“In Mordor where the shadows lie…”
The Lord of the Rings

We keep hearing and seeing it, including on Twitter a week ago: “CA is a place where good software goes to die a slow, painful and horrible death.” Really? Well, it’s been nearly six months since CA acquired NetQoS. No foul Orcs have threatened to torture, maim and kill us. We have neither seen nor felt the fires of Mount Doom. No mob of CA employees has come at us with pitchforks (Oh wait, wrong work of fiction…).

On the contrary, CA has welcomed us and our software as a key component of its Service Assurance vision: To help IT teams deliver optimal service levels by mapping transaction, infrastructure, and business value into one complete picture of service delivery. In fact, technology from the NetQoS Performance Center is quickly finding its way into broader Service Assurance projects focused on common views and workflows.

From our experiences, we see CA as a dynamic, fluid organization not afraid to shake things up in the name of giving customers what they need. From a new CEO to a new CMO to fresh faces and thinking at all levels, there is a sense of excitement and innovation that those of us from the NetQoS fast-growth culture like to see. CA’s CTO Don Ferguson, named to the post last September, recently launched his blog on CA.com with the name “Life, the Universe, IT Management & Everything.” This isn’t your stodgy CA of old.

We at NetQoS welcome change and the chance to have our solutions be an integral part of a broader, more complete offering for customers.

Have there been hiccups? Sure: There are with any acquisition. Spending a half hour on the phone with tech support just to have a password changed is no fun. Our e-mail systems are still not integrated. And we’ve lost a few employees who feel they thrive in smaller environments: They have chosen to take jobs at start-ups in Austin or elsewhere. And that’s okay. Most of us see great opportunity at CA.

So we are not like Gollum or other creatures unfortunate enough to have been caught by the evil that lurks in Mordor: Beaten, stretched, and morphed into a shell of their former selves. This isn’t your father’s CA. In our case, it’s a place where good software goes to flourish and fulfill the promise the NetQoS co-founders dreamed up at a kitchen table nearly 11 years ago this month.

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. 

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.

The Mattel Corporation, makers of Barbie, have produced an online poll asking people to vote on the next occupation of “teenage-fashion model doll” Barbie. Choices are “Environmentalist,” (although a doll made entirely out of plastic might be a poor spokesperson for this career), Surgeon, Architect, News Anchor, or, drumroll please: “Computer Engineer.”

Seriously.  Go vote for “Computer Engineer.” Whether you believe Barbie’s influence on young girls to be positive or negative, you cannot deny that there is an influence.  And Computer Engineer will go a long way towards correcting the “Math class is tough” version of Barbie.

But of course, Barbie wouldn’t be Barbie if she didn’t come with accessories.  In addition to the usual computer engineer accoutrements – laptop, pocket protector, jeans for crawling under desk, sneakers for getting around quickly, and a collection of slightly witty t-shirts (especially appropriate would be this one, for “self-rescuing princess”), may we humbly suggest the following:

• Spray-On QoS




• In this instance, QoS stands for “Quality of Suntan.”


• “Five,” her new pet cat.


• A freakishly monstrous third arm growing out of her neck.




• For the three-way handshakes, of course. 


• TCP




• Tea and Crumpets Party. With real lunch packets from Barbie’s new server.


• A Perl Necklace




• This gold-laced necklace extends to a small jewel containing a crystal image of a camel; with the words “#!/usr/bin/perl print "Hello, world!\n" wrapped around it.


• Plasma Sword (Lucas owns the trademark on “lightsaber.”)




• Because, let’s face it, there’s always a plasma sword hanging around a computer engineer’s office somewhere.


• Ethernet Hair Spray




• A geeky version of Aquanet to keep Barbie’s hair voluminous even at 3am in the datacenter.


• Barbie’s Dream Datacenter




• The entire 3-story Dream Datacenter is over 3 feet tall and fully furnished
  
• Realistic sounds like the humming of big iron and air conditioning, thousands of hard drives reading, and a diesel generator.
  
• Gourmet-style vending machine with plenty of storage comes with all the popular conveniences
  
• The third story has a portable ship container, removable for on-the-go complete datacenter play
  
• Raised flooring
  
• A password station and biometric scanner, which prevents cheap Barbie knock-offs from entering the facility.


• End User Ken

Of course, Barbie already has a leg up. We’re just getting into virtualization now, but Barbie has been living a virtual life in a virtual world since the 1960s.

Network World reports on a survey by security software vendor Symantec which talks about data center staffing. Specifically, half of the respondents said that their data centers were either extremely or somewhat understaffed.

And of course, there’s always the usual suspect to trot out – the economy – forcing IT workers to do more with less, with cutbacks and layoffs hitting IT hard. But there’s also another factor – that it’s not just that the IT staffing budgets are decreasing but also that the job of the network engineer is becoming complex, thus increasing the overall workload.

This is especially true in mid-sized enterprises where new technologies which can save money but which are extremely complex, like virtualization, WAN optimization, and cloud computing are being implemented at a faster rate than either smaller enterprises or larger ones.

Well, if you don’t have enough manpower in your data center, there are three solutions I can think of off the top of my head. The first is to hire more people. This may not be feasible given current budgets.

The second is to decrease workload. In short, taking the approach that instead of trying to do “more with less,” that it’s okay to do “less with less.” Five nines of uptime give way to three nines, and applications previously handled in-house are outsourced to a cloud services provider. There are some disadvantages to doing things this way, of course.

The third is to find a way to decrease the complexity of your network – perhaps by using management tools that provide a broad overview of the network and how the applications are performing. The only downside there is that if you don’t use these tools correctly, instead of making the job easier, an additional manager could just end up increasing the complexity of the network that much more.

All three of these solutions have the possibility of being disruptive – at least in the short term – and monitoring your network for those disruptions is the quickest way to get to the root cause of them.

Though CA and CA|NetQoS are vendors of aforementioned management and monitoring tools, I’m pretty comfortable suggesting that if you can hire more people, that it might be a good idea to do that first, if you’re making decisions about where to spend the budget money. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, no diagnostic, monitoring, or management tool can replace a network engineer with a good head on his or her shoulders. All a tool can show you is where the problem lies; the engineer has to come up with the solution.

Second, if you have engineers who know what they’re doing, they’ll be the ones to suggest the tools that they need, rather than buying tools first and then trying to train engineers on the proper use of the tools chosen on their behalf. A good engineer with a mediocre management tool is better than a mediocre engineer with the best stuff in the world, after all.

(Not that we don’t want you to buy the best stuff in the world - which, if you haven’t guessed our particular bias, is our stuff…)

I’d like to call your attention to this Network World article called “Stop inventing mobile phones.” To be brief, there’s a huge market for mobile phones – the physical devices that is – and the operating systems and applications for them. But in this rush to develop a better box, it often seems that the infrastructure to operate them – the network – hasn’t kept up with that innovation.

Does this sound familiar?

It often seems like we come up with the applications first, then try to develop the infrastructure to support it – not just in mobile technology but in all of technology. The car was built before the highway system, for example. RealPlayer tried to show video back in the day of the 56.6k modem.

But as Network World points out, there are so many competitors in the crowded mobile phone marketplace. This is great for innovation, but all of these mobile phones have been hamstrung by a lack of innovation in the mobile infrastructure.

Generally, it’s not a good idea to deploy apps until you verify your network can handle them.

ComputerWorld is saying that “IT job statisfaction plummets to all time low” in an article by Patrick Thibodeau.

Hagan said there is a lot of pent-up dissatisfaction in the IT workplace, as well as a backlog of people who normally would have moved to a different job in a stable economy. The recession has resulted in "unnaturally low attrition levels," he said.

I’ve just handed in my two weeks notice.

No, that’s not a hypothetical or hyperbole; I really did. January 22, 2010, will be my last day at CA|NetQoS.

Thing is, I’m not dissatisfied with my job here. I’m actually quite satisfied with it. When you talk about carrot and stick motivations – there’s no stick.

I’m taking another job because that job allows me to do something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult live – live and work in another country. In this case, specifically, I’ll be working for a startup called TemplateDigital.com, and living in Tauranga, New Zealand. CA|NetQoS always required (with good reason) that I remain here, and telecommuting wasn’t an option.

Even so, over the past three years, what I’ve been able to do here has helped me – I’ve been very happy here, and I think that the main factors in why I’ve been happy comes down to two things: the freedom to try new ideas, and a culture that rewards learning new skills. Because of this, I’ve been doing more work with video production and editing. I think my writing’s improved as well.

It is these improved skills and this risk taking, in fact, that allowed me to land the new job; but also kept me happy at this one.

Over on Slashdot, where they’re discussing the article, a prevailing thought has been that a few people are happier as contractors than they are as full time IT professionals. There are a variety of reasons, but one of them is the freedom of risk-taking and the ability to drive one’s own learning.

Anyway, I have to start packing, so the rest of this article will be written by the Marke-Tron 3000™ blog-posting robot, who we’ll have to rely on until we can line up a replacement.

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The Consumer Electronics Show is about to begin in Las Vegas; and it’s interesting to see some of the technologies that are coming out – and speculate on how they might impact the enterprise IT environment.

First, there’s the Phone Wars, heating up with Google coming out with the Nexus One, which is an open smart phone, compared to the current market leader, the Apple iPhone, which is a closed smart phone. 

It looks (to me, anyway) like Apple’s making a similar mistake to what they made in the 1980s and early 1990s – they’ve created a closed-down product and priced it at a premium, while competitors are creating much more open products which start out as expensive but become less so as the technologies mature.  This openness allows Google to take more risks with offering services related to the Web and leveraging cloud computing.  (After all, a smart phone has a teeny-weeny little processor in it – you don’t want to do any heavy number crunching on that!)

Still, the iPhone has one main advantage over Nexus (and RIM’s BlackBerry) – the iPhone has hardware encryption that cannot be turned off, and applications are tightly controlled.  In short, it’s more secure, making possible inroads into enterprise markets.  ReadWriteWeb has a few pieces of advice from their coverage of the Nexus One that IT managers can follow to secure it for use with an IT network – especially on government networks or defense contractor networks.

• Make sure that the device can be locked and swiped of its data if a user loses their Nexus One.


• Make sure Exchange ActiveSync is installed on the device so permissions for accessing data can be set up according to the policy set by the enterprise.


• Provide the ability to configure the device to remotely provision application clients and device interfaces used to reach the application source (e.g. Wi-Fi, VPN).


• Allow for PKI support that allows Android devices to receive and ingest digital certificates. The use of certificates helps automate connectivity to enterprise applications via Wi-Fi, VPN and web by making authentication transparent to users.

There’s also the impact of the Cradlepoint 4G routers – devices that essentially convert and route ambient city-wide 4G WiMax signals to the more prevalent 802.11n signals which more standard WiFi network interfaces can use.  The idea is that people who have WiFi, but not WiMax, on their laptops can use 4G service, as well as enable someone to pay for one 4G connection, and transfer that to multiple boxen – roommates, for example, or even small businesses. 

Finally, there’s the expansion of the VUDU service.  VUDU is an on-demand Internet movie rental service – you hook up a box to your TV, and voila, you can rent movies from it.  It’s branching out, however, as it’s now going to be available built-in to multiple TVs, and will have internet “applications” for specific sites – Flickr, Pandora, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Stock Tracking, etc.

Because of technologies like Vudu, we’re starting to see the – well, not the beginning, because we’re too far in – but the “beginning of the middle” of the TV/Internet convergence.