People will use the iPhone at their jobs the way they use Blackberrys now.
To the end-user, the iPhone is a personal cellphone, with no more need of IT scrutiny then their current phones. To the IT department, the iPhone is a mobile computer, increasing the complexity of the network and creating an additional demand of resources.
The iPhone's rumored "phone over WiFi" capabilities means that even if you don't intend to roll out VoIP, you may still be dealing with converged traffic on your network.
The iPhone's web browsing capability may draw additional bandwidth.
The iPhone would be used as a gateway to SaaS software such as Google Docs and Salesforce.com.
The iPhone is small enough to steal, requiring data to be secured.
Now that we know a little bit more about it, we can start to revise some of our predictions of how the IT department will have to deal with the new iPhone.
For anyone who considers our recent data visualization experiment -- Netcosm --"just a toy," without serious purpose in a large enterprise network, I invite you to take another a look.
I've noticed something incredibly powerful and poignant when asking people what they think of Netcosm, the NetQoS experiment in 3-D network monitoring. By far, the comment most people give me is that "It kinda looks like 'Tron'" - despite the fact that, if you actually go back and look at "Tron" - Netcosm looks nothing like it. The only similarity is a conceptual one - both "Tron" and Netcosm give you the ability to "look inside the network."
But why "Tron" in particular? Why not "The Matrix," which, after all is a much more recent movie. Well, that has much to do with my sampling bias. I had been asking people in my generation - late 20-somethings and 30-somethings. And we all remember Tron from our childhood or young adulthood.
If you ask a young 20-something what Netcosm looks like, they're much more likely to say "It looks like the Matrix." And I've had one or two older Unix gurus tell me that Netcosm "looks like something out of Buck Rogers."
It should not be a surprise that we hold onto the memories of our childhoods first and most dearly.
We spoke with Jason Potkanski earlier for his work with Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension" project. But since we made contact with him, we found out that he was also the technical director of the expert alternativeto Wikipedia, Citizendium. While we had his attention, we decided to talk with him about the Citizendium project and what it takes to handle such an ambitious Web 2.0 project.
Citizendium is a LAPP (Linux,Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP) configuration, he explained. They went with PostgreSQL for a number of reasons, including better scalability. PostgreSQL is an MVCC database. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium never has to lock the database for reads and writes. MySQL can do a lot of things quick and replicate them to slave servers, but PostgreSQL excels at complex functions and full features like JOINs and can do complicated categories and full text searches faster than Wikipedia.
"The reason we went with PostgreSQL was threefold," Potkanski said. "First, to be different from Wikipedia. Second, we already had Greg Sabino Mullane, a core PostgreSQL developer, on board. Finally, we felt from reading various mailing lists over mediawiki development that mediawiki was hitting the ceiling of the features MySQL can provide as a backend."
There is a performance hit, however, with PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL has longer TCP setup times and reduces the amount of users Citizendium can serve compared to MySQL, Potkanski explained.
We - that is, NetQoS - recently had our customer service independently evaluated by First Market Research, to try to find out what our customers really thought about us. Apparently, they like us.
In the report, based on a 50-case telephone survey, eight out of ten NetQoS customers had "very favorable" opinions of NetQoS compared to other companies they deal with, citing excellent customer support and high quality products. They also said, overwhelmingly (9 out of 10) that our network performance management products and services have a beneficial impact on their organization, including lower costs, better resource utilization, ability to completely identify the source of problems, greater visibility of network traffic, ease of receiving help, quickly solving problems, and improving application performance.
Additionally, nine out of ten said it was "very likely" that they would recommend NetQoS to friends or colleagues, eight out of ten gave excellent ratings to NetQoS employees for competency, responsiveness, and accessibility. Nine out of ten customers also characterized their investment in NetQoS as "excellent" or "good."
Here's the kicker. 100 percent of customers in the 50-case study said that NetQoS employees are doing at least a "good" job - and 80 percent of them said that we're doing an "excellent" job.
(Continued with the wrestling reference explained, below…)
The Brain Behind Paintball Artist Bilal: ‘Domestic Tension’ Sysadmin Jason Potkanski talks about how he helped keep the paintball-via-webcam site running.
Jason Potkanski, who works at the Citizendium Foundation, read the Chicago Tribune Daywatch, to find Wafaa Bilal’s site, Domestic Tension. He looked at the site and saw that it was getting swamped over a DSL link. He sent Ben Chang, lead software programmer of the project, an e-mail offering help, and got an answer back the next day. He visited the project site at the Flatfile Galleries on the 11th – a day when the gun was down most of the day due to the strain that the Internet was placing on the connection – the DSL line and commercial-grade router they used were taking a beating from the Slashdot-like effect of a small pipe.
He immediately offered some performance optimization techniques, such as setting keepalives to 3, and installing eAcellerator to speed up the PHP script, replacing the memory inefficient tail function for the chat. And of course, he told Bilal that he would need a dedicated line to the Internet, and by the next day, they got an OC3-quality connection to Steadfast, at Equinex in Chicago. Immediately he saw an improvement.
He also mounted the webcam image and chatlog/shooter log via NFS, remoted in to do the mounts and copy the application over to the Steadfast connection.
Another problem was the use of XML requests, which wasn’t viable on all browsers, and the fact that the original configuration kept three separate requests open for the chat, the shooter log, and the web cam.
If he had the system to design all over again, he’d design it to use a backend database for the logging features, combine the shooter log and chat so that the application requires only two keepalive connections, not three.
Wafaa Bilal is a man being driven slowly insane, and I think I may have had something to do with it.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story - which we've covered previously - Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal has locked himself in a room for 30 days with a paintball gun, which can be aimed and fired from an Internet Web site, by anyone who wishes to do so. He's done this primarily to make a point about distance, technology, and humanity - the idea that we are sending real bombs into a "conflict zone" from the safety of a "comfort zone" and how that makes us more likely to inflict pain, suffering, and death.
But his original plan might have been more than he bargained for. The article I wrote made it on the social news Web site, Digg.com and A-list blog, BoingBoing, where it was elevated to the front page. Network Performance Daily got over fifty thousand unique visitors from that exposure - I have no idea how many then went on to Wafaa's site. From the machine-gun sounds on his most recent video diary, I suspect quite a few.
Wondering what this might look like from a network perspective? Here's a video of experimental NetQoS' network monitoring technology that gives you an approximation of what that Digg/Slashdot effect looks like.
While we hope to have an interview dealing with the technical aspects of Wafaa's "Digging," - and they are considerable - up soon, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the human aspects. Wafaa has been putting up a video journal of the days inside the locked room as his time inside progresses. And on day 14, well - you can just see for yourself below what happened.
Wafaa is visibly shaken, and things have quickly become "insane." If Wafaa's intention was to create a microcosm of conditions in Iraq - a model, in effect, of what it is like to live in the combat zone, then what have I, and Network Performance Daily, become in this model? Certainly, Wafaa wanted attention for the project - and I don't doubt that's ultimately what he believes will do the most good - but through this exposure, I have to ask myself whether or not I'm acting in a manner consistent with journalistic ethics (Yes, this is a company blog, but we don't hide that, and I do take ethics very seriously). Ultimately, I must report the truth while seeking to minimize harm. Instead, through our promotion of the project, Wafaa Bilal was hurt physically and harmed emotionally - possibly endangering his mental health as well.
And in Wafaa's model of a war-torn country inside four walls, I've become part of the war. I've become the media hawks who overtly or tacitly call for the war, by promoting the site and giving people access to that virtual battlefield.
So yes, even I fit into this model that Wafaa has cooked up… and ultimately, the experiment is not occurring inside those four walls. Like Douglas Adams' penned fictional character "Wonko the Sane," Wafaa has locked himself "outside" of the real world where the insane people who cause people lasting pain for a few brief moments of pleasure. The experiment is truly not in the Chicago Art Institute, but everywhere but there. After all, it is not Wafaa who pulls the trigger on that gun. It is us, outside of the "asylum."
Later on, I hope to talk to Jason Potkanski, who helped set up much of the networking backend for Domestic Tension - but before I did so, I wanted to be able to get that off my chest.
Everybody is getting ready for the Memorial Day Weekend and winding up from Interop, but I thought it would be cool to post some of the pictures I took of some of the strange things I saw while attending Interop.
Feel free to post your own captions in our comments section.
Guerrilla marketers for Dice.com
Powered up and ready to go.
The Interop globe in the lobby.
Of all the attendees, Bluecat, an IPAM solutions provider, clearly had the coolest booth.
We recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Bruce Clark, VP of sales at Network Instruments, and Charles Thompson, manager of sales and engineering at Network Instruments at the Network Instruments booth at Interop, where they talked about how they were working with the Interop NOC and talked about some of the experiences that they’ve had at Interop.
Network Instruments has a 8TB GigaStor appliance set up to obtain data from the Interop show floor – a sponsorship earned when they worked with Interop last fall in New York City, and they were able to look at the data going across the show’s Class A network, according to Thompson.
“The traffic level has been fairly consistent,” Thompson said. “A lot more BitTorrent than I guess I would have imagined at this particular showcase venue. It’s mostly Web traffic – some email traffic. A couple of the organizations seem to have SQL servers up and running, generating a fair amount of data across the network here.“
“We can dial in – I saw some MP3s going across, some people downloading music, random files, looked like there were some system images going across there as well.”
Bruce Clark talked a bit about the success they’ve been having at Interop as well.
Glenn Evans cheekily lists his title as “Supreme Ruler” on his official Interop badge. This is no delusion of grandeur. He’s the Lead Network Engineer for Interop, and we had a chance to sit down with him and ask him some questions about what setting up a major network installation in a conference center over a short period of time entails.
Glenn Evans: It takes about seven or eight months of the year just to get Interop rolling. We start with an RFP process about six of seven months out for the show. For example, for the 2007 show year, we started our RFP process in October of 2006. We send out a generic request where the basic design parameters are that you have to build a network that operates across the show environments – that’s exhibit floor and conference space – and it has to work and be capable of no downtime.
We ask the vendors, requesters, or whatever we want to call it – what can you bring to the table? We then get responses back from a number of vendors across all facets of the networking industry. We filter through those and make our final selections, and that’s who the sponsors are going to be.
From that stage, we go to the vendor design phase. In general, when we’re selecting the vendors, we put a basic design in mind, and we select vendors based around that. We then sort of go in and refine the design, streamline it. That usually starts about January of the show year with a general meeting in our offices in San Francisco, bringing the vendors together and hash everything out. I sort of explain my expectations, what I’d like to do, and then we all work together to bring them to fruition.
By Brian Boyko
