Monday, July 02, 2007
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.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Check out our update of this story with added editorial commentary.
*Another update on Wafaa Bilal and Recreational Network Traffic
By Brian Boyko
I recently interviewed Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American who teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. He's currently part of an exhibit there called "Domestic Tension." There may be a lesson there for those who work in consolidated data centers.
Bilal moved his entire living room into the gallery and now spends 24 hours a day, 7 days a week over 30 days in an enclosed space, and his only companion is a paintball gun hooked up to a Web cam, which can be aimed and fired by people who go to a Web page.
And over the past 13 days, there have been over 6,500 shots taken at him. Some near his head - which, because he doesn't wear any protection other than goggles, can cause serious injury.
Even though shooting a man with a paintball gun over the Internet probably won't kill him, it seems to me to be more than art - but also a psychological test about the human condition. People who choose to aim and fire the gun at him are doing so knowing that they hurt him - but either they show no remorse when they inflict pain - a hypothesis that I'm not keen to accept but would be foolish to dismiss - or because the distance and remoteness of the location "on the Internet" is dehumanizing, and people do things anonymously behind an IP address that they'd never do when people can see your face.
While it may not be as extreme as shooting paintballs at end-users, IT departments are notorious for having staffs that are removed from the concerns of the people who actually use information technology they provide, create, and maintain. But at least an IT staff usually worked in the same building as the people they served - now, IT staffs can be continents away in a consolidated data center. With the tyranny of distance creating a dehumanizing factor, it's just that much harder to remember that the end-user experience is really what matters in maintaining a network.
The interview with Wafaa Bilal follows.
(Continued...)
Continue reading "Recreational Network Traffic News: Interview with Wafaa Bilal - Lessons about dehumanization and technology from a man living under the gun" »
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
By Brian Boyko
The article by Detective Lounsbury has been delayed while we double-check some information in the article, but it will be published tomorrow. In the meantime, we did some more research on some of the misconceptions of this case.
We called up Steve DelGiorno, CEO of ComputerCOP software, which makes some of the forensic software used in this case. We looked at the whitepaper they had on ComputerCOP Professional and the software seems designed to recover hidden and deleted files from a computer, but did not mention anything about tracking the source of the files.
Mr. DelGiorno stated in a phone conversation with us that while ComputerCOP can find all sorts of files and images, including deleted images or images in unallocated disk space, by keyword or by filetype, ComputerCOP does not determine the cause of those files being on the computer (whether caused by malware, intrusion, or direct and willful use), and that it is not the function of ComputerCOP to make that determination.
On Thursday we will have a news-analysis editorial concluding our coverage of the Amero case, as well as discussing the relevance of the Amero case for professionals in IT.
Brian Boyko is editor of Network Performance Daily
Monday, November 20, 2006
by Cathy Fulton
Monitoring business transactions over the network has never been more critical to operational efficiency. Yet, there’s much confusion over methodology.
The implementation choices consist of different deployment strategies (client-site or server-site, agent or appliance) and distinct monitoring technologies (active or passive). Each of these options has individual strengths and weaknesses. This series of articles discusses industry best practices for effectively monitoring business transactions in a global environment.
Part 1 of 2: Deployment Strategies
One of the most important decisions is the deployment strategy for the business monitoring solution. Should monitors be deployed at the client sites or should they be deployed at the data centers? Should software agents or hardware appliances be used? While this may seem like a minor matter, it has the most serious ramifications from both an immediate “headache” and long-term recurring cost standpoint.
Continue reading "Best Practices for Monitoring Business Transactions, part 1 of 2" »
