Contributed by Patrick Ancipink

While our regular blogger, Brian Boyko, is away for a little bit, I trolled through the non-election news today to find some interesting tidbits for Network Performance Daily readers.

It’s a topsy-turvy world: ITIL more popular in US than Europe?

As reported by Denise Dubie in Network World, a recent IDC research study generates some interesting finds regarding ITIL. Not only can following ITIL save you money, but there may be a reversal in the geographic adoption:

"ITIL adoption may be stronger in the Americans and Asia/Pacific than in Europe because IT managers feel that without the strong tires forced by ITIL between the business unit and IT, IT becomes less relevant and therefore easier to eliminate through layoffs," the research report reads.

For years, the knock on ITIL in the US is that, well, it seemed a little foreign and academic. (I remember taking a certification exam back in the late 90’s that seemed like it was written by a Dutch or German-speaking engineer and then hastily translated into British English. It took some rereading for my American brain to parse effectively. The V3 exam last year was better, but still a little thickly worded in the places. It could just be me—typical American.)

Anyway, ITIL or other process adoption is generally a good thing and can help break grid lock in IT organizations that still struggle with silos. We’re pushing for a dedicated Performance Management discipline in a future version, but until then it’s important to remember that performance measurements, baselines and SLAs are littered throughout ITIL.

The FCC vs. Dolly Parton

While there’s a Supreme Court case being heard right now that deals with the more classic media vs. FCC issues over using naughty words, there’s apparently another donnybrook brewing that pits the entertainment and microphone (yes that’s right, microphone) industries against an alliance between technology behemoths and the FCC. Not exactly Yankees vs. Red Sox, but it’s interesting:

Spearheaded by Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and Motorola (NYSE: MOT), the flexible use of the white-spaces spectrum could pave the way for more widespread use of broadband communications, particularly in rural areas, which traditionally have lagged in broadband access.

So the FCC approved what these tech giants wanted and drew the ire of:

A large group of entertainment, sports, and businesses figures had sounded the alarm that the use of the white spaces could interfere with their events. These ranged from entertainer Dolly Parton and the American Federation of Musicians to the NFL and Nascar.

In a nutshell, a concern from this group is that wireless microphone performance could be compromised by what Google, Microsoft and Motorola want to do with the white space. Not sure this is what they are getting at, but I don’t want my Google searches being broadcast at a Dolly Parton show.

As part of their solution for broadband, perhaps the FCC could look into Boyko’s idea about using VoIP white space for the last-mile.

Get out your valium.

Bloomberg: U.S. Stocks Drop, S&P 500 Sinks Most Since 2001 Terror Attacks

The Dow Jones Industrial Index, simultaneously economic barometer, canary in the coal mine, and metaphor for America’s hopes and dreams, has dropped 500 points in the worst slide since the September 11^th attacks.

Was it the Lehman bankruptcy, (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history,) that did it? Or the forced sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America? Or was it the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Or AIG needing a federal bailout?

No. It was me.

I removed the tag from my mattress that says “Do not remove,” and, well, it was the straw that broke the back of the American economy, apparently. Sorry about that.

More seriously, I’m sure that among those who still held Lehman Brothers stock Tuesday morning, those who managed to sell first ended up (relatively) happier than those who came after them. It just reinforces the idea that in today’s market, you need to take every step to monitor your network and be proactive about problems. (Because when the market is in a panic, you need to be making bad decisions faster and more reliably than anyone else out there.)

PCWorld: HP Announces 24,600 Layoffs in Wake of EDS Acquisition

When it rains, it pours.

Hewlett-Packard will lay off about 24,600 employees over the next three years in an effort to streamline the company following its US$13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems last month, the company announced Monday.

The layoffs will be part of a three-year restructuring program, HP said in a statement. The company will lay off about 7.5 percent of its workers during that time, with nearly half of the reductions coming from HP's U.S. workforce, HP said.

Can things get any worse?

Cnet: Forrester slices 2009 IT spending projection

That was supposed to be a rhetorical question!

IT spending is expected to rise 5.4 percent this year, revised from previous Forrester projections of a 2.8 percent increase.

But next year, growth in IT spending is expected to get whacked down to 6.1 percent from previous projections of a 10 percent increase.

Forrester, which revises its annual projections on a quarterly basis to reflect changes in the economy, attributed the changes to its most recent projections based on the drama that is sweeping across the economy and world markets.

"We think the economy will turn (for the worse) in the third quarter, and if that happens, we'll see a significant slowdown in IT spending in the fourth quarter and then the first and second quarters," said Andrew Bartels, a research analyst with Forrester Research.

It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists. Does anyone out there have a blade?

Network World: Cisco to enter blade server market?

In a bulletin issued this week as a preview to Cisco’s Sept. 16 analyst conference, investment firm UBS states that Cisco is likely to enter the blade server market within a year. The firm cites “industry checks” as its source but did not say whether the company’s entry would be through acquisition or organic development….

…Cisco last year announced a $150 million stake in server virtualization software vendor VMware; unveiled an appliance to control pooled data center compute resources; and this year rolled out switches with increasing application intelligence and unified transport fabrics to gain more control over the source, destination and flow of data center traffic.

Blade servers are the next most obvious piece when it come to filling out this strategy, observers such as UBS note.

So, I guess it’s not all bad news for today.

NetQoS Google Community/Forum

One of the things that we’re trying to do at NetQoS is to get more dialogue and exchange within the customer community.  Network performance monitoring is complex and engineers are coming up with wonderful ideas using our products and other vendors’ products as well.  Ideas too good not to share.

We’ve set up a Google Community-slash-Forum for our customers at Google Groups.  Why Google Groups?  Well, we want a more robust platform to support profiles and more customer-to-customer interaction, but for right now, we just want to build the community up so that we can justify the building or licensing of said robust platform. 

Sadly, only NetQoS customers are allowed to join up to the Google Group above.  Then again, we can always set up another group for Network Performance Daily fans – leave a comment if you’re interested.

McCain’s speech lighter on bandwidth, hosted on YouTube.

In contrast to Barack Obama’s convention speech, which was available direct from the VNC in high definition using Microsoft Silverlight, the GOP decided to put McCain’s speech out there in standard definition on YouTube.  It was available in both a standard quality and high quality (that’s compression and resolution, not a value judgement of the rhetorical content). 

As we promised, we repeated the test for McCain’s speech that we did for Obama’s – McCain clocks in at 146MB standard quality/384MB high quality for a 60 minute speech.  If you recall, Obama’s speech clocked in at 1.11GB. 

Ego Boost

In NetQoS’s never-ending effort to get you (the reader) to know everything that is going on with NetQoS, NetQoS has signed up for the “Friendfeed” service. The service allows you to keep up with everything NetQoS including NetQoS press releases, NetQoS twitter posts, NetQoS del.icio.us bookmarks, and of course, posts from Network Performance Daily, the official company blog of NetQoS. You can subscribe to NetQoS’s friendfeed by going to http://friendfeed.com/netqos.

When the WAN makes more sense than the cloud

Johna Till Johnson at Network World talks about the pressures of shifting computing from the WAN to the cloud, citing consumer adoption of VoIP and Video Streaming over the Internet, and arguing that application-layer security can do as good a job as a private network. However, she puts out that quality of cloud applications has varied wildly, and notes that carrier Ethernet prices are becoming more affordable. She also notes that outsourced applications will do what they need to in order to bring their costs down, sacrificing quality for lower bandwidth needs. An interesting read which may help you decided which applications, if any, to bring to the cloud.

Up and Running, Still Not That Good.

Silicon Alley Insider says this about “Google Killer” Cuil:

When we spoke to [Cuil CEO] Tom [Costello] last week, he basically conceded that Cuil still isn't going to offer up good results every time. But he argued that we ought to be impressed that we get anything at all:

"Search is a kind of magic. You're trying to produce meaningful results for people with computers that deep down, don't really understand anything. So the fact that it works at all is a kind of a miracle. It's sleight of hand."

“Search is a kind of magic?” I imagine it’s more J.O.B. Bluth than Lord Voldemort…

In the meantime “Cuil” is morphing into the antonym of “Google” as a verb. It is now Internet slang for having searched for something and not being able to find it.

We're all a bit busy - a big chunk of us are at Interop setting up our booth (shameless plug!), and I'm working on taking symposium presentations and making video and multimedia presentations out of them. 

But there are a few interesting articles out there that we thought you'd like to see.

First, Pmarca.com has an interesting rundown of the likely scenarios that would happen if Microsoft tried a hostile takeover of Yahoo!

That's not enthusiasm, shock, or other exclamation.  It's just that I needed to end that sentence with Yahoo! and Yahoo! has the exclamation point in their name.

Secondly, Network World's Steve Taylor talks about the misperceptions of the NOC, a topic which Jim Metzler talked about at Symposium.  You can hear a podcast Dr. Metzler did on the subject here. 

And finally, Richard Stallman stopped by Network Performance Daily to leave a comment on an article which talked about two things: rumored changes in MySQL's open-source status (which turned out to be unfounded), and, as an aside, Dungeons and Dragons. 

Naturally, RMS wanted to talk about Dungeons and Dragons.

I'll be frank - I couldn't think of a good idea for an article today. There are a couple of interesting links in the news, of course, which I could share with you. And we will get to those in a second, but…

…truth is, I wanted to get a little introspective about things.

This blog is based on Movable Type v.3, and while we can talk about what I should have done, switching to a different system, such as WordPress really didn't make a whole lot of sense.

The one problem that MT had was that we were getting deluged with spam. Hundreds of spam messages a day.

Now, there is a setting that is supposed to catch junk posts. However, this was worse than useless, as it didn't catch a great deal of the junk messages - and it was classifying some good messages as junk mail. In fact, I think it might have been classifying most good messages as junk mail, which may be one of the reasons that we didn't get many comments on this blog for - oh, the first 16 months or so.

A few weeks ago, we moved to a CAPTCHA based system, using ReCAPTCHA. This has been working well - we've gotten more comments, more frequently, and spam is almost entirely gone. Yeah, I know CAPTCHAs are a pain, but it's the only solution we can think of at this time.

Still, 16 months of bad comment moderation may have discouraged regular readers from becoming regular commenters. What I'd like to ask is that, if you've tried to comment in the past but got discouraged, try it now. And if it still doesn't work, for whatever reason, feel free to send me an e-mail to my work address, brian.boyko@netqos.com. I really could use your suggestions for stories to investigate or issues in technology to talk about.

That said, here are those interesting links:

New York Times: Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out:

EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that "the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction." Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed.

For Cesar DeLaRosa, 15, however, the concern is more specific. He said he was worried about his science project on global warming.

"If we don't have Internet, that means I've got to take the bus to the public library after dark, and around here, that's not always real safe," Cesar said, seated in front of his family's new computer in a gritty section of Hunting Park in North Philadelphia. His family is among the 1,000 or so low-income households that now have free or discounted Wi-Fi access through the city's project, and many of them worry about losing access that they cannot otherwise afford. Philadelphia officials say service will not be disconnected.

"We expect EarthLink to live up to its contract," said Terry Phillis, the city's chief information officer.

The problem was that EarthLink's plans required more routers than they initially predicted, which makes me wonder if those predictions were tested on smaller scales first. However, there is no problem with the technology - it performs as advertised. The problem is that there's no real clear way to make a profit from that technology - which, to me, makes it an ideal service that the municipality should provide, rather than outsourcing it to a private company.

George Ou: Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control:

George Ou at ZDNet claims that "swarming" is causing a significant bandwidth problem, and goes to great lengths to explain why, in a four page article.

Simply by opening up 10 to 100 TCP streams, P2P applications can grab 10 to 100 times more bandwidth than a traditional single-stream application under a congested Internet link. Since all networks have a bottleneck somewhere, a small percentage of Internet users utilizing P2P can hog the vast majority of resources at the expense of other users. The following diagram illustrates the multi-stream exploit in action where User A hogs more and more bandwidth over User B by opening more and more TCP streams.

But as I read it, it seemed a bit dubious to me. After all, if my multiple TCP-stream connection on my home computer allowed me to have multiple bandwidth links, wouldn't that mean that a download on BitTorrent of a Linux distribution operating at max capacity would be faster than a single TCP stream and FTP connection to a server? In practice, I've found that both speeds are roughly equal - except when there's a lot of demand on the server side; like the first few days after a new Ubuntu version comes out. Then the multiple TCP streams come in handy because they are coming from multiple TCP connections to different locations. But it's impossible for the multiple TCP connections to take up more bandwidth than had been allocated by the service provider under their QoS policies.

Where there is some validation to this is when the pipe gets completely congested to the point that the available bandwidth per user is less than the bandwidth allocation provided by the ISP to the individual users. In other words, it only occurs when the provider has under-provisioned for the network demand and is delivering less than promised to begin with.

Ou suggests an update to the TCP/IP stack that prevents this problem, but for ISPs, the solution is simpler. Either add more bandwidth so that you can deliver the service promised, or promise less if you can't deliver.

PC World: Tech Workers favor McCain, Obama:

Not getting into politics, but this little fact from the article is interesting:

The survey, of 600 self-identified IT workers, found that 27 percent have used the Internet to contribute to a political campaign. By comparison, less than 0.3 percent of U.S. residents have contributed more than US$200 to a U.S. political campaign during the 2008 election cycle.

Which implies that the techies, who by definition are likely to be Internet savvy, are highly politically motivated and therefore very interested in events from the 2008 presidential race.

Hmm, did you experience a bump in recreational network traffic around the time of Obama's speech on race?

We've recently been linked to by Slashdot again, and we're getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, so we thought this would be an opportune time to "share the love."

Recently, I found out about Ryan Davis, a network engineer at the University of Missouri. He's publishing a personal blog dealing in large part with network engineering called RyanDavis.net, and one of his first posts is a review of O'Reilly Publishing's "Network Warrior: Everything you need to know that wasn't on the CCNA exam"

Here's a quick excerpt, but if you're interested, you really should read the whole thing at RyanDavis.net:

Network Warrior bills itself as "Everything you need to know that wasn't on the CCNA exam" and that claim is quite accurate. The book is very Cisco centric, both covering configuration examples in CatOS (considered by most to be deprecated) and IOS. While I don't come from a Cisco background (but just about every other background) I still found this book very enjoyable because it combined the Why with the How. I should explain…

Most books on network engineering topics, or even computer or technical topics in general, usually cover one of two sides of the field; either the history and theory behind a technology, or the implementation and maintenance of its solutions. I feel like this book joins the two. In doing so it really fills in the gaps that I found in my expertise where I either knew about something, but not how to do it, or vice versa. By creating a bridge between the two, author Gary A. Donahue provides the catalyst for several of those "Ah-Ha!" moments, even for seasoned professionals.

So much happening in the world of network management software today, here's a quick look:

2008 Network Computing Awards Finalist - Cast Your Vote Today

The NetQoS Performance Center has been named as a finalist for the 2008 Network Computing Awards for "Test and Monitoring Product of the Year" based on the number of user nominations. Network Computing readers are now able to vote for finalists in each category until March 3rd - all you need to provide is a valid e-mail address when casting the vote. The results are announced on March 13th.

We really want to win this thing, mostly because there's a rumor going around the office that if we win, everyone in the company will get a cookie and a gold star sticker, so please go vote for us.

Jogging and drinking. It's almost a good idea.

Donald Johnstone, one of our QA testers wanted to promote the "First Annual South Austin Gulp It Down And Run Around," coming up on February 2nd at Austin's Circle C Metropolitan park. It's a one mile race with required beer drinking every quarter mile, and the proceeds from the $10.00 entry fee goes to help April Delaware, who was diagnosed with MS.

Designated drivers are required for all runners, so I suppose the only problem with it is that they scheduled it for the cold February and didn't wait until it got a little warmer around St. Patrick's Day. You could also get rid of that long name which is hard to remember, and replace it with something memorable, say, "The Green Mile."

The Obligatory Link to A Story from Slashdot

Slashdot is such a cool site and Rob Malda, a cool enough guy, that you really should be visiting it every day. That is, provided you haven't already subscribed to its RSS feed. In case you missed this one, one IT/Ask Slashdot post poses the question: How do I become an IT/IS Manager? The answers run the gamut, but mainly boil down to: "Know the business side of IT," "Show you can do it," and more than a few guys asking: "Why?"

Ars Technica: AT&T Takes Another Step Towards Filtered Network with Investment in Vobile

AT&T announced in June that it would develop technology designed to prevent copyright infringement on its network - by, presumably, deep packet inspection combined with technology designed to identify video. Now they're investing in Vobile, a company that makes a screening technology that supposedly can identify videos as they're being transmitted over the Internet.

Vobile's core product is a screening technology that it calls "VideoDNA." Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.

Continue reading "Network Performance Links: In Russia, Computer Reboots You." »

ComputerWorld: 2007 Jobs Report Snapshots

Ever wanted to feel depressed about how much money you're making? Wait no longer! ComputerWorld has published their annual survey of IT salaries.

IT salaries have risen at a slow but steady pace since hitting rock-bottom in 2002. Here are the IT pay raises from 1987 to 2007…

The 2007 median annual base salary is $80,000 (half the salaries are above the median, and half are below). For senior management, the median annual base salary is $115,000; for middle management, it's $88,000; and for staff/technical positions, it's $70,000.

Continue reading "Network Performance Management Daily Links" »