When it comes to understanding network performance, exploring the following basic definition will help many people find their way deep into the heart of this subject:
Network performance is a process to ensure efficient use of network resources, while minimizing the impact of resource contention.
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Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-26" »
For the longest time, network engineers—particularly those at ISPs and carriers—have kept close watch on link utilization to help them decide how their networks are doing. Once usage levels creep above various thresholds, their answer to provisioning and capacity planning has invariably been "boost the bandwidth," as something of a panacea for network performance problems.
But while increasing link bandwidth can (and does) address certain kinds of network performance issues, it cannot solve all problems. It’s important to understand that all traffic must be transmitted from one point (the sender) to another (the receiver) across a network link. Any complete network transmission involves numerous such pairs of correspondents, as messages move from their original senders to their ultimate receivers, and replies or responses trace their way back in turn from the ultimate receiver to the original sender. But all such transmissions are subject to these three delay components:
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Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-25" »
The Gartner Symposium ITXPO was a hotbed of information and debate on the topic of network performance management, and a venue for the exchange of ideas from people throughout the IT industry. We expect this debate to continue at the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit in Las Vegas November 14-16 and we will report on those details from the event. Don't miss it.
In the mean time, here are some highlights from ITXPO:
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Way back in 1995, Network World used the economic metaphor of inflation to report The Cost of Network Complexity. While 1995 might be considered the Paleozoic era of networking -- Windows NT was barely two years old -- and the technologies have since rapidly evolved, still the inflation metaphor holds up today.
"The cause of economic inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, diminishing the buying power of the dollar. In the case of network complexity inflation, we have too much network infrastructure being chased by too few network wizards. Net service quality (the currency provided by the support staff) declines because it is spread across too many service demands."When this occurs, there are two means of bringing service quality and service requirements back into balance: reduce the number of factors contributing to the complexity [NPD Editor's note: That's not going to happen.] ... or increase the size of the support staff to handle the increased complexity. [Nope, that's not happening either]"
Flash forward to today and it's clear that infrastructure tools have progressed over time, making enterprise networks more reliable in the process. However, increased reliability doesn't necessarily mean better performance and it doesn't necessarily mean a better experience for the end-user. Today users commonly expect a ubiquitous and instantaneous network. They want it now, anywhere at anytime.
Therefore, network engineers aren't getting much sleep!
Here are three big trends that have increased the volume and complexity of wide area network traffic, made monitoring application performance a necessity and sleep for network engineers a luxury:
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According to Neal Weinberg at Network World magazine, Gartner analysts Mark Fabbi and Bob Hafner argued that IT and network engineering departments will “waste an estimated $100 billion over the next three years by overspending on network products and services.”
He [Fabbi] expanded on that premise this week to argue that network execs should only buy what they know they will need for the next two years, rather than buying more than necessary, just in case network requirements grow. More often than not, "just in case never comes," Fabbi said.
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