Saying that your business should never, never, never use cloud-based applications instead of desktop or network/server based ones is about as ridiculous as saying that cloud-based applications will eventually replace IT completely.  

With an article that begins with “Cloud computing apps are for suckers. If there is an alternative that runs locally on your own machine, it will always be better,” John C Dvorak, seems to be going from “baiting Mac users” to “baiting Google users.”

But let’s just take the argument at face value.  Some of the points he makes are good ones – specifically, the ones with performance issues. 

I don't care if you have 30-megabit-per-second service—you'll get flaky performance from most online apps, especially if they're popular. Always remember that your online speed is only as good as the speed at which data is coming at you: The application server may be swamped, and the various nodes along the route could become clogged, too. Nothing is ever as fast as the machine sitting on top of (or beneath) your own desk.

Your desktop is faster than the cloud – that’s true - but is your car?  Information stored in the cloud can be accessed from any place with a Net connection.  Information stored locally can only be accessed locally – well, unless you connect through a VPN or set up a VNC server.  But even for those of us that know how to do it, a VNC server is a hassle, and a security risk unless you do it exactly right.  90 minutes is horrendous downtime for an enterprise application, and Dvorak is right so far as any application where 90 minutes downtime is unacceptable shouldn’t be put on the cloud. 

But there are plenty of applications – and for small-to-medium companies, e-mail is one of them – where the losses incurred from 90 minutes of downtime is less than the cost of having a dedicated in-house application installed and maintained on the network.  (If the opposite is true, don’t use cloud computing, use the in-house application, and keep an eye on how it performs.)

Dvorak also points out that your data is at the mercy of the service provider and that if the service is cut off, for whatever reason, so is your data.  That’s true, but if you don’t back-up your data, your data can be lost by a hard drive crash.  Both are about as likely to happen, in my experience. 

To Dvorak, “People tend to forget that software is NOT a service; the whole cloud scheme is a scam to lock users into a single product and somehow extract more money from them.”  There is some aspect of vendor lock-in, but mostly cloud computing is a way to provide an application at low startup costs in exchange for revenue over time – whether through advertising, in the case of Google’s apps, or through a subscription model.  Yes, it is very much “renting” rather than “owning,” but that can very well make financial sense in many cases. 

After that, the arguments get a bit silly. 

What happens if the net is attacked and your entire cloud world is gone for days and days? It just happened in the Republic of Georgia, and it can probably happen anywhere.

If the Russians start bombing us, John, I’m sure that the boss will give us a few days off. 

Ask yourself why the heck will we need six-core, high-performance chips if the cloud takes over everything?

Why do we need six-core, high-performance chips now?  In a virtualized server, certainly we’ll need power to spare, but unless you’re doing video editing or animation rendering, a six-core chip is probably overkill.  And if we stop putting the big iron in the datacenters of big companies (very unlikely,) they’ll pop up in the data centers of the SAAS providers. 

When it comes to performance and scalability, absolutely, standard client-server IT applications and local programs are going to have SAAS beat.  Final Cut Pro is not going to the cloud.  Photoshop isn’t going to the cloud (though Photoshop Elements is…).  But the key advantage of cloud computing isn’t performance or scalability – it is portability.  This is why people will pay twice as much for a laptop with the same specs as a desktop computer.  Mobility is important.   

According to this recent article in ComputerWorld:

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman Sachs & Co. released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

My reaction:

According to the article, the study showed that CIOs are:

• Looking to cut resources from contracted IT staff


• Not looking to start or fund “discretionary IT projects”


• Looking for solutions with a “high and fast ROI.”


• See the “greatest potential for cost reduction in IT in the area of networking equipment”


• See server virtualization and server consolidation as their top two priorities, with data center consolidation an additional priority.


• Do not see cloud computing as a priority

Let’s talk about a couple of these. First, the “high and fast ROI.”

It is notoriously difficult to prove IT’s return on investment. There is some truth to the idea that IT is a utility to big companies despite the fact that they do see it as a necessity. They don’t consider electrical power a profit generator either, but without it, the business grinds to a halt.

And unless you work in a software company, chances are that IT isn’t a “profit-generating center.” Troubling.

However, what IT can do is lower costs for the company as a whole. (Indeed, the theory of having all those newfangled computers in the first place is that it saves a fortune on cross-country pneumatic tubing and hundreds of thousands of file clerks sitting on typewriters. Not to mention all the wite-out you’d need). The trick is having a way to prove that you’re lowering costs and to quantify exactly which costs you’re lowering. For that, you need a way to baseline performance and a way to determine what the effect of each IT project and change was.

Additionally, being able to detect and track detrimental changes to the network before people start calling into the help desk shows in a more anecdotal sense the utility and power of a well-functioning IT department.

This is especially important when you consider server consolidation – powered by virtualization, running many servers on one box decreases costs but certainly increases complexity. Being able to rapidly detect problems as they occur not only can decrease mean time to repair, but helps isolate problems. In a complex system, little problems early in the chain tend to cause big problems later on down the chain.

With server consolidation comes data center consolidation – seen as a major cost-cutting measure. But what that does is increase the amount of traffic that’s traveling along low-bandwidth WAN links instead of high-bandwidth LAN links. All things are relative – as you bring the servers closer to home, you’re also moving the users farther out. Being able to monitor end-to-end performance in these conditions – and figure out ways to improve performance on the WAN, is critical.

The one big silver lining in this is that cloud computing is not yet a priority – meaning that there’s still room for in-house IT even as belts get tightened. Focus will be, it seems, on the LAN, WAN, and DAN, er, if you are a network engineer named Dan, for example, our Dan in our IT department. (I suppose that you could worry about LAN, WAN, and BILL, or LAN, WAN, and LAURA but neither of those rhyme.)

These are some of the notes sent to Tier two support from the help desk by a man who is referred to as “George,” on a Web site called: “The Chronicles of George”

[Name] is havening problems with getting on to network,shesays she gets nocked of the network.

[Name] is havening problems connectioning to the network

[Name] needs to dell servers  need to be installed

[Name] needed access microsoft network

she doesnt  have any off her driver install ,she said they aregone so when she went reinstall them back she recieved an error message that said”rp server is not availble”

he tried to install [program].but it said admin right ,he thinks as something with server.

he needs access  to the raz server

[Name] is not able to access her email throught the web base

[Name] needs access  to manger discusion datebase

[Name] needs permission to [Shared Network Drive]

[Name] is havening problems replicating his emails, he says gets and error that says he cannot find mail file server.

[Name] called and he is havening problems getting onto the network.

[Name] is recieving anerror that states  the server is not responding.

I had to type that out in Notepad because Word would automatically correct all the errors. 

So, why am I sharing this with you?  Because the help desk staff are, in far too many companies, the first people, besides the users, to know when there is degraded application performance.  And while 99.999% of help desk personnel are well versed in their field and their written language, sometimes you get George.  (And yes, the author points out that George is a native English speaker who is most likely not dyslexic.)

One of the reasons that it is so important to be proactive with network trouble prevention – having the guys in the NOC be the first to notice application performance problems – is because when you rely on the help desk, you’re hearing about the problem third-hand.  George illustrates the problem with having the end-user, who may not have the technical knowledge to adequately describe the problem to begin with, passing the information along to another person before it gets to the people who might be able to solve the problem.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Baseline magazine recently put out an article warning IT departments of under-30 "risk takers." Of course. Why not? Everyone knows that the youth are stuck up, and don't fit into corporate culture.

Being 29 years old a week from tomorrow, I was keenly interested (if giddily bemused) in what pejorative things they had to say about us brash young kids who are Ruining-It-For-Everybody™.

"Millenial workers are nearly twice as likely to use personal devices such as cell phones, PDAs and laptops in the workplace as their older counterparts."

Yes, from a security standpoint, an infected laptop or smartphone could provide trouble for the security of the network. But that also means the under-30s are more connected.

Let's look at this from a holistic standpoint. Yes, network security is important. But if personal computers and handhelds provide a more efficient way to get information, they enhance the power of the network. IT is about application delivery - and mobile devices might just be the most efficient way for Young Turks to get to the application. Yes, they can cause problems, but a NOC with automatic reporting can identify the problems quickly enough that the benefits of the always-connected employee outweigh the risks.

"Millenial workers are more than likely to use their work and personal computers for professional and personal use."

I admit that I do this. Sometimes, I need to use my personal Mac to edit video for work, or I need the computer at work to execute a Windows program. But again, this makes me more efficient. I often (after hours or on my lunch break, of course) use my work computer to send personal e-mail, and in fact, is one of the reasons I use Google Mail. Conversely, I log into Exchange to check, and send, work related e-mail from my personal computer at home if something needs my attention.

"Millenial workers believe they should have the right to use software of their choice on their work computers, regardless of its source."

NetQoS has a policy of allowing everyone to install whatever (legal) software they deem necessary to complete the work (as long as it doesn't affect other's network performance). As research for articles I write, I've got a variety of freeware programs, including GIMP, VirtualBox (virtualization software), various video editing programs and, the big one, Firefox, which I downloaded on day one. (I will never understand companies that make you use Internet Explorer in the name of "security")

I've worked at places where we were severely limited in the programs we could have. There's a reason I'm not working at those places anymore - the lack of trust in the ability for a person to choose their own software - their own tools - shows a lack of trust in the ability of the person. And it paints IT as productivity preventer rather than enabler.

This is not to suggest that there should be complete anarchy on the network. But when the IT department locks down everything, it creates more of a productivity hassle than any damage that a virus or hacker can do. There are unsecure apps out there, and the good judgment of the majority does not make up for the poor judgment of the minority. But with that said, why punish the majority for the transgressions of the minority.

It is not, after all, the downloading of malicious apps which affects the network - it is the traffic that those malicious apps produce. Instead of trying to control the application on the desktop (and relying on security on the user/desktop level is futility at best) it's better to control access to the network. You can put computers with out-of-date antivirus or unauthorized apps on an alternative network. You can use anomaly detection to find malicious traffic before it does damage. But there are a whole host of options between application anarchy and resorting to the draconian measures of a culture of complete control.

"While Millenial workers are more likely to visit unauthorized Web sites and install unauthorized applications, they are also more aware of security risks then their Gen X counterparts."

"Millenial workers are slightly more aware of what it takes to secure their apps and devices."

These could easily translate as: "Don't worry. We know what we're doing." And while those have been famous last words a number of times, in this case, I don't think it's ironic. But more importantly, security should never be left to the end-user. We've tried it countless times, it doesn't work. If you rely on defenses at the edge, your network is only as secure as your least security savvy employee.

This next one is very important:

"While all workers want access to technology and devices, each group reports little to no productivity gains as a result. Millenials, however, are more likely to perceive productivity gains from collaboration and Web-based apps." [Emphasis added]

When you think of Web based apps, you immediately consider the network. This is a generation raised on MySpace and Facebook, and Google Maps, and Google Mail, and Google Analytics, and Yahoo Answers, and Wikipedia - this is the generation of the Web based app. These are the tools that the upcoming generation is comfortable with. And the people who develop tools know this. This is why application performance - especially for Web based apps, is so crucial.

In the end, Baseline put out a separate article a few days later, pointing out that under-30s in IT had benefits as well as drawbacks. But why should we believe them? Everyone knows that you can't trust anyone over thirty.

June 16, 2007, Network World:

"We're telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says. "This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities and it's important that it be recognized as such."

March 6, 2008, Network World:

During a media conference at its San Francisco headquarters today, Apple unwrapped a host of new features that are designed to make the iPhone more attractive to corporate users.

Six months is a long time in the tech world…

We've warned that eventually the iPhone would be appearing on corporate networks and that the new (at that time) devices would introduce vulnerabilities into the corporate network and take additional resources. What we weren't counting on was Apple making overtures to enterprise networking - we had assumed that, much like the original iPhone was hacked to run on multiple carriers, that those who wanted to use the iPhone for enterprise applications would have to provide their own, messy, stop-gap solutions.

Back in January of 2007, when the iPhone was first announced, we wrote:

"That's another question - will this device have VPN support so that traveling employees can get the information they need while on the road? And if they do - how do you secure the data? The iPhone, like all small devices, is easy to lose, and easy to steal. That makes it vulnerable to illicit access. Does the iPhone have cryptographic abilities to make sure data stays safe?"

Well, apparently, Apple didn't take that as a rhetorical question because the fruit-based tech company is going to support Cisco IPsec VPN in the next iPhone update - the same one that will bring secure Exchange support as well as the possibility of an "iTunes Store for iPhone apps" - current Apple plans are to allow third party development but that Apple would have the final say on whether or not the applications could run on the iPhone. (Of course, clever hackers have already found a way around that.)

At any rate, the iPhone now seems to be competing directly with the Blackberry, which is good in the sense that competition in technical markets lead to innovation, and companies will have to expect new types of devices using different types of traffic, which - well, isn't bad, but which can be frustrating, absent a network device monitor.

Personally, I'm a bit confused by Apple's insistence to cripple the iPhone into only running "acceptable" applications on the iPhone, as A) it's clear that people are going to use it the way they like anyway, and B) if Apple took the same attitudes with their Macintosh/OSX general purpose computers, some of the best Mac apps (Quicksilver, Colloquy, Transmission, Burn,) simply wouldn't exist. Perhaps this increases the security of the device but at the obvious cost of utility.

It's just rhetorical, and I'd love to get some comments on this, but is the tradeoff between security and utility a false one? I'm not sure - havening not worked much in the security side of technology - but it seems to me that if the iPhone can be hacked to make it more useful, it can also be hacked to make it malicious, and so the choice is not between security and utility, but rather between a lack of security with utility, or a lack of security without utility. Hmm… maybe I should ponder this more.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Amit Basu and Chip Jarnagin about how most companies are failing to recognize the potential of IT, and they list a number of reasons why.

First, Basu and Jarnagin say, the business often sees IT as a basic utility, like plumbing or phone service. This is compounded by the current trend towards SaaS; in which prominent authors like Nick Carr are actually sincerely arguing that IT is indeed a basic utility, and that "IT doesn't matter." We disagreed with that argument on the basis that those companies that use unique IT resources and talent effectively will outperform those companies who do not, but agreed with the general trends that Carr pointed out. The problem that many overlook is that IT as a utility and IT as an innovator are not mutually exclusive propositions. (Remember when your cable company just provided TV?)

Additionally, Basu and Jarnagin argue that there is an effective glass wall isolating IT within the company, and there are five reasons for this wall separating IT and the rest of the business.

"Mind-set differences between management staff and IT staff, language differences, social influences, flaws in IT governance (defined as the specification and control of IT decision rights), and the difficulty of managing rapidly changing technology."

The first case, of mindset differences between IT teams and business leaders is one of abstract vs. logical thinking. IT teams often deal in binary logic; something works or it does not, something is better or it is not. There is a right way, a wrong way, and sometimes a best way, to do things. Business leadership often deals in the grey areas, what ifs, and sometimes illogical intuition.

To oversimplify, IT thinks in the terms of the math class - there is a right and wrong answer. Management is liberal arts - arguments should be well formed but there's no one right way to get to the answer. For all the jokes between management and IT working on totally different wavelengths, there is an absolute truth to this.

Also, as Basu and Jarnagin point out, both business and IT use incomprehensible languages filled with acronyms and specialized terms. I know most of you are familiar with "VoIP," "packet priority," and "ITIL" but to a business manager, they're as alien as "EBITDA," "commodity value," and "ISPL" are to a network engineer.

(A digression: When I first started working at this position, I came from an academic background. It confused me to no end that when the marketing people were talking about "the pipe" and the networking people were talking about "the pipe" they meant two entirely different things.)

There are other, social, factors mentioned in the article as well, but the end result is that business doesn't want to deal with IT, doesn't care about IT, and doesn't understand how IT helps their business. And yet, IT is still crucial to meeting business goals.

We've talked many times about the need for better IT communication, and better understanding of business needs in IT. Mostly, we agree with Basu and Jarnagin's assessments of the situation, and really do recommend that you read the article - and perhaps forward it to your manager.

This is where ITIL can help out considerably. One of the major improvements in ITIL v3 from v2 is the shift from business alignment to business integration, which requires IT to adopt business terms and to create, measure and communicate IT value in financial terms whenever possible.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The release of Adobe AIR today might just bring about major changes - both good and bad - for network performance. AIR is a way to produce Web apps that can be run as desktop apps. It is cross-platform and relies, like Java, on a just-in-time compiler and an interpreter of application bytecode. There are interpreters for Windows and OSX, and a Linux interpreter in development.

"It allows Web application developers - or just application developers - to use the Internet technologies they know, whether it's Flex and ActionScript to target the Flash part of AIR, or Javascript/HTML/CSS to target the AJAX part of AIR," said Phil Costa, director of product management at Adobe. "It allows them to take those applications and run them on the desktop."

Costa explained that through AIR, (depending on what the application does and how it is coded,) companies may theoretically experience a lowered amount of data throughput and an improved network performance.

"Today a huge number of corporate networks are moving towards browser based applications, and one of the extra bandwidth requirements that it puts upon the network is that every time you access a [Web based] application, you need to download it. Whether that's HTML or Javascript, or all kinds of Flex and Flash content, that needs to be pulled over the network. Having the application installed locally avoids that. All that will be going forth is the actual data that you're trying to access."

"We've done tests with some of our customers where they've seen our bandwidth [usage] go down for Internet applications in general, because unlike a Web site, which creates both the content and the formatting of the content, most AIR apps are just passing the information back and forth instead of refreshing the page each time."

"Now, depending on what the application does, it may actually add [to] bandwidth requirements for the network as well. One of the things that applications do, is run in the background and connect permanently to a data source's real time streams, or frequently check for data. That could increase the bandwidth requirements. But that's more about what the application specifically does than anything specific about AIR."

AIR's capabilities allow for offline usage as well, which will likely prompt more demand for online apps as the major drawback of SAAS - inaccessibility - is mitigated.

"In addition to giving the developers and then end-user of the application the convenience of launching the [Web] application like any other desktop application," said Costa, "it gives them additional capabilities that they didn't have when they were targeting the browser, such as local storage, either in flat-files or structured storage like a SQL database, which is embedded in there, or drag-and-drop integration with the file system, and cut-and-paste as well as the ability to take data or content offline, and run it when they're on an airplane or just not connected to the network."

"The runtime provides a whole set of APIs for notifying the application when it is on and offline, and so the developer can implement behavior that accounts for that; in many cases what we see is that the developers are caching some of the information offline, so that if the user takes it offline, it will still be available."

"To give you an example… one of our customers, Anthropologie, built an online catalog that lets people browse through things they have, and they built an AIR version which lets customers make little notes to themselves about the product, and rather than store them on the Anthropologie Web site, it stores them locally. The customer can put notes on things the same way they put stickie notes on an actual physical catalog, and they don't have to share that information with the Web site, so it's private to them. It also means, from Anthropologie's standpoint, that they don't have to create massive databases to store that information."

Costa said that Adobe hopes that there will be AIR apps on mobile phones, something that there's no specific date on, but which is on the Adobe roadmap.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently put out a press release which announced that six of the 13 root servers in the root zone (presumably located in-between the Phantom Zone and the Forbidden Zone) now had IPv6 addresses.

It's a small step but one which is necessary for bigger steps to follow. With the root name servers having IPv6 addresses, it paves the way for a full IPv6 end-to-end transmission path for data. The fact that the nameservers still relied on IPv4 made at least some form of IPv4 over IPv6 necessary for Internet transmission.

We were able to ask a few questions about the IPv6 assignment to ICANN and got answers from David Conrad, Vice President of Research and IANA Strategy.

NPD: Why only six of the 13 root servers?

Conrad: 6 of the 13 were ready at this time. Each of the root servers is run independently and are funded through internal means (that is, in general, no one is paying any of the root server operators to operate a root server directly). The 6 that requested ICANN add IPv6 records were the ones that had finished setting up their IPv6 infrastructure sufficiently to provide service.

NPD: Could you explain a bit about the 512 byte limit on the packet sizes?

Conrad: The original specification of the DNS protocol chose 512 bytes as a reasonable approximation of the largest packet that could get through the Internet (of the time, circa 1983) without being fragmented. Enhancements to the DNS protocol since then have allowed for an increase in that limit (specifically, requesters can indicate how large a packet they're willing to accept).

NPD: How will computers get the new info about the root name servers' new IP addresses?

Conrad: The only computers that will actually need the new information are DNS caching servers. When a caching server starts up, it asks one of the 13 root servers it has pre-configured (the root hints) for an up-to-date list of all the root servers. It then uses that new list.

DNS caching servers are typically operated by ISPs or the IT departments of large enterprises. Average PCs and workstations send their DNS queries to these caching servers.

NPD: Would this require operating system upgrades/patches?

Conrad: A patch will likely be supplied to make the change in the root hints permanent (the updated list obtained by the caching servers isn't generally written to disk), but as described previously, caching servers will be able to use the new addresses without the patch.

Is this a significant move towards standardizing Internet traffic on IPv6? Tell us your thoughts in our comments section below.

SuperTuesday is coming up in less than a week, and many people, (including myself,) are chomping at the bit to talk about politics.

Don't get me wrong; this is a blog focused on issues that affect network performance in enterprise (read: business) environments, and politics and vendor blogs go together like potassium chlorate and gummi bears - a whole lot of heat, sparks, and violent reactions that take forever to die down. But, if nothing else, U.S. technology policy affects U.S. technology companies. Network neutrality and broadband policy will affect those companies hoping to roll out SAAS solutions, H1B visas will affect the tech job market and innovation, and of course there are the fundamental questions about data security and privacy that have become issues over the past decade.

Among the tech blogosphere there were two politics-related events that may be of interest to our readers. The first was that Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch interviewed Mitt Romney. Arrington focused on technology growth policies in the U.S., Internet taxes, H1B visas, venture capital tax issues, and renewable energy, and it's an interesting read if you're a Republican currently mulling which candidate to support in the primaries.

The second, from a stranger source, came from Randall Munroe, the author of the technology focused webcomic, XKCD, who used his public forum to endorse Barack Obama, because of Obama's association with copyright-reformer Lawrence Lessig, his support for network neutrality, among other reasons.

(This may not seem significant, but Munroe is not just any comic artist. XKCD focuses on high tech issues - including a few editorial cartoons regarding technology and science policy - and it is one of the most popular on the Internet, rivaling Penny Arcade. Because of this, Google invited Munroe to speak last month as part of their Authors@Google series of lectures, an honor shared with Paul Krugman, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Brokaw, among others. In less than two years, Munroe has become the pre-eminent technology editorial cartoonist - all with a few crudely drawn stick figures.)

Whether or not Munroe's endorsement will carry any weight is yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean that technology issues aren't real and considerable, and if the guys who actually know something about technology don't speak up, well, then we're left with the talking heads on cable news shows who have trouble understanding even basic computer concepts, let alone subtle computer issues.

During the main election season, technology issues will probably not be the foremost on voters' minds, so primary elections are extremely important for those who believe that a solid technology policy is important to U.S. national prosperity. While we'd feel uncomfortable (and kind of icky) endorsing any particular candidate, we've put together a list of the top ten current technological controversies which you should consider before voting.

1) Intellectual Property Laws

There is not one portion of the tech industry that is untouched by the intellectual property laws, both current and proposed. First, any company that makes software, either for resale or in-house, has to be aware of their rights under copyright law to preserve their own products. Any company that uses - in whole or in part - open-source software needs to be aware of how open-source licenses work - that is, open-source code remains under the copyright of the author, who may be very specific about who may or may not use the license.

Additionally, the current entertainment industry crackdown on pirated materials affects enterprise networking in a number of ways. First, there's the question of liability of an end-user on the corporate network uses it to distribute material when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder - while traffic is a consideration, it's also a consideration that if you aggressively patrol your network for copyright violations, you can find yourself liable if a copyright violation gets through the tracks. This leaves enterprise networking in a precarious position - police the network and assume the legal liability, or take sanctuary in "safe-harbor" provisions and allow the traffic of illicitly traded files to clog up your network.

There is a middle ground where certain types of traffic can be prevented from taking up bandwidth necessary for business applications - without looking at the individual files in deep packet inspection, using QoS policies, and that seems to be the best solution right now. However, any changes to copyright law would have a profound effect on the ways that companies do business, and that is why everyone in IT should be keeping an eye on this issue.

2) Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure

American broadband infrastructure is simply not quite up to the standards of other countries. Japan, Korea, and France are often touted as having much better broadband than the U.S., with various explanations given regarding U.S. having a lower population density. However, it seems dubious because there's little correlation between population density and broadband penetration when you look at actual states.

The U.S. population density may be 31/km^2 compared to France's 113/km^2 or 337/km^2 for Japan, but a lot of that is Alaska and Texas and whatnot. California has a population density of 90.27/km^2 - rivaling France - yet does not have France's broadband speed - and considering that California is one of America's technological "bread baskets," this is a serious problem. On the other coast, New Jersey has a population density of 438/km^2 - and New Jersey's broadband is not better than the rest of the nation. Additionally, even considering that nationwide population density number, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have lower population densities and both faster broadband speeds and greater household penetration.

Just as the highways developed by the Eisenhower administration helped to foster America's post-war manufacturing boom, better broadband infrastructure can help foster America's technology industry. An ubiquitous, high quality broadband can mean more applications can be run as a Web service out on the Internet instead of the WAN. More bandwidth for everybody means that the bandwidth for your company becomes cheaper and they can afford more of it, which means that existing apps will run faster (presuming there aren't other network performance problems) and that you'll be able to run high-bandwidth apps such as Cisco Telepresence.

Even if your company is sitting on more dark fiber than a bowl of NinjaBran™, every company relies on smaller companies as vendor product makers, as distributors, as customers - and those smaller companies are relying more on SAAS solutions. In the grand scheme of the business world ecosystem, communications infrastructure policy can have far-reaching effects.

3) Spectrum Regulation/Allocation

When people think of bandwidth, they often think of bits traveling down pipes. The other type of bandwidth is just as important; the bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because you can't run two different signals on the same frequency (they would interfere with each other,) the FCC allocates which frequencies are going to be used for which purpose - and some frequencies are better suited towards different purposes.

For example, currently, there is an auction for the 700MHZ band - a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum which can penetrate through walls, and can cover a very wide area. This made it very desirable for the television stations which now control the bandwidth, and also very desirable for cell phone companies currently bidding for the bandwidth when the television stations must return the bandwidth to the FCC as part of the analog/digital TV switchover in 2009.

Anything that deals with broadcasting of any sort - wireless networking, WiMax, even telecommunications ownership - goes through the FCC, making it one of the most important and powerful Federal commissions. Decisions made by the FCC can affect any rollouts your company makes regarding wireless networking or cellular technology.

4) Network Neutrality

If you haven't been keeping up on this one, it's a doozy, and you might want to check out the very informative Wikipedia page on the subject. The possibility of network neutrality legislation - or the actions of big-business players in the absence of network neutrality legislation, can mean fundamental changes in the way that bits travel over the wire.

We won't get into a rundown of issues here, but while you can plan for a neutral Internet or a non-neutral Internet, it is much harder to prepare contingencies while this matter remains up in the air.

Some candidates have expressed support for network neutrality legislation, others opposition, and still others ambivalence - and depending on which position is the best for you and your company, it may be something to consider.

We'll cover Telecom Immunity and Privacy, Open Government Initiatives, Energy Policy, and Immigration and Education in Part II of this series tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment below to discuss these issues.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Since yesterday's Network Performance Daily post which criticized Nicholas Carr for a quote in Network World, I've finished reading The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Keep in mind, I agree with the main thrust of Carr's arguments in The Big Switch and recommend it. The main thrust being that the software applications that were once developed in-house in a client-server model are increasingly moving towards "the cloud" of SAAS and Web applications.

The Network World article take on the book made it seem like Carr's core message was that IT departments, as we know them, would be obsolete. Admittedly, he does try to make that point in the book. I, however, don't think that that is the focus of the book.

There was one example from The Big Switch that stuck with me - partially because I'm a gaming geek as well as a techie. On page 114, Carr mentions "Second Life", a computer game which is mostly delivered as a service.

"Second Life is an example of a utility service supplied over the Internet and shared simultaneously by many people. It's very different from traditional computer games, which need to be installed separately on each player's hard drive. But Second Life is also itself a construction of many other utility services. The "computer" that runs Second Life doesn't exist in any one place; it's assembled, on the fly, from various data-storage and data processing molecules floating around in the global computing cloud… The program constantly "talks," over the Internet, with the main software Linden Lap uses to generate its online world. That software runs on hundreds of server computers that are housed in two data centers, one in San Francisco and one in Dallas, owned not by Linden Lab but by utility hosting companies. Every server computer contains, in turn, four virtual computers, each of which controls a 16-acre plot of land in Second Life. All the real and virtual computers work in tandem to create the vast world that residents experience as they play the game."

Second Life is an excellent example of "Gaming As A Service." There's just one problem with Second Life (other than the fact that most people don't even have enough time for their first life), and that's network performance.

The key draw of Second Life is that the world is entirely created by end-users. All attractions, games, and objects are the result of savvy Second Life end-users who have created these things to share or sell with other end-users. Unlike other MMORPGs, the world of Second Life is infinitely customizable, so it would be a bad idea to try to run it as a client-server application. Since all the information changes every time you play, (and sometimes while you play,) running Second Life as a service makes sense.

But there are significant drawbacks to this model. Loading up the information needed to get the details about the world, even on the fastest of Internet connections, takes forever. It's a bandwidth hog. Even if network performance conditions are ideal, rendering textures and shapes over the Internet is a time-consuming endeavor, and there is a very clear tradeoff between the quality of the visual application, and the quality of game's application performance. Controls aren't very responsive at all, mostly because the information about avatar movement is competing with graphics and world information on the pipe. This gives everything a frustrating, "bouncy" quality. Comparing that to a traditional client/server model type game - say, "World of Warcraft" - and the difference is apparent. WoW is quick and responsive, can handle multiple, and very complex, users very well, and while there may be lag on WoW at times, it never approaches the same amount of lag in Second Life. Even "Guild Wars," which has a 101KB client but is similar in scope, complexity, and gameplay as WoW, downloads the game software to the client at run time and caches it for the future rather than try to run the entire game off the server - and you can tell from the performance difference that, for right now, most gaming will continue to follow the client/server model.

Indeed, application and network performance is so important to gamers that even in an age where you can find a game of "Team Fortress 2," "Battlefield 2142" or "Quake Wars" any time, any place, 24 hours a day over the Internet, gamers lug their desktop systems around with them, get together with anywhere from 4 to 300 friends, connect it all to a single, created network, and play in what are known as "LAN parties." Why? Because there's less network latency, and better performance under a network that you control than there ever will be over even the best case online scenarios.

So will IT departments become obsolete? No - forgetting for a moment that somebody has to manage the infrastructure on the business side to allow all those end-users to connect to the cloud to access SAAS apps and "virtual data centers" and the like, the popularity of both World of Warcraft and Second Life show that both SAAS apps and client-server apps will be around, each model used for the advantages they provide in the cases where those advantages are beneficial.

It's breathtaking what is going on in the industry in this area and Carr puts his finger right on it in The Big Switch. There are revolutionary things going on in the SAAS field. Google Gears is bringing online apps offline. Virtualization is turning hardware into software, and when you turn hardware into software, you can offer "hardware-as-a-service."

But as for IT, well, maybe some companies will be able to make do - or be willing to risk - exclusively using SAAS solutions. But for most large companies, they need performance and control, not necessarily utility-like convenience, from their applications. IT departments aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

What do you think will be the future of IT in the SAAS environment? Feel free to discuss it in our comments section.