At this year's NetQoS invitation-only Networkers After-Party at the House of Blues in Disneyland Anaheim, we're going to bring you what we call the Netcosm Immersion Experience.

The Netcosm Immersion Experience will take our Netcosm tech demo and project it on the inside of a walk-in cube on the dance floor of the House of Blues - 25 feet by 35 feet, 10 feet tall. (Okay, that's a not exactly a cube, but why get pedantic?)

It will be a full immersion video experience with sights, quadrophonic sounds, colors, and the digital pyrotechnics, navigable with a gyromouse. And the experience will be enhanced with "Netcosmopolitan" drinks. (They're just like regular cosmopolitans, except blue, with a dash of portmanteau added for flavor.)

If you're attending the NetQoS Networkers After-Party, you'll be able to literally walk inside a living model of an enterprise network.

(We do not suggest partaking of any illegal narcotic substances before or during the Netcosm Immersive Experience. The Netcosm Immersive Experience is simply enough to blow your mind and alter your reality without any pharmaceutical assistance. Besides, the last stoner I knew who went to Disneyland still has nightmares about "six-foot-tall rats".)

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Continue reading "You don't know what's in / Anaheim. / Why don't you come with me (little girl) / on a magic carpet ride?" »

John Mao, product manager at NetQoS, quickly explains the impact of WAN Optimization on Cisco IOS NetFlow/IPFIX information gathering 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:

On WAN Optimization:
- NetQoS and Cisco Webinar: Evaluating WAN Optimization Options and Quantifying the Results

On NetFlow Monitoring :

Also in our Whiteboard Series:
- The impact of WAN Optimization on TCP Applications

With John Mao:
- Six Tips for Improving Network Visibility and Performance Using Cisco IOS NetFlow Data

By John Mao, Product Manager at NetQoS

Cisco's NetFlow technology provides flow statistics from IOS-enabled routers capable of characterizing traffic on a network. Information provided by NetFlow includes network protocols, ports, IP addresses, and much more.

Five years ago, NetFlow was a new buzzword floating around various companies' networking groups. Some immediately saw the management benefits it could provide while others continued to use the network probes they knew best. However, fast forward to today, and a large majority of engineers are intimately familiar with the benefits and uses of NetFlow.

Although initially implemented by Cisco, NetFlow is emerging as an IETF standard: Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX). Based on the NetFlow Version 9 implementation, IPFIX is going to be the industry standard in the very near future. Network infrastructure vendors, including Nortel and others, are already adding IPFIX support to their enterprise switches and routers.

Thousands of IT enterprises worldwide have embraced NetFlow technology which is capable of providing them the same flow information traditional probes provide. Because of the lower cost to deploy and maintain NetFlow, it is easy to see why so many have made the switch.

The router's memory can retain the vast amounts of in-depth statistics only for a short time. NetFlow/IPFIX Management products (like NetQoS's own ReporterAnalyzer) export the NetFlow data periodically, store and parse the data.

That said, here are six tips for improving network visibility and performance using the NetFlow data that you're probably already getting from your routers. These tips work best with ReporterAnalyzer (hey, it's our company blog and if we didn't think our products were the best, we wouldn't be making them), but should be helpful even to those using more basic tools.

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Continue reading "NetFlow Monitoring: Six Tips for Improving Network Visibility and Performance Using Cisco IOS NetFlow Data" »

By Brian Boyko

Fingerpointing - it's a frustrating and lingering problem for IT organizations. Whenever, application performance degrades, all of a sudden application, server, and networking teams start pointing the finger at one another in an attempt to pass the blame. But isn't that why we have network monitoring tools in the first place - to tell you where the problem is, so that you can fix it faster.

Theoretically, yes. Unfortunately, network teams may be suffering from an undeserved "credibility gap" that prevents companies from taking timely action when problems arise.

For so very long, problems with network performance have often been laid at the feet of the networking team because, quite frankly, to the end user, an application problem, a server problem, and a network link problem all look like the same thing. "The network is slow." So even when it's not the network, the network team often gets the blame.

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Continue reading "Fingerpointing, Frustrated Network Engineers, and the Application Performance Blame Game" »

Yes, WAN Optimization may be the greatest thing since Cat-5, but there is a significant drawback to the solutions on the market. The various optimization techniques that these appliances apply on the application packets all affect monitoring and reporting tools to varying degrees, and distort the results of performance reports.

This means three things for those of you who are deploying a WAN Optimization device: 1) you will lose visibility into important metrics, 2) it will be more difficult to troubleshoot network problems and identify bottlenecks, and 3) it will be problematic to even quantify the benefits of the WAN optimization devices.

Think about that. You could spend millions of dollars on WAN optimization equipment and not even know if you're getting any tangible return on investment. The simple question: "How much will this solution improve our network and application performance?" can't be answered with any accuracy.

One of the reasons is how WAN Optimization solutions handle packet header data. This is the data which passive network performance tools use to give you detailed information about end-user response times. WAN optimization devices use techniques that change the packet header data so that data it can be transferred more efficiently.

For example, Tunnel-based architecture (or "Layer-3") optimization solutions tunnel the client-server traffic though dedicated TCP ports between the WAN optimization devices. All the flows disappear into a single WAN Optimization port, so it can be difficult to determine what type of traffic you are dealing with.

LAN-WAN segmentation (or "Layer-4') optimization solutions use two peer devices on either side of the WAN that optimize the TCP connection between client and server by breaking a single TCP connection into three. The first goes from the client to the WAN Optimization Device (WOD) at the edge, the second goes between the WODs at the edge and at the core, and the third goes from the core-side WOD to the server.

But the problem with segmentation is that most monitoring systems will assume the existence of a single TCP connection and will therefore only report on a single TCP segment - typically the one between the core-side WOD and the server. Worse still, if you weren't aware of this, you might take a look at the performance monitoring tool thinking the network is lightning fast, when all you're getting is the local LAN speed - not the end-to-end connection - the only thing worse than being uninformed is being misinformed.

Well, I suppose having your toes gnawed off by weasels is worse than being uninformed. But not by much.
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More Information:

Press Release
- NetQoS Integrates with Cisco WAAS to Deliver End-to-End Application Response Time Reporting for WAN Optimization

Webinar
- WAN Optimization and measuring the results

On WAN Optimization

WAN Optimization solutions are designed to do a couple of things: increase the performance of applications running over the WAN by reducing latency and help companies achieve efficiencies in bandwidth usage. This can help avoid costly infrastructure upgrades and reduce the downtime and lost revenue associated with poor network performance.

For most companies, a big value proposition of WAN optimization is data center consolidation. If you can make your WAN performance rival that of your LAN, you can do away with remote data centers and repurpose or liquidate the expensive hardware in each branch office.

It also simplifies making backups in preparation for disaster recovery because much less data needs to travel across the link in order to get a full backup of the branch office to the home office. It becomes feasible to back up key data remotely on a regular basis. (The alternatives are to saturate the link with a scheduled backup, hire on-site staff simply to do the backup, or trust that the end-users will back up their data locally - which isn't much of a guarantee.) Keeping your data backed up and in one central location also means that it will be easier to verify compliance with government regulation.

There is also a "green effect" as it may also cut down on power requirements too - similar jobs done by separate servers in each branch office can now be handled via a single server at the home office, running virtualized server environments. While that one server requires more CPU cycles, chances are the tradeoff will result in lowered electricity needs. And of course, it eliminates maintenance costs for all that hardware, and the ability to keep your IT staff in your home office rather than sending them on planes to the four corners of the earth when something goes wrong.

There are numerous trends driving the demand for WAN optimization. So, how do you know where you can get the biggest improvements from your investment? Which applications will benefit the most? And, what about the pitfalls? One of the downsides to WAN optimization is that is obscures end-to-end performance monitoring for TCP applications because it breaks the connection between client and server into three separate segments. Most WAN appliances also obscure Netflow data which is used for security and traffic analysis purposes. Traffic prioritization via QoS can also be interrupted. Some WAN optimization solutions address these concerns. Others do not.

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Network Performance Daily will address these questions in a series of upcoming posts on WAN Optimization. Subscribe to our RSS feed to get weekly updates. Also, chime in with your thoughts on what you hope to get from deploying WAN Optimization in your organization. Feel free to leave comments below.

By Brian Boyko

The United Kingdom has a new prime minister. Gordon Brown, formerly the chancellor of the Exchequer, became prime minister when Tony Blair stepped down this Wednesday.

Tony Blair had been prime minister since May 1997. That's just slightly over ten years in office. The United Kingdom has had one head of government for the past 10 years. That's about par for political change.

Technological change, on the other hand…

1997 wasn't when the Internet first started getting adopted by the mainstream, but it was still early in the formative years of the "ubiquitous Internet." Back in 1997, most of us were still on dialup. The term "blog" hadn't been invented, online gaming consisted of dialing directly into your friend's modem to play some Doom, and the world had never heard of "kitty pidgin," "all your base," "Leeroy Jenkins," or "the Star Wars Kid." An ISDN line was considered "incredibly fast."

In 1997, for example, a time which predates the original Napster, the record companies were still going strong and the RIAA was not an infamous household name. Today, in Rolling Stone, an article published recently states outright that the major record labels are terminal cases, and that there's nothing at this point the record labels can do in order to recover - mostly because the record industry was unable to adapt to the changes of digital distribution.

There have been amazing changes in Internet and Network technology since Blair first took office from the day he left.

Netscape was separate from AOL until 1999, and AOL was separate from Time Warner until 2000 - an Internet service merged with one of the world's biggest entertainment conglomerates. In 2001, the European Council adopts the first treaty addressing criminal offenses over the Internet. The U.S. Department of Commerce privatized DNS in 1998. A list of MI6 agents were released on a UK Web site in 1999.

The Y2K Problem. IPv6. SETI@Home and distributed/grid computing. Flash Mobs. Even The Guardian launched, in 2005, a "Blair Watch Project," asking citizen-journalists to follow Blair, blogging and capturing his every move in mobile phone cameras, coordinated through the Internet.

In 1997, according to Hobbes' Internet Timeline, there were 19.5 million hosts connected to the Internet. In July 2006, there were 439 million hosts. We have had revolution after revolution in the Internet sphere while politics remained more or less the same. Change in politics occurs slowly. Change in technology occurs quickly.

This is particularly important to realize that the elected officials, who change ever so rarely, are charged with regulating and stimulating the growth of this technology.

While some political candidates have turned to blogging and YouTube in recent elections, I'm not entirely sure that the candidates I've seen have really understood the technology in question. Often it seems that blogs are used for smear campaigns (when they can be incredibly easily fact-checked) or used for fundraising. Even in the rare times that they may be used to announce a policy platform or explain a candidate's opinions about a news event, they're often used for broadcasting a particular announcement, much like the "traditional" media, and it's not often used for communication - and this is something that affects almost all candidates of almost all democratic nations of almost all political party and affiliation.

Allowing people to vote on your campaign song through YouTube does not a participatory democracy make.

And while it is outside our realm of expertise to suggest any particular policy, and it is certainly beyond our license as a technical publication to favor any candidates, the resignation of Blair and the retrospective over the past ten years leads us to conclude this: The people elected to office today will be determining policy for technology that we have yet to dream about. Yet, the only thing most people - and most geeks - really know for sure about the political stances of the current candidates on developments in technology is that, for some reason, Democratic candidates tend to use Linux and FreeBSD for Web hosts, while Republicans tend to use Windows Server 2003. Why? Who knows? Who really cares?

At any rate one thing is clear: We have reached a tipping point where it seems that politics simply cannot keep pace with the change in technology. The only thing that can really be done is to guide the officials we elect, through gentle but firm public pressure, to make the right decisions for the people when these issues - unknown of today - show up in the policies of tomorrow.

By Brian Boyko

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of an academic paper not yet published, doing a comparative content analysis of the "Daily Show" and the network nightly news broadcasts. Not surprisingly, the "Daily Show" actually conveyed a similar amount of substantive material - that is, information without jokes - as the network news broadcasts.

But in that paper, written by Prof. Julia R. Fox, Glory Koloen, and Volkan Sahin at Indiana University-Bloomington, there was a passage that caught my attention.

"Although the two sources were found here to be equally substantive, are they equally informative? There is debate among scholars as to how well soft news shows, in which The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is categorized by some (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006), can inform their viewers…. the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election survey found younger viewers of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart answered more political questions correctly than respondents who did not watch that show ("Stewart's 'stoned slackers,'" 2004).

Experimental research may well substantiate this corelational survey data suggestion that viewers may actually process and remember substantive information presented on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart better than when it is presented on more serious sources of political information. When viewers see positive messages that are appetitively activated (in an approach mode towards the message) and tend to encode more information than when they are aversively activated while viewing a negative message (Fox, Park, & Lang, 2006; Lang, 2006a; Lang, 2006b; Lang, Sparks, Bradley, Lee, & Wang, 2004). Previous studies have found that political coverage is often negative… In contrast, although The Daily Show with Jon Stewart may also be negative in tone, the appetitive system is likely to be activated by the humor on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and by the audience's laughter, which may elicit emotional contagion (McDonald & Fredin, 2001).

Or, to sum up without the Ph.D. language: "Maybe the fact that Stewart is funny causes people to remember the important stuff more."

I too had read the "Stoned Slackers" article from CNN, and thought at the time that it was not particularly surprising that the Daily Show viewers were likely to know more about the election, thinking something along the lines that the Daily Show just attracted smart viewers - Stewart doesn't exactly do sophomoric humor on his show. But now I'm not so sure.

Certainly, the professors and teachers that I remember the most from are those teachers who used humor on a day to day basis to get their points across. Walter Lewin, professor of Physics at MIT embodies this idea - his class lectures have made it to YouTube, where he tells a student, quite matter of factly, that "So what I'm going to do now, Simon, I'm going to beat you with cat fur." Not that Prof. Lewin's classes are all laugh-riots, but I think the students paid attention and retained more of that information for that experiment than if he had just read from the text book.

Of course, especially in the technical fields, it's incredibly important to be able to learn new skills and tackle new problems. Today's darling language is tomorrow's obsolescence - COBOL comes to mind, although C++ programmers now find that they're migrating to AJAX and RUBY in order to produce the Web apps that are now in demand, rather than the console apps that were once king.

So why are technical demonstrations and technical skill-imparting meetings are often so painfully dull? If you want to impart information to be retained, it's usually best to add a bit of humor to the information. Even we've been doing this for a while at Network Performance Daily - making jokes in the Tuesday and Thursday link posts, adding humor where possible and appropriate. (Heck, I was even hired in part because I do have some professional comedy training.)

Certainly, many technical people aren't known for their comedy, and the only thing less funny than zero-humor content is humor content from people who aren't actually funny. But if someone in the IT department has this talent, it should be encouraged, not repressed due to a stifling corporate culture. Investors and clients will know you're serious from the job you do - and you can do a better job if you retain more relevant information.

By Brian Boyko

We've been covering the iPhone release and what it might mean for those in the IT department in a series of articles, including: "Why Apple's iPhone means more work for the IT department," and "I, Phone: could the Apple iPhone's broad consumer appeal present a formidable threat to enterprise networks?"

There was one aspect that we really did not consider, and that was from the international perspective. The iPhone really doesn't bring anything absolutely new or revolutionary to the table - it just seems new and revolutionary because consumer cellphone and mobile development in North America has lagged behind Europe and Asia. So, from a global perspective, as NPD reader David Deans pointed out, these problems aren't new. He posted at NPD and we engaged in an e-mail conversation which may be of some interest to our readers:

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Continue reading "Enterprise Apps, Safari, and Consumer Adoption: A discussion on the iPhone and how mobile computing will affect IT." »

Julie Bort interviewed George Kurian at Cisco in Network World, where they talk about WAN optimization.

The interview talks about how Cisco's optimization and acceleration products are distinguished from competitors' and (of course, considering that George Kurian works for Cisco) promoted as superior because of their transparent placement in the network. This means they can be shared among several servers and applications, as well as integrated with Cisco's existing products, and QoS and security policies do not have to be migrated or disrupted. One item only barely touched upon is the idea of using a single appliance in the branch office - the Integrated Service Router - to handle WAN optimization, security, and routing - and how having one appliance to handle all these tasks helps cut down on server room clutter and complexity.

To be sure, these appear to be advantages to Cisco's solution. But the dirty little secret is that all WAN optimization solutions on the market, including Cisco's, obscure end-to-end performance metrics. This is a major issue, of course, and makes the current state of choosing whether or not to deploy a WAN optimization solution a Monty Hall problem - do you opt to retain visibility into your network performance and the ability to solve problems faster, or you deploy a WAN optimization device and hope that whatever's behind curtain number two (the resulting performance gain) is better than what you've traded for?

Maintaining transparency of response time and latency metrics is critical in our view and any WAN optimization vendor that provides a solution to this problem will have a serious competitive advantage.