On Friday, January 5, 2007, this blog published an article from an interview with Professor Christopher Yoo.

We have some important information regarding that article.

We originally conducted the interview with Professor Yoo on Wednesday, January 3, 2007, quickly edited a first-draft for a transcript, and sent it to him for his review - to make sure that his words were accurately transcribed, and that we were not doing damage to the substance or spirit of his words.

On January 4, 2007, Prof. Yoo sent us two e-mail messages pointing out flaws in the article, and making corrections - e-mail messages that we did not receive. We do not know what happened to those e-mail messages. We have looked in our e-mail archives, in our spam filters, even checked to see if the e-mails were somehow misrouted through one of our mailing list filters. The e-mail messages did not get to our network.

On our end, we heard complete silence by the time we had our press deadline on Friday. On Friday afternoon, January 5, 2007, we published the article as it stood. It was quickly picked up by Slashdot.org.

On Saturday, January 6, 2007, Prof. Yoo wrote back, telling us that he was very upset about the article's publication, and wondered why we had not made the corrections that he requested. On Sunday, January 7, 2007, I checked my e-mail remotely and found Prof. Yoo's January 6 e-mail.

After an e-mail exchange and a phone conversation, I agreed that though it was through no direct fault of our own, the article had done him a disservice and resolved to repair any inaccuracy or anything that would be unfair to his words or image.

Because the article was linked to on Slashdot, it is very unlikely that this correction will receive the same notoriety that the original one did. We are trying to correct this and have written to Rob Malda, editor of Slashdot, hoping that they can help correct the error by placing this correction notice in a "Slashback" post.

The corrected article appears below. We have also promised Prof. Yoo a right of reply to the blog - if he wishes to make a post explaining the situation in his own words, he needs only to send an e-mail to either of the e-mail addresses we have provided him, and we will post his words as they came to us.

-- Brian Boyko
-- Editor, Network Performance Daily.

(Corrected article appears below)

Continue reading "Clarification: A Case for Non-Neutrality" »

[Editorial Note: As of January 7, 2006, we have been contacted by Prof. Yoo, who has said that he sent us some clarifications and corrections that we did not receive before publication deadline. As such, the article that appears in this space has been retracted. An explanation of what occured and the corrected version of the article that contains Prof. Yoo's corrections can be found at this location. Those with questions about the article can e-mail brian.boyko at netqos dot com with any questions or concerns.]

On NetQoS's internal boards, this news item from ZDNet prompted a discussion over Net Neutrality; and we had various questions and concerns about how recent developments would impact the Internet and our position as a network monitoring company. Below are some of the most insightful comments from the discussion that ensued.

Because it is a contentious issue, we have invited a few outsider experts to provide commentary. Tomorrow we will have commentary from Prof. Christopher Yoo at Vanderbilt University Law School, and we plan to follow it up in the future with commentary from other Net Neutrality issue experts as their schedules may allow.

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Continue reading "Network Neutrality Debate: An Introduction and Discussion" »

By Ben Haley

I’m a developer for NetQoS, and I’ve been mulling over the idea that Cisco is planning to take the IOS in their routers and break it into different modules, which they can then provide separately. As a developer I am always interested in architecture, but as a customer do I really care how the code is implemented? After all, I buy a router to direct traffic. My main interests are that it does this reliably, quickly and for a reasonable cost. What difference does it make if the IOS comes feature-by-feature or in a single package deal? In this case I believe the change will be very positive.

The IOS is the Internet operating system for the router. Everyone tends to think of the router as a piece of hardware you plug in, but it’s really a specialized computer that has an operating system on it that can be tweaked to do different things. Every switch and every router has some type of operating system built into it. In fact, people have been able to figure out how to install Linux on a few models of consumer routers and add new capabilities.

Moving to a modular system provides some interesting ideas. For IT administrators, it might increase the cost, or if relatively few features are needed, save money. (Cisco, I think, tends to make money on the hardware, not on the software.) Either way, it’s an interesting concept to say “How would you do this, and what would be the impact?”

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Continue reading "Thoughts on Cisco's Modular IOS" »

By Brian Boyko

In the first tentative months of Network Performance Daily, I can come to a very simple conclusion: We are probably going to end up learning more about the new medium of blogging than we currently know.

We've had some successes; both of our articles on Windows Vista's TCP/IP stack landed on the front page of Slashdot. We've managed to reach out to a few people in the blogosphere including Lowell Heddings at DZone. However, I think we have a long way to go and we should not confuse high-profile links with effectively communicating with the public.

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Continue reading "Editorial: State of the Blog, Q1, 2007" »

by Joel Trammell

Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox) compliance puts a heavy burden on IT teams to implement identity management systems to track who made changes to financial information, when they did it, and how they did it. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. But we often take a look at solving the problem without taking a step back from it and consider whether or not it is a good idea in the first place - the history of engineering is filled with elegant solutions that produce more problems than they solve.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed as a result of numerous corporate scandals such as the ones at WorldCom (MCI), Enron and Tyco International. Unfortunately, the Act was passed without much thought given to the economic impact of the new rules and was crafted so quickly that many of the provisions are overly vague. The most burdensome area for companies is Section 404. Here is a summary from Soxlaw:

Issuers are required to publish information in their annual reports concerning the scope and adequacy of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting. This statement shall also assess the effectiveness of such internal controls and procedures.

The registered accounting firm shall, in the same report, attest to and report on the assessment on the effectiveness of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting.

This simple idea has increased the accounting costs for every public company (or company considering going public) by at least $2 million dollars per year. It is effectively a tax on public companies - paid to accounting firms and IT vendors.

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Continue reading "A Critical Look at Sarbanes-Oxley" »

By Brian Boyko

Well, 1996 is almost over and we’re really excited about the technologies of the upcoming year. At the risk of becoming Cassandra, I thought it might be fun to predict what 1997 holds for technology – don’t hold me to it, though!

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Continue reading "8 Tech Predictions for 1997 (made in 2006)" »

Katheryn Jager helped design this custom LEGO Factory kit of NetQoS headquarters and Austin, TX landmarks for each of our department heads. Here is a picture of lego bricks in general disarray in Steve Harriman’s (V.P. of Marketing) office, and below it, the assembled project in CEO Joel Trammell’s office.

Visible are (clockwise from bottom left) Town Lake, Pennybacker Bridge, the University of Texas Tower, the Texas State Capitol building, 100 Congress Avenue, One Congress Plaza, the Frost Bank Tower and the offices of NetQoS.

by Kevin Davis

It might not be possible to understate the importance of network visibility.

Without visibility, the last words captured on the black box flight recorder are likely to be "What's a mountain goat doing way up here in this cloud bank?" (Apologies to Gary Larson.)

Imagine attempting to manage network performance across an enterprise without knowing who is using the network, when they are using the network, and without knowing if the routers and switches are running at their limits, or are failing intermittently. Utter chaos.

So, how do you get visibility into your network?

Well, the main areas of visibility required to effectively manage a network for performance may be divided into three major categories:

End-to-end Response Time: On a per-application basis for business critical applications-the ability to understand the performance the user is experiencing, as well as to identify and isolate the source of a problem to the network, server, or application
Traffic Flow Data: The traffic utilization of network links (for WAN, MAN, and LAN) from SNMP and flow analysis from NetFlow monitoring or IPFIX data
Device Performance Information: The status and utilization of network devices themselves (especially routers, switches, and firewalls) via SNMP

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Continue reading "Network Visibility Techniques" »

For more information on this topic, you can download our Tech Brief on Cisco WAAS, available here

by Steve Fulton

Users expect a ubiquitous and instantaneous network, as well as consistent application performance. This, combined with a proliferation of business critical, Web 2.0, (and recreational) applications that consume precious WAN bandwidth, forces IT to get very creative in squeezing more performance out of existing infrastructure.

Hence the red-hot market for application acceleration and WAN optimization products that address WAN performance problems caused by latency, congestion, and applications (such as WAFS and CIFS) that were designed for the LAN and now have to traverse the WAN due to data center consolidation.

Cisco shook things up in late 2006 with the introduction of WAAS-short for Wide Area Application Services-technology that is transparent to the underlying network infrastructure. According to Cisco, WAAS combines WAN optimization, acceleration of TCP-based applications, and Cisco's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) in a single appliance or blade.

WAAS addresses problems related to traffic congestion that need some sort of optimization done at the branch. It complements Cisco's Application Control Engine (ACE), which is a data center optimization product that integrates server load balancing, application security, and unique virtual partitioning capabilities.

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Continue reading "WAAS Up with Cisco's WAN Optimization Initiative?" »