, but face challenges in terms of expanding their reach and gaining momentum. Top-down municipal networks promise ubiquitous coverage but have run up against formidable barriers concerning cost of construction, cost of maintenance, and implementation. Both have a goal of eliminating unlawful WiFi "piggybacking" that opens up millions of Internet surfers to dangerous invasions of their personal privacy. Stop by this panel to find out the latest about attempts to bring safe, secure and ubiquitous WiFi coverage to our cities.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Today primary election and caucus day in Texas, where we're based. Usually our elections don't really matter, so this is somewhat of an exciting time for the state. Politics is on my mind… and when politics is on my mind, I find it hard to think about anything else.

(This is annoying when you're trying to write a blog post about the future of network engineering, and dangerous when you're so absorbed explaining to your significant other the nuances of the Texas dual primary/caucus system that you temporarily forget that "red means stop" at a busy intersection.)

But here's the thing; there are some areas where changes in political communication herald changes in business communication, and those events are worth talking about, because it may have a lot to do with the importance of keeping latency low when the next generation of C-level executives - the generation raised on, and still playing video games, will want to use video games as a business tool.

There's an old joke that when there's a new technology, the first people to exploit it are the pornographers. This may be true, but there is a certain pattern to technological communication adoption. Usually, when a new media hits on the Internet, it's first hit by the techies, then by the politicians, and lastly by the business. This pattern is true for blogs, true for online audio, online video, and social networks - the technological early adopters build up a mass audience with no risk, the politicians move in when a population has been built up, risking little, and businesses - classically risk averse - move in last.

But what's interesting about this pattern is that if you look at where political discussions are cropping up, you can almost predict the future of where business communication will be. And lately, political discussion is taking the form of video games.

Back in 2004, there was the political flash-based 2D shooter "BushGame.com," in which you took control of Fat He-Man and John "Voltron" Kerry and mowed through a field of Republican opposition. This year, you've got AtomFilms' "Kung-fu Election."

If presidential elections are decided by who we feel is the best candidate to lead us into a no holds barred mixed martial arts tournament -- and most political theorists believe we do…

This is all very silly, of course, but more seriously, I recently completed an ">interview with Wafaa Bilal (Remember him? The guy who locked himself in a room with a paintball gun?) for the GeeksAreSexy.com site regarding his new project, a very controversial, and very political video game that he re-coded and will present at an art exhibition this Wednesday.

Political games really aren't that rare. The U.S. Defense Department uses "America's Army" as a "cost-effective recruitment tool." "BioShock" makes criticisms of the political philosophy of objectivism. "Defcon," with its abstracted, "WarGames" style visuals and haunting soundtrack makes a subtle point about the dehumanization necessary to wage a global thermonuclear war. Those are just the well-known hits - "I Can End Deportation" is a videogame about immigrant issues, for example, and Kuma Games is a game publisher whose entire business model is designed around quickly developing episodic video games based on real-life battles that happened just months or weeks earlier.

As I mentioned earlier, risk-averse business always tends to be the straggler when it comes to taking on new forms of media - aborted efforts at commercializing and politicizing "Second Life" aside - but if politics is starting to make its way into the interactive medium of video games, how long will it be before, like online video and blogs before it, commercial game development will be considered a crucial part of business marketing?

Another old joke is that most business deals don't take place on the board room but on the golf course - but in this upcoming generation, the CEOs are more likely to be comfortable playing World of Warcraft than golf; and if the adage holds true, they'll be conducting business deals, man-to-man (or dwarf-to-elf) over some sort of game-enabled VoIP. Both gaming applications and VoIP applications require low-latency connections.

I'm not saying that this could affect business over the next quarter - or that it could affect business over the next 10 years. But maybe it's just something to start thinking about now.

Windows Server 2008 officially launched today with little fanfare; but the new enterprise-class operating system has been eagerly awaited by people who eagerly await operating systems, instead of going out and having a good time with their lives.

NetworkWorld has a thorough review of the W2K8 OS up on their site, but spends a bit of time tracking the performance of the network input output in various tests.

We tested network I/O performance using both emulated I/O and various traffic/assault tests (see How we did it) and found Windows 2008 Server performance has improved - and especially improved when Vista is the client….

The new stacks also have the ability to dynamically respond to communications latency in network connections as they possess the ability to dynamically change TCP packet window size, which allows a communication channel to be more efficiently stuffed with data.

In our testing we found that under light loads, the effects in terms of speed of tasks like copying folders, streaming media and loading complex Web pages aren't strongly demonstrated, but the effects under heavy loads, however, favors performance for Vista, strongly. Depending on the mixture of I/O (but pronounced under streaming media and heavy file copying), Vista can be as much as 43% faster than Windows XP SP2 in copying operations and 18% faster in opening concurrent streams.

This also means that there's a two-class affinity for clients of Windows 2008 Server Editions - Vista and everyone else, including Windows XP SP2, MacOS (we used 10.4.10 and 10.5.2) or other SAMBA clients that use SAMBA 3.0.2+ connection methods. If you have a client with the new stack, you're more efficient, and, therefore faster under higher loads, but you're a second-class citizen if your stack isn't up to date.

What I'd like to know is what, specifically, makes W2K8-server/Vista-client combinations so powerful. Is it just the compound TCP protocol? Are there kernel optimizations for network data processing? (I don't have the technical knowledge to address those questions, I'm hoping that my readers will be able to share their theories and the results of any tests they may run.)

At any rate, while W2K8 is a significant milestone release, good or ill, the history of server software distribution usually means a slow rollout period - to the point where naming your operating system by year becomes almost a bitter irony; chances are most companies who use W2K3 will want to roll out W2K8 in 2009 at the earliest.

Just a quick post today - I wanted to call attention to an article by David Talbot of MIT's Technology Review, entitled "A Technology Surges" about how DARPA produced a kind of wikified Google Maps for Iraq-stationed patrol commanders.

The application, called the "Tactical Ground Reporting System" or, because the military loves acronyms, "TIGR" - is a wonderful thing. Junior officers who command patrols study data telling them about key buildings, location data on past attacks, etc., and then they can add the information they found out on their patrol to the map-centered database for the next patrol to study. Using cameras with embedded GPS technology, they can take pictures of the scene on the ground and add them to the database as well.

And of course, the system was designed with the Iraq theatre's networking performance needs in mind.

Deploying it widely required dealing with two main challenges raised by Iraq's spotty data connections: how to synchronize scattered copies of the same database, any one of which a returning patrol leader might modify, and how to give soldiers multimedia information without crashing the system. One solution was a network that carefully rations out bandwidth. For example, the default mode for any photograph is a thumbnail version. A soldier has to click on the thumbnail to see a larger version and will get a response only if bandwidth allows.

With future advances, such a database can be updated and accessed live from the patrol in-country.

The next step, says Maeda, is to install it in Humvees and other military vehicles, allowing soldiers to download and act on new information in real time. Some of these vehicles already have some low-bandwidth connections, and Maeda says DARPA is working on ways to make the software work using these thin pipes.

It's not that any of this should sound unfamiliar. Google Maps mashups for sales data, tourists, and even MMORPG players are used in a similar manner for similar purposes. The significant thing is overcoming the challenges in an unstable, wartime environment where network performance is never a certainty.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The release of Adobe AIR today might just bring about major changes - both good and bad - for network performance. AIR is a way to produce Web apps that can be run as desktop apps. It is cross-platform and relies, like Java, on a just-in-time compiler and an interpreter of application bytecode. There are interpreters for Windows and OSX, and a Linux interpreter in development.

"It allows Web application developers - or just application developers - to use the Internet technologies they know, whether it's Flex and ActionScript to target the Flash part of AIR, or Javascript/HTML/CSS to target the AJAX part of AIR," said Phil Costa, director of product management at Adobe. "It allows them to take those applications and run them on the desktop."

Costa explained that through AIR, (depending on what the application does and how it is coded,) companies may theoretically experience a lowered amount of data throughput and an improved network performance.

"Today a huge number of corporate networks are moving towards browser based applications, and one of the extra bandwidth requirements that it puts upon the network is that every time you access a [Web based] application, you need to download it. Whether that's HTML or Javascript, or all kinds of Flex and Flash content, that needs to be pulled over the network. Having the application installed locally avoids that. All that will be going forth is the actual data that you're trying to access."

"We've done tests with some of our customers where they've seen our bandwidth [usage] go down for Internet applications in general, because unlike a Web site, which creates both the content and the formatting of the content, most AIR apps are just passing the information back and forth instead of refreshing the page each time."

"Now, depending on what the application does, it may actually add [to] bandwidth requirements for the network as well. One of the things that applications do, is run in the background and connect permanently to a data source's real time streams, or frequently check for data. That could increase the bandwidth requirements. But that's more about what the application specifically does than anything specific about AIR."

AIR's capabilities allow for offline usage as well, which will likely prompt more demand for online apps as the major drawback of SAAS - inaccessibility - is mitigated.

"In addition to giving the developers and then end-user of the application the convenience of launching the [Web] application like any other desktop application," said Costa, "it gives them additional capabilities that they didn't have when they were targeting the browser, such as local storage, either in flat-files or structured storage like a SQL database, which is embedded in there, or drag-and-drop integration with the file system, and cut-and-paste as well as the ability to take data or content offline, and run it when they're on an airplane or just not connected to the network."

"The runtime provides a whole set of APIs for notifying the application when it is on and offline, and so the developer can implement behavior that accounts for that; in many cases what we see is that the developers are caching some of the information offline, so that if the user takes it offline, it will still be available."

"To give you an example… one of our customers, Anthropologie, built an online catalog that lets people browse through things they have, and they built an AIR version which lets customers make little notes to themselves about the product, and rather than store them on the Anthropologie Web site, it stores them locally. The customer can put notes on things the same way they put stickie notes on an actual physical catalog, and they don't have to share that information with the Web site, so it's private to them. It also means, from Anthropologie's standpoint, that they don't have to create massive databases to store that information."

Costa said that Adobe hopes that there will be AIR apps on mobile phones, something that there's no specific date on, but which is on the Adobe roadmap.

Wondering about the traffic that traverses your enterprise network? Concerned that malicious or recreational traffic is eating into your precious bandwidth? Just want to know if traffic trends are impacting overall application performance? Get answers in this live NetFlow Webcast on February 26th, 2008. NetQoS expertise will to give examples of how to use network behavior analysis to improve end-user application performance.

(The webcast on how to use network behavior analysis to take over satellite mounted lasers originally scheduled for that day has been postponed. We deeply apologize to Mr. Blofeld, and hope that he can catch our next webcast on the subject.)

Network behavior analysis and anomaly detection have enabled those organizations that use these tools to become more proactive - and we'll have our experts John Mao, Product Manager, and Patrick Ancipink, Director of Product Marketing, talking about the trends driving IT decisions in the industry.

Additionally, we'll talk about the continued importance of Netflow and IPFIX reporting for sustained and optimized application delivery, and those of you who deal with flow-reporting as a major priority will probably find this upcoming Webinar particularly instructive.

We'll also be talking about planned updates to the NetQoS product lines at this Webcast for the benefit of our current and prospective customers, and all attendees will receive a copy of the Aberdeen Group's recent report, "The Real Value of Network Visibility." (We thought about sending you all NetQoS koozies, but thought you might like this better. Though if you ask for one, I'm sure we can find some.)

You can register for the Webcast here. Attendance, and our supply of koozies, is limited. The Webcast will be held on February 26th, 2008, at 12:00 noon. CST (10:00 a.m. PST/1:00 p.m. EST/6:00 p.m. GMT-UK.)

If you're just itching to get a few tips on how to use a NeFlow analysis and reporting tool to check out network traffic and conduct network behavior analysis, we present a few tips on our NetFlow analyzer page.

What network engineers need to know is not what they already know. This is because if they already knew it, they wouldn't need to know it, after all, because they already know it. And if they didn't know it, well, then, they wouldn't have known it, then, unless they've forgotten it, in which case all bets are off and might as all pack it in and follow our dream of writing Monty-Python style British comedy making fun of tautological banter.

But in a more metaphorical, less tautological sense, the critical metrics for measuring network and application performance are shifting; and require new information in order to manage effectively.

Much of what is now considered an older generation mentality is the fault oriented approach network management. "Send me an e-mail when the router goes down." That was the kind of proactive notification that engineers were looking for.

But technology has advanced to the point where complete and catastrophic failure is a much less likely scenario. Built in redundancy in the form of redundant network connections, NIC cards, and power supplies, (not to mention redundant network connections, NIC cards and power supplies) mean that fault is no longer the biggest driver of network maintenance needs. In fact, you could say that built in redundancy in the form of redundant network connections, NIC cards, and power supplies, mean that fault is no longer the biggest driver of network maintenance needs. To reiterate…

The problems that are being faced today are more along the lines of application performance, e-mails that take forever, Web sites that are hammered with traffic, and FTP batch transfers that get timed out. These aren't about questions of whether the application, router, or server is up and running, but whether the application, router, or server is running efficiently.

Network engineers now have to look network behavior analysis to spot anomalous traffic patterns that either threaten or coincide with application performance problems. Additionally, in order to fix the problem, network engineers need to analyze those patterns so they can determine what kind of performance problem they're having - a mis-configured router, inappropriate P2P traffic, malware, etc. - and then be able to quickly fix it. After all, none of these examples would bring a router down but they might cripple business-critical applications to the point the end-user feels that it's not usable.

For this reason there is a burgeoning industry in network behavior analysis appliances, devices, and programs that look at the live data for anomalous behavior and alerts the network engineer that there may be trouble a-brewin. That way, a network engineer can then know what they need to know - the things they didn't know until they knew it.