For a politics junkie and a technology junkie like myself, the EU Elections produced results that were really, really interesting to watch.

First off, how about the wacky U.K.? Labour, which currently is the dominant party in the U.K. Parliament, wins only 15.7% of the vote – a third place finish behind the Conservatives and the Euroskeptic UKIP. The UKIP, which seeks withdrawal from the EU, only got 2.2% of the U.K. national vote in 2005, though it’s tough to figure out if the radical change over the past four years is due to the recent expense scandals, the EU having a proportional representation election system while the U.K. uses “winner-take-all” voting, a great sea change in the voting populations’ opinions, the idea that a Euroskeptic party would naturally receive more prominence in an EU election than a U.K. one, or some combination of the above.

Some days, I wish we had a NetVoyant for voters, so that we know what’s going on when they vote. I suppose we’ll have to make do with the more traditional type of polling for now.

Another interesting election result from the U.K. was the establishment of the BNP – the British National Party – getting 6.2% of the vote, putting them in 6^th place overall, and entitling them to two seats. If you are not familiar with the BNP, they are, without exaggeration, the Nazis. That’s not a joke - the BNP’s political party platforms are expressly based on racism (including but not limited to anti-Semitism) and fascism. In fact, the BNP is so universally loathed that membership in the party is grounds for dismissal from serving as police officers, as the BNP is “totally incompatible with the duties and values” of police forces.

6.2%. Damn. Where’s Indiana Jones when you need him?

Well, at least there’s some good news; the Pirate Party of Sweden (PiratePartiet) won its first seat in the European Parrrrrrliament, and came close to a second one with 7.1% of the Swedish vote. This is huge. The Pirate Party did not exist four years ago – now it has a MEP (Member of European Parliament). Even if you disagree with the Pirate Party’s stances, it will bring more prominence to technology issues which have too often (for us techies, anyway) been relegated to the backburner of political concern.

Representation means more coverage of technical issues in the mainstream press, as well, which will hopefully cut down on the number of conversations you have with people asking you “What is this BitTorrent thing,” or “Why can’t you have ‘Born to Run’ playing in the background of the corporate Web site if Springsteen himself put it on YouTube?”

PiratePartiet also claims that they received more votes than any other party among under-30 year olds; which, if true, may make this a generational sea change.

Or it could just be a flash-in-the-pan, who knows.

On Tuesday of next week, Microsoft plans to unleash a large patch – the largest “Patch Tuesday” in eight months. If you update your desktop systems individually, you might want to prepare for that traffic.

In many ways, the smaller size of patches seemed, at the very least, to imply that the codebase behind the Windows OS and Office might have been stabilizing, or at the very least, that the XP and Vista codebases were wrapping up in anticipation of the Next Big Thing, Windows 7.  Apparently, that’s not the case.

When I was a younger, brasher, more hot-headed geek in college, the very name Microsoft would conjure up images of hatred.  When Windows XP came out, I had heard rumors of something called “Palladium” and draconian DRM measures – and, let’s be fair here – this was around the time Microsoft’s competitors were starting to get good.  Despite competition from MacOSX and Linux – very good competition, I might add, - Windows is still the OS of the masses, Office has not been displaced as office king-of-the-hill since it displaced WordPerfect, despite attempts by Sun, OpenOffice.org, Zoho, and Google.  (That may change in the future, but not likely, according to Forrester.)

But it’s been an interesting road for Microsoft; XP SP2 wasn’t released with a whole lot of fanfare, but its basic competence (well, it compared favorably to previous versions of Microsoft OSes in the stability area, and similarly to contemporary MacOSX 10.2.)

Then Vista came out, and suddenly the old hatred for Microsoft is horrible again.  To be fair, I trashed Vista in a review for HardOCP when it first came out, as it seemed like nothing worked; most of these problems were fixed with the service pack, but it was still more problematic than Windows XP while still doing the same basic job; this is one of the reasons that business adoption for Vista remains – well, let’s just say that most businesses will probably skip Vista and head straight to Windows 7. 

Which brings us back to Patch Tuesday.  If it wasn’t apparent before, it seems that no operating system is “done” anymore, like the Windows 95 and 98 days; (Even 98 had “98 second edition”) and that even the most basic part of the computer – the operating system – requires the network.  But it also implies that patching is not something we’re ever going to grow out of – that operating systems are never done.  The open-source model, of course, relies on “release early, release often” but it seems that through Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 9, and Windows 10 (and Mac 10.6, 10.7, & 10.8) we’ll be waiting for that big glob of data to download every week, to keep our systems up to date.

On the other hand, Patch Tuesday is repeatable, predictable – hell, it’s so predictable, we call it “Patch Tuesday.”  It’s a great way to determine whether or not your network can handle a spike in traffic, and how well it performs under those conditions. 

GM and Chrysler, combined, will be closing about 3000 dealerships across the U.S., leaving many out of work, and hurting local economies across the country.

On the bright side, however, this is a strange opportunity for networking companies. See, car dealerships and the car companies they franchised with, were some of the earliest adopters of electronic data interchange (EDI) networks; the idea being to connect a large number of automobile dealers and lenders. The EDI systems provided an alternative to paper documents, meetings, faxes, etc., which is one of the major reasons that you can walk into a dealership today and drive off the lot with a new car, instead of waiting a few days for the paperwork to clear. But it also meant that car companies could have dealers select cars to order, and have the network apps automatically order parts for building the car from suppliers, issue instructions on how to assemble the car, invoice the dealer, and pay suppliers. Enterprise IT networks, therefore, are a major priority for many if not most dealerships.

So my question is – what’s going to happen to all the networks running to car dealerships? Some dealerships will rebrand, in which case they’ll probably keep the capacity but route it to the new affiliate, but others, who either close up shop, sell to a non-dealership, or go the used car route. This seems to me to be an interesting, under-tapped networking resource.

Because – and let’s be frank here – there are an awful lot of car dealerships in America, and 3000 car dealerships is 60 dealerships per state. Granted, it’s highly unlikely that the closing car dealerships will be uniformly distributed geographically, but anyone looking at starting up municipal broadband – or even a for-profit Mom & Pop broadband shop - might want to take a look and see if there’s a closing car dealership in the area.

Two days ago, General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That same day, GM was delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It’s replacement – a company we’re all familiar with – Cisco. 

"Cisco makes the paving bricks for the information superhighway and it's affecting the culture in kind of the same way that automobiles affected the culture in the 20th century," John A. Prestbo, editor and executive director of Dow Jones Indexes, told The Associated Press. "We thought it was a fitting replacement for General Motors."

Yes – and no. 

General Motors has been the #1 stock on the DJIA more often than any other company in the DJIA’s history, and it’s delisting is a sea change; an end of an era.  And there’s something symbolic about the idea that America’s industrial future belongs not to petrolheads but to propellerheads.  But let’s hold off judgment just yet.  Cisco’s inclusion (though we’re awfully proud of them) might not have as much to do with what they do with what their stock price is at the current moment.

Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist for ConvergEx Group, in New York said Cisco was a logical choice not only because the company's business is an important one but because its shares aren't as high as some companies analysts speculated might have been added, like Apple Inc. or Google Inc.

The Dow is weighted by price so adding Apple and Google, which each have triple digit share prices, could have been more disruptive. Cisco at $19 won't have as much weight as IBM Corp. at $106. Google, at $417, would have vaulted to the most influential Dow stock. By comparison, Cisco will have roughly a 2 percent weighting.

Hold up for a second.  Cisco’s great, but one of the reasons it’s been added is that the stock price is roughly numerically equal to the stock that it’s replacing?  That seems odd to me.  Don’t get me wrong – Cisco (Market Cap: $111.09B)  is certainly worthy of being on the DJIA, but more worthy than Google (Market Cap: $134.81B) or Apple (Market Cap: $125.10B)? 

I have no clue whatsoever what a market cap actually is, but that seems off to me.

So, what is the DJIA?  Is it the best stocks?  Is it the most average stocks? The biggest companies?  The most average companies?  Wikipedia points out that the Index is 30 stocks, originally 12 stocks selected by William Dow back in 1896 – but other than that, it’s hard to tell what makes a stock Dow-worthy and not.  Of those stocks, only General Electric has retained its position on the list since 1896, so even the stocks change over time – which means that if you compare the Dow Jones of today to the Dow Jones of, say, November 5, 1955, you’re not comparing apples to apples.

So the question is – if it’s only 30 stocks, how the hell is that representative of the economy? And why does public opinion – and in many cases, the news media, rely on the DJIA as an indicator of the economy?  “The Dow Is Up” is seen, more often than not, as “The Economy is Up,” but there’s really little, if any correlation between the state of the economy and the state of those 30 stocks; if a company stock price increases in a bad economy, and they’re on the Dow, the Dow goes up.

Ultimately, the Dow is used incorrectly as a way to measure the economy – or at least the stock market – when the only thing that the Dow accurately measures is the performance of the Dow.  It’s simple, it’s easy to understand, and it’s wrong to confuse it with some sort of economic health indicator.

What gets me is that this problem isn’t limited to economists; many companies end up using the wrong metrics to try to determine the health of their network.  They either don’t have the knowledge to interpret the data they have, or they never collect all the data in the first place, so they conflate the metrics they can gather and comprehend – things like network utilization – and confuse that with network performance.  A fully utilized network could mean that you’re oversubscribed, or it could also mean that you’ve got just the right amount of network; low utilization rates could mean that you don’t have to worry about overhead – or it could just mean that your servers are so slow that the little it slowly outputs doesn’t tax the network. 

Or, for example, taking sampling data which could be wildly inaccurate when the capabilities exist to measure every transaction. 

It’s not just about getting data; it’s about getting the right, relevant data. Otherwise, you just confuse the issue.

The Engineer of Love is the original Internet romance reality series that offers one lucky engineer, Ben Erwin, and several lucky enterprise network monitoring suites the unique opportunity to find true love. The lucky Engineer will get to know a group of network suites via a series of trial installations and exotic, romantic dates -- some in groups, some individually. He will introduce some of the network suites to his family, and will visit their hometowns for a slice of their life in an effort to determine the network reporting suite with whom he is most compatible.

The Engineer of Love is hosted by Robb Van Eman and produced by NetQoS in association with Blogphilo New Media. Brian Boyko is the executive producer.

The Alberta SuperNet, a state-of-the-art IP network that connects 429 communities in the province of Alberta and provides direct broadband connectivity to more than 4,400 government, learning, health, library and municipal facilities as well as private businesses and Alpha Flight Secret Headquarters.

Axia NetMedia corporation, which runs the Alberta SuperNet, had deployed NetQoS® NetVoyant for their device performance monitoring needs.  SNMP based metrics are important when at any moment, your network can be attacked by the varied hazards of Albertan life.  For example, flying polar bears who take out network links.  (It could happen.  Calgary still has its ski jump from the 1988 Winter Olympics, and if Coca-Cola commercials are anything to go on, bears like extreme sports.)

It also helped Axia with one of the more mundane hazards of Albertan life – Albertan government. 

“NetVoyant was the only product we found that scales to our needs and provides the flexible reporting required by the Government of Alberta.” said Drew McNaughton, Chief Technology Officer for Axia. “For instance, NetVoyant allows us to group and display reports so that a customer sees only the data relevant to them, whether it’s a single school or an entire district.”

In addition, Axia uses NetVoyant internally to ensure it has the current and future capacity to serve evolving customer needs and also to troubleshoot issues as they arise.

The Alberta SuperNet, like many Canadian networks, uses an open access model, which means any service provider in the province can use the SuperNet to deliver ultra-high speed services, including Internet access, to their retail and business customers, especially those who reside in rural areas.

“NetQoS NetVoyant provides both a technology and marketing function for Axia: The product helps their customers understand what is happening on the network and how it is delivering services, but also reinforces to them the value Axia is delivering via the high performance Alberta SuperNet,” said Mike Magri, client delivery executive for NetQoS.

You can find out more information about the Axia NetMedia deal in our press release.

It’s a standard rule in marketing that you don’t point out your competitor’s advertising, as it just draws attention to your competitors and makes it look like they’ve struck a nerve and therefore have a point.

But I’m not a standard marketer – I’m a blogger. Woo! Look at me! I’m spontaneously subverting the accepted conventional wisdom! Whee! I’m bucking the paradigm trends! Yahoo! Us wacky bloggers, is there nothing we hold sacred?

So, here’s Fluke Networks’ latest advertisement, which is currently running on the Network World web site – you can check it out on the “Network Management” subcategory of “Infrastructure management.”

(I’m pointing out where people can see our competitors’ advertising! Lock me in the loony bin, ‘cause I’m a-blog-o-crazy! )

So, here’s the deal. The advertisement consists of three slides – the first: “Only Fluke Networks can do it.” The second, “Not NetScout, Not NetQos [sic], Not OPNet.[sic]” The third is, “We’ll prove it, if you consider us and still buy one of the others, we’ll pay you cash,” with what looks remarkably like our NetQoS SuperAgent product.

First, let’s get the nit-picky out of the way; NetQoS is punctuated with a capital S, as it’s a shortening of “Network Quality of Service.” Granted, this distinction may eventually become naturalized out, much like “Microcomputer Software” became “Micro-Soft” and then “Microsoft,” but still, the fact that the name is misspelled actually calls attention to that part of the ad. It should also be noted that the name “NetQos” is actually bigger than the Fluke logo in the Fluke ad in that screenshot. As a matter of fact, I’d bet that UPNET and NetScot would love it if a competitor misspelled their names in a marketing communication. If you’re going to run an ad with your competitors’ names on it – don’t call attention to it.

Anyway, it’s not clear from the ad, but clicking in, you can see a screenshot, captioned “Would you rather have this?” And there is a difference; Fluke is claiming an advantage in granularity. Fair enough. If they want to get into feature comparison, we think we’ve got them beat.

Mostly, the granularity thing is cherry picking a tiny difference in features. Features are important, but what’s absolutely crucial is having a platform which offers data from the entire infrastructure to provide a comprehensive reporting solution that can deliver the information in a way that network engineers and other IT users can use to pinpoint problems.

So to steal a line from them, would you rather have a network graph that only network engineers can comprehend, or would you rather have… say, something like this?

This is the Application Performance Diagram that uses response time data – a.k.a. SuperAgent – to provide higher-level views of how the network is supporting application delivery.

We actually licensed our products to Fluke Networks who re-branded and sold them for years, so Fluke is very familiar with our technology. Fluke subsequently acquired products of their own and are now competitive (their advertising draws a big red line-o’-nasty through our misspelled name). NetQoS terminated the licensing deal which expires at the end of June. (If you’re a NetQoS product customer through Fluke, you might want to talk with us as your product support will stop).

As for the claim that “only Fluke Networks can do it… know the root cause of application problems in three clicks,” they obviously haven’t seen the videos we put out last week, showing you exactly how know the root cause of application problems in three clicks using NetQoS Performance Center 5.0. Not only that, but we can show you the root cause of server problems and network problems too; we can show you performance by physical location through intuitive maps, and inform you at a glance how applications are performing through our Application Performance Dashboard. You can drill-down to isolate the cause of higher-than-normal latency, view the full packet captures for the problem application and recreate the user and application behavior for diagnosis. There’s a lot more I could add but I won’t – we have to give the sales demo guys something to talk about.

Novatel has come out with a new device it’s calling “Mi-Fi” – specifically, the “Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.” Mi-Fi is essentially a wireless Wi-Fi router which connects to the Internet using a 3G data network over the cellular service.  Five users can connect at once, and the particular device is about the size of an old, first-gen iPod.  Current solutions for connecting a router to 3G or EV-DO networks are bigger, bulkier, often require an additional card, and don’t have a cool, marketing friendly name. 

Which begs the question, if it’s the first Mi-Fi device, where do they get off numbering it as “2200?” Were there 2199 prototypes that we don’t know about?  Will it hit the market in the year 2200 A.D.? Is it really 2.2, but someone accidentally misplaced the decimal point? I miss the days when technology started at 1, and worked its way up to… 3.11, then skipped ahead to 95, then 98, then ME, then 2000, then XP, and then back again to 7. 

But back to the matter at hand – a mobile router that is smaller than a cellphone would have multiple uses in an enterprise environment.  Note that I did not say that would have multiple uses for an enterprise environment. The way I envision this thing heading into most organizations is via being smuggled in, to bypass restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, or other sites. 

Of course, a computer that can connect to either the corporate network or to the unsecured general internet provides unique security problems, but also some infrastructure problems.  Who wants to tell the CEO on the 3^rd floor that the data entry team on the 2^nd floor is using a 3G router and the signals are interfering and that’s why he can’t go online?  What happens when a crucial piece of equipment auto-connects to the wrong network? 

We’ve mentioned the hurdles and headaches in supporting 3G devices like the iPhone in the enterprise; though when we did so in January 2007, it was speculation, and since then Network World has written an article with more concrete real-world examples of the problems that IT pros face in integrating iPhone tech with the rest of the enterprise.   Supporting not just 3G devices, but, essentially, 3G networks which can spring up anywhere at anytime is likely to be far worse. 

And now, the obligatory pitch: how do you catch someone using illicit or misconfigured 3G network devices?  Simple – the same way you catch someone operating an illicit FTP server, or a malware outbreak.  You baseline your data, analyze the traffic, and look for anomalies.  Interestingly enough, most problems in the network are marked by a severe increase of traffic over the norm.  Illicit and misconfigured 3G traffic will show up – not as an unusually large traffic volume on the corporate network, but an unusually small one.  But with visibility into the network, these things should be detectable. 

Everyone’s putting out surveys at Interop; we’re no exception. Surveys are how we know what you need in products, how we should focus our efforts, and how to game the system when illegally betting on American Idol results, an often overlooked source of secondary revenue for mid-sized businesses in these bleak economic times.

So we’ve been surveying, and from what we learned both in Vegas and from our Symposium last month, network budgets and, consequently, network personnel, are down over the last 12 months. At the same time, network usage, unsurprisingly, went up.

Combining the results of the two surveys (totaling 170 respondents with only one mix-up between our survey and a keno bet), 69% of IT professionals indicated that their company’s WAN usage increased over the last 12 months, and 8% said it decreased.

Two notes: First, WAN usage was defined as volume of traffic, number of end users, and/or number of links. Second, our survey won $25 for nine hits out of 20 spots.

Anyway, when asked how the network management resources available to manage the increased usage have changed over the same period, 74 percent of survey respondents said their budgets have either decreased or stayed the same, and 69 percent said their personnel have either decreased or stayed the same.

Now, when you’re doing more work with less people and less availability, there’s got to be some sort of way to bridge that gap – force multipliers, if you will. That’s probably why nearly 40 percent of survey respondents indicated increased investment in network management tools, with only seven percent saying that they planned to decrease investment in network management tools.

The top network management priorities cited for this year are monitoring end-user service levels, more proactive performance management, faster troubleshooting, and data center and infrastructure consolidation. Surprisingly, despite all the industry discussion, only nine percent stated that managing a cloud computing initiative was a top priority for this year.

(There may be a bit of a bias there, as the survey was conducted at Interop and Symposium – which would, naturally, over-represent companies that are willing and able to send representatives to Las Vegas or Austin, respectively. It’s a hunch, but I personally think that cloud computing can still make a huge impact on small-to-midsize companies, and bears looking into if only because the small-to-midsize companies of this decade tend to become the midsize-to-large companies of the next.)

Interop in full swing in Vegas; and already both my work e-mail and my personal e-mail are filled with press releases, press-releases disguised as e-mail, and in one odd case, ninja disguised as press-release. 

If you’re asking how a ninja can get into my e-mail, you don’t know much about ninjas.  Ninjas can get anywhere.

Still, I figure I might as well check in to see what’s going on at Interop.  For example, Jim Metzler just put out a post on his blog on his Interop first impressions:

I stepped out of the hotel I saw something that I have never seen before in Vegas – there was absolutely no line for a taxi. Every other time I have come to Vegas there has been a long line, often lasting a half hour or more. My fear was that the Interop show would be as empty as the taxi line. It is not. It appears to be down some from last year, but there still is a lot of energy here...

…Then we got to the Q&A and the gap between what is being promoted by vendors and analysts and what is being practiced by IT organizations became painfully clear. For example, vendors and analysts have been talking for years about what IT organizations need to do to meet their internal SLAs. When asked, hardly any of the participants stated that they offer internal SLAs. That did not surprise me. Even more interesting is that vendors and analysts have also been talking for years about the need for visibility into applications. When asked, relatively few of the participants stated that they had that kind of view even though most of them had some kind of APM tool. That did surprise me.

Meanwhile, Network Instruments polled the Interop attendees on virtualization deployment, and released the results via a press release on their website – pessimistic reading if you’re keeping track of virtualization in the enterprise.  Some findings:

• 27 percent identified a lack of visibility and tools as the largest troubleshooting challenge in virtual environments.  Other troubleshooting concerns include a lack of training on virtual infrastructure (26 percent) followed by an inability to secure infrastructure (21 percent).


• 55 percent report experiencing more problems than pluses with virtualization, while 45 percent thought the technology’s benefits outweighed any problems.


• 47 percent report roll-out costs were too high.

That’s not great news for virtualization deployments, and goes to show you that visibility is extremely important in virtual environments in order to keep costs down and make sure you’re going to receive benefits before large deployments.