This phenomenon isn't limited to the Gummi Bears. There were protests in Mexico over the rising price of corn tortillas. German beers are feeling the pinch as farmers trade in hops and barley for the more lucrative rapeseed and corn. Jolly Time Popcorn isn't feeling so jolly after corn prices went up 70 percent. Between the double whammy of increased cost of corn and increased cost of every other crop because farmers are switching to growing corn instead, it's gotten to the point where it's cheaper to feed livestock, such as pigs, human snack food, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Back to network performance. Consider for the moment, that the path of the food we eat, from raw ingredients to our supermarket shelves consists of a "network" of sorts, this is a classic case of a sudden, unanticipated spike in demand from another endpoint in the network that is wreaking havoc on the network itself. Or, farmers switching to corn at the expense of other crops seems like a classic case of over provisioning one "application" on the network at the expense of all others.

These changes may have seemed insignificant at the time. Many disruptive changes do, which is why you need to have good visibility into your network - whether it's an enterprise network or a food distribution network.

Even a slight increase, for example, in network demand has a number of ancillary costs that many people don't look at. Greater demand of resources doesn't just require more bandwidth. It may necessitate greater processing power, which necessitates more hardware, which necessitates more power and more cooling.

I mean, when even the cost of alternative fuels are going up, many more people are going to be telecommuting from their homes instead of driving or flying in for business. If you're not prepared for a change like that by being aware of how your network is being used, and what changes are coming down the pipe, your network is in just as much trouble as the Gummi Bears are.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

My roommates and I have been chosen (if we choose to accept it,) to be a Nielsen family. And while, at first, I was thrilled to finally get the opportunity to stand up and be counted (I'm a fan of more cancelled series than I can count - Firefly, Brisco County Jr., Wonderfalls, The Critic, Futurama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Arrested Development, Farscape, The Tick, Justice League Unlimited…) it got me thinking about how, exactly, Nielsen is going to get accurate data on their version of "network performance."

First of all, my "Nielsen Family" consists of three roommates, including myself, who share a four bed, four-bath condo. I've never seen Patrick watch television. Ever. Mike supposedly watches TV but I've never seen him actually pay attention to it - preferring to leave it humming in the background to help him concentrate while he plays Warcraft III or Diablo II.

As for me, well, that's the stickiest of wickets. I own a TV but I only use it for my PS2 and Wii hookups. While Nielsen can track what people watch on TiVo brand PVR boxes, I'm not sure they'll be able to track my setup, which consists of a P4 Dell repurposed into a MythTV on Ubuntu box. The MythTV box connects directly to a business-class projector, but I end up using it mostly for DVD movies, YouTube, and downloaded videos. Even when I watch MythTV recorded movies, I usually end up doing so from my bedroom, which can access the MythTV box and stream the videos (and live TV!) over the LAN in the condo.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Another kind of "Network monitoring,": Looking at the Nielsen Ratings." »

Or: Catering to expectations in Voice Over IP.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

When you pick up the phone, do you hear a dial tone? Chances are, you probably don't.

For most industrialized nations' telephones, what you hear is a recording of a dial tone. And when you dial, you're not hearing the ringing on the other end. You're being played a recording of ringing. (And a good thing too - do you really want your embarrassing ringtone to be the first thing your boss hears when he calls you on your cellphone?)

The reason for this is because the telephone is one of the oldest technologies, and when people use a phone, they have a very reasonable expectation for how it should work. Step 1: Pick up phone. Step 2: Check for dial tone. Step 3: Dial the number, Step 4, wait for other end to pick up. Step 5, Converse.

While the "back-end" of the technology has changed dramatically during that time, from operators plugging in holes in a phone board, to automated switches, to cell towers, and today's latest phone technology, VoIP, the front end remains practically unchanged. People have come to know what to expect from a phone over a century of practically Pavlovian conditioning. (Bell rings, pick up phone, get treat!)

(Continued...)

Continue reading "VoIP MOS: The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and VoIP" »

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

There is no doubting the influence of Slashdot among the technically savvy and the culturally geeky - the deep blue-green site can - and does - make or break products, or whole companies in the technology and IT industries, by deciding who or what to publish. It is, as the site proclaims, "News for nerds," and perhaps, depending on your definition of the term, one of the first "blogs" on the Internet, having been started in September 1997.

Rob Malda
--Credit: Derrick Story/O'Reilly Network

According to Slashdot's FAQ, the site serves 80 million pages each month. No small feat.

And the only reason I've written out an introduction which restates what most people already know - and avoided using the cliché that Slashdot is "a household name" - is the fact that my father once congratulated me for one of my stories being linked to by "Glashsnot."

Still, almost everyone knows about Slashdot.

One of Slashdot's relatively recent major changes has been the addition of a new "social news" feature called "The Firehose," and we were lucky enough to interview, via e-mail, Slashdot creator and editor Rob Malda (also known as "CmdrTaco") about this new feature.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Drinking from the Firehose: Speaking with Slashdot's Creator and Editor, Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) about Slashdot's New Social News Feature" »

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

If it sounds like you've read this story before, you probably have. Internet politics in 2000 was newsworthy because, like anyone on AOL, politicians had their own Web pages. In 2004, internet politics were newsworthy because, like anyone with a Blogger.com account, politicians had their own blogs. The new technology of the Web which will "revolutionize politics" this coming election year, but which everyone seems to have found out about two years ago, seems to be YouTube and other "Web 2.0" applications. At least, that's what CNN seems to have focused on with its recent "YouTube" debate of the Democratic Presidential Primaries.

Franken's campaign site will soon include this "Web2.0-style" interactive events map (top) and automatic slideshow (bottom,) seen here in a late beta version. Schlough informed NPD that it would likely be available Friday, August 10, 2007. The events map runs on a combination of Flash and MySQL, while the slideshow runs off of Flash and XML.

Still, that cynicism of overhyped coverage should be reserved not for the politicians but for the news outlets covering the election that grasp onto novelty for novelty's sake. These technologies - Web, blog, and online video - are communications tools. They are important because they very well can help honest politicians communicate with their constituents.

Of course, they can also help dishonest politicians seem to communicate without actually communicating. Most news coverage of the politics of the Internet doesn't actually bother to help people make the distinction.

But what of the people tasked to introduce technology into political campaigns? What is it like to be working on a campaign's IT team in the age when it only recently became clear that a political campaign needs an IT team? We had an opportunity to talk with Jon-David Schlough, who manages IT operations and online communications for the Al Franken campaign for senate in Minnesota.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "The Intersection of Politics and Technology: Talking with Jon-David Schlough, Interactive & IT Operations for the Al Franken for Senate, 2008 campaign." »

Jim McQuaid, senior product manager at NetQoS, talks about how UDP (used for VoIP) and TCP (used for data applications) interact in a short video, as part of our "Whiteboard Series."

If you have questions about the video, please leave a comment below and we'll do our best to answer them.
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More information:

About VoIP:
- VoIP Protocol Basics, and Why VoIP Consumes More Bandwidth Than You Might Expect
- Joe Miller of Linden Labs speaks about VoIP in Second Life
- 'I Swear, There is a Good Reason I'm Singing at Work'

Whitepaper:
- Managing the Performance of Converaged VoIP and Data Applications

Also in our Whiteboard Series:
- The impact of WAN Optimization on TCP Applications
- The impact of WAN Optimization on NetFlow/IPFIX measurements

If you weren't able to come to the NetQoS Networkers after-party at the House of Blues in Anaheim, we uploaded this short video which shows you what it was like inside our Netcosm Immersion Experience. Enjoy!

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Heather Havenstein at ComputerWorld just released a story online about corporate blogging - about how corporate blogs sound less like re-hashed press releases and have started sounding - well, more like humans. More like people. More like… us.

July 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- NetQoS Inc. is a vendor of network performance management software. But you'd be hard-pressed to figure that out from some of the online posts written by Brian Boyko, the Austin-based company's designated corporate blogger.

In April, for example, a Boyko post about the Interplanetary Internet project - which is designed to extend the Net into outer space - prompted Internet luminary Vinton Cerf to post a comment on NetworkPerformanceDaily.com, the NetQoS blog.

And over the course of several months this year, the blog gained national attention after Boyko posted multiple entries about the case of a Connecticut school teacher whom a jury convicted on charges of risking injury to a minor for allegedly exposing students to pornographic images that appeared on a classroom computer.

Well, thanks, ComputerWorld! I'm glad that you consider NPD a major driving force in the world of corporate blogging. Ah, the life of a blogger! Women want me, men want to be me…

More seriously, I figured I'd use this as an excuse to talk about some of the points in the article - not to disagree with them but just to give you my view. The main thesis of the piece, which I overall agree with, is a good place to start:

Companies such as NetQoS, which launched its blog nine months ago, are eschewing Corporate Blogging 1.0 tactics that often result in blogs being used merely to post static marketing materials as an extension of companies' Web sites. Now, a growing number of businesses are opening up their blogs to provide an outlet for the same kind of uncensored commentary and interaction that have made personal blogs such a popular medium on the Web.

I'm not sure I like the nomenclature of "Corporate Blogging 1.0." We're very much in "Corporate Blogging 0.9 beta" - those early efforts are probably best recognized as early alpha builds - if you're going for the version number metaphor. There is so much - so incredibly much for us to learn! I have trouble understanding why our story with Vint Cerf wasn't picked up by Slashdot when a "filler" editorial I did on Dungeons and Dragons was. I have trouble figuring out how one story on Slashdot netted over 100 comments, yet another story on Slashdot netted only 10, and neither of those stories got as many comments as there were on Slashdot, talking about the same story.

While I know more than most about this field on the theoretical level, what I know has not seen a lot of field testing yet, compared to more established areas of expertise, and there are going to be better ways to communicate with the audience that simply haven't been found yet - blogging is just so new.

And there is this paragraph, near the conclusion:

"It has to be a realistic discussion about industry trends and issues that are important, potentially even issues that are antagonistic or troublesome," Fishkin said. Otherwise, "you look even more ridiculous than if you never attempted it."

I'm not sure about that. I can look pretty ridiculous anyway…

The big problem with WAN Optimization and Application Performance Monitoring was that there simply wasn't a WAN Optimization solution on the market that preserved end-to-end performance data, nor a monitoring solution that would work in an optimized WAN.

This problem has been solved.

At Cisco Networkers in Anaheim, NetQoS gave a presentation to hundreds of attendees to make the announcement that we've been working with Cisco to develop a management interface for accurate end-to-end application response time measurement that works on optimized networks. (In addition to the people mobbing our booth, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, stopped by for a chat and review of what we do.)

Through integrated software on Cisco Wide Area Application Services devices (WAAS), TCP header information is exported to NetQoS SuperAgent (an end-to-end application performance monitoring module) before optimization occurs - preserving that information. Finally, IT organizations can accurately validate the results of WAN Optimization deployments.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Tracking The Optimized WAN: NetQoS Integrates with Cisco WAAS to Deliver End-to-End Application Response Time Reporting for WAN Optimization" »

During a recent NetQoS - Cisco WAN Optimization Seminar Series, and to some extent at Interop, NetQoS launched a survey regarding WAN Optimization. We found some interesting things:

Over 90% of the survey respondents said that it is either important or very important to be able to quantify accurately the results of WAN optimization.

Over 80% say it is important/very important to have integrated WAN optimization and performance reporting.

We also found that most respondents – 60% - believe that the most relevant measure of WAN optimization impact is in application and network latency. 30% believe that link utilization is the most relevant measure, and 10% believe that the two are equally important, with a handful of respondents saying that protocol distribution is the most important.

What this tells us is that many enterprise IT organizations do not want to deploy a WAN Optimization solution that is going to break their application and network performance monitoring. However, WAN Optimization devices perform local TCP ACKnowledgements, thereby confusing performance monitoring and making it near impossible to accurately quantify the results of WAN Optimization.

We go into this challenge more in “WAN Optimization’s Dirty Little Secret” and John Mao and Ben Erwin have uploaded some videos in Network Performance Daily’s Whiteboard Series to illustrate the points, but basically, many WAN Optimization devices (WOD) split a TCP/IP session between a client and server into three separate sessions – a client segment, a WAN segment (or “channel”), and a server segment. But data center-resident passive network monitoring tools assume only one TCP session between the client and server – which means that when WAN optimization is deployed, they only have visibility into the server segment response time – between the server and the data center WOD. So, visibility into all the components that make up end-user application response times, including network round trip time and data retransmission time, is lost.

If ultimately, IT is about application delivery – the reliability and speed with which you can deliver applications to the end-users – then forgoing application and network monitoring is not an option. We’ll have more on this problem next week. In the meantime we look forward to seeing you at Cisco Networkers in Anaheim.

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More information:

On Quantifying the results of WAN Optimization