That's the question CA Technologies asked North American college students when it challenged them to create a smart monitoring app for BlackBerry devices.

Managing your net from your iPhone

CA Technologies recently challenged North American university students to partake in a competition to infuse BlackBerry devices with intelligent monitoring applications, one of the software maker’s favorite technologies.

The CA Smartphone Challenge inspired one team of technology lovers to create an application that could enable IT operations managers and application managers to monitor performance of critical apps from a BlackBerry smartphone. CA Technologies put forth the challenge prior to its CA World 2010 conference in Las Vegas last month, offering a free trip to the show as part of the prize package for the winning team. The competition, which was open from March 3 through April 21 to universities across North America, attracted 14 university teams, but just one could be named winner.

The winning team, from Stony Brook University, developed an application dubbed “Pocket Monitor,” which is said to provide mobile access of application performance management (APM) data on the BlackBerry. (The top three teams also received cash prizes and BlackBerry 9530 phones.) The first-place team would also be tasked to man the CA Technologies’ booth at CA World and demonstrate their winning app to show goers.

Pocket Monitor lets IT managers tap “real-time Introscope graphs” and drill into performance alerts from the top down. It also offers a customized dashboard and an e-mail notification and alerting feature. The application enables IT managers to adjust thresholds and ensure business-critical transactions are able to complete without require the IT operations managers to be on site to implement the changes. The Pocket Monitor works with the Introscope technology in the CA Wily Application Performance Management division.

The CA Smartphone Challenge is just one of many initiatives by the vendor to engage students in its business. Earlier this spring, CA Technologies welcomed a sixth-grade student to its New York offices to take the helm as President for a Day.

Posted by Denise Dubie

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Director James Cameron might not be the most obvious choice of speaker at an IT industry conference, but attendees at this year's CA World '10 quickly learned that the choices Cameron made in his career can be related to challenges IT managers face daily when tasked with providing more services to the business with fewer resources.

Putting aside the star power Cameron brought to the event, the renowned director of films such as "Avatar", "Titanic" and "Terminator" shared what he believed he had in common with audience members: his geek pride. While Cameron delved into technologies used in his films and the CA World '10 crowd focuses on IT technologies, the filmmaker made it clear that fear was not a factor when innovating in his industry.

"Too much caution can be crippling. ... Any complex enterprise striving for innovation is a leap of faith," Cameron told the audience.

It may not seem so on the surface, but the foray into 3-D filmmaking for Cameron could be likened to IT organizations exploring technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing. If IT executives fear change and remain stagnant, they could miss the opportunity to innovate and help the business accelerate beyond competition. Accepting that there will be failures and learning from them, Cameron said, helps the innovation process.

"Failure always has to be an option, but fear is not," Cameron concluded.

For IT organizations, the principle is the same. Take, for instance, an IT group that fears the potential of cloud computing for security or personnel reasons and resists evaluating it as an option for the business. It is likely that a business unit could gain access to cloud resources, prove to executives it is a more logical choice than internal IT and then the IT group is left looking uninformed. Or internal IT departments that resist allowing end-user groups to access social networking or peer-to-peer resources, perhaps also due to security concerns, could also find the community working around the IT mandates, improving productivity.

"The biggest problem for IT departments today is culture and political issues," says Glenn O'Donnell, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "The complexity of environments, economic conditions and the threat of the external cloud should drive IT to change their culture."

Posted by Denise Dubie

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We thought we'd experiment with Twitter Media's new Blackbird Pie feature to let you all know some exciting news!

More information to come next week. Stay tuned....

Just going to write up something quick because I was spending most of the day out with the rest of the marketing dept. working on something fun, but I wanted to draw your attention to today’s strip of “Real Life,” a comic written by gaming geek (and trained chef) Greg Dean, the premise, of course, being that Greg gets to (cheer/cry/laugh/fume) about events in his real life.

I’ve been a reader of “Real Life” since the “Fuego” comic. (I named a tabletop RPG character "Fuego" after the comic. Fuego had no fire-based powers, but he chose the name because "it just sounds so cool.")

I’m copying today’s cartoon for you, and it explains why “fast” Internet isn’t always as “fast” as you’d expect, and it shows the difference between throughput and latency.

As we all know by now, today is the 40^th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing, unless you are one of those few who choose not to believe the Mythbusters when they debunked the idea of a moon landing hoax. Then there’s my uncle Edward, who believes that the moon landing was faked from a soundstage located on the surface of the moon.

Today, the moon landing is humbling for those of us who think in terms of networks, routers, and switches – the Internet is amazing in its communication potential, but for all the good it’s done, it’s still essentially terrestrial. The furthest the network travels is to orbital distance – and only as a waypoint.

Because of the sheer distances involved, new technologies have to be invented and improved, like Vinton Cerf’s InterPlaNet; and just as the Apollo mission gave us digital watches, cordless drills, the joystick, the smoke alarm, and so many others, interplanetary Internet promises similar advances for computer technology – from improvements in security for electronic mail, to improved performance in communication challenged environments, like disaster recovery scenarios, the developing world, and the military at wartime.

In fact, it was earlier this month (July 7^th, to be exact) that the International Space Station turned on the first node in a permanent Interplanetary Internet, using a protocol known as “Delay Tolerant Networking” (DTN for short) and is designed with huge latencies and dropped packets from solar storms, or being on the wrong side of a planet, in mind.

And while astronauts typically have more important things to do, they can Twitter. (“OMGWTFBBQ - Houston, we have a problem. :-(”)

One interesting thing I just learned was that Apollo 11 had its own minicomputer on board – minicomputer in the 1969 sense of the term – because there was a 2.5 second delay between Houston and Apollo 11 due to speed-of-light issues, and that 2.5 second delay was far too long for the astronauts, hurtling around the moon, to gather, send, retrieve, and act on data. I suppose there are parallels to cloud computing here, but I’d rather not stretch it.

Anyway, that minicomputer was the first of ever smaller and smaller computers, rather than ever larger and larger computers which characterized pre-1969 computer development. Now we have computers the size of – actually, I don’t know how small computers are nowadays; I’d mention the iPhone, but you just know someone’s coming out with a cellphone twice as powerful at half the size a month from now…

Point is, today’s a day when we can look back at one of the most powerful technological and scientific triumphs with a sense of techie-geek pride. It was the nerds with pocket protectors that got us to the moon and back. And I’m proud of that.

For too long, network administrators, engineers, and architects have longed for a way to determine dominance within the IT pack.  Unfortunately, those efforts have been stymied without a quick and convenient way to determine IT knowledge on a quantitative scale, leading to unsatisfying substitutes like Guitar Hero or Halo tournaments.

Finally, we have solved this problem.  We present:

The Network Rockstar Challenge

Oh, yeah.  We went big and bold with that link.  If the Blink or Marquee tags were still valid HTML, we’d use ‘em.  That’s how awesome it is.

In fact, when we beta-tested the game among our own crew, things got so out of control that—well, I think you’d better see for yourself.

Gentlemen, Gentlewomen, and Gentlemiscellaneous, are you ready... to rock?

The last time we saw Ben Erwin, he was playing Ping Pong while explaining how to leverage Cisco’s NAM. Today, we went out into the woods and filmed his alter ego, “Network Survival Expert Moose Dentabling” out in the Texas wilderness, relying solely on what he can find inside old network gear for survival.

Really, I think it might just be that case of insanity that’s been making the rounds. We really can’t justify this other than we thought it would be cool, and it was 72 degrees with no humidity in the middle of February, so we were willing for any excuse to head out and still “work.”

So please enjoy “Geek Vs. Wild.” You can view it here, or you can check it out in full high definition at the YouTube page.

But while I’m on the subject – or rather off the subject, I wanted to mention a couple of things. First, when I was uploading the video to YouTube, I noticed this gem about a bunch of geeks who incorporated network monitoring (for fault) into their Christmas Lights setup.

Second, you’ll notice in the video that we used the iPhone “Campfire” app. For $.99, it was worth the laugh, but I had a heck of a time getting it onto the iPhone. See, the iPhone only allows you to sync to one computer at a time. You used to be able to hook up an iPod via USB to any computer and then use that to play music directly from the iPod, provided that you had iTunes. Not anymore – if I wanted to install the “Campfire” app, I would have had to delete all the songs on my iPod so that I could “sync” with the new computer.

Why couldn’t I have just bought the application and downloaded it over the 3G network? Because Apple/AT&T prevents the installation of applications over 10MB in size over the 3G network in order to preserve that bandwidth. A smart move, but combined with the sync problem, it created a major headache.

Why did you do that, Apple? Why can’t I use my iPhone at work and at home?

Eventually I did have to erase my iPhone music, which ticked me off, naturally. It just goes to show that you can be overzealous regarding security (in this case, the technology securing me from accessing the music I own), and overzealous regarding network performance and end up with ticked off end users.

First off, congrats to Nick Carr – we’ve talked with him (and disagreed with him!) often on the blog and we’re thrilled that he managed to go toe-to-toe with Stephen Colbert on last night’s show.

And, thanks to the Colbert Report’s online presence, here’s an embedded player with that interview.

Although the book plugged is “The Big Switch,” the majority of the interview talks more about the implications of dwindling attention spans due to the Internet’s “hyper” hyperlinked nature – a topic not covered in “The Big Switch,” but instead in the cover article Carr wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”

The idea, as we’ve mentioned before, is that Carr believes the end result of the attention getting behavior of the Internet is that it will “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

During the interview, Colbert made a play of ignoring Carr to check his iPhone. Now, that that does happen in real life, but I’d say that’s more an indication of individual rudeness then of culture spinning on a dime over the concept of hypertext.

The same criticisms that Carr makes of the Internet could be made of the newspaper – you’re trying to read one thing but it’s broken up, put next to all these other interesting articles, and ads designed to catch your attention… with all these… analog gewgaws, how is one supposed to be informed?

We’ve mentioned before that the limits on network performance limit the ability to communicate complex thought back when the Atlantic Monthly article first came out. But, we missed an opportunity to get less academic, more practical, and closer to the issues in a corporate network environment.

While we disagree with Carr’s diagnosis that the Internet causes short attention spans, (I’m a pro-blogger at a tech company, raised on Nintendo and MTV – I’m the poster-child for the 21^st century digital boy, and still I managed to summon the concentration to read the book Nick Carr wrote…) we do agree that human attention spans are short.

When I worked at a supermarket retailer, back in the early 2000s, as I’ve mentioned (and complained about) we were using a java-based networking app that took one to two seconds to input each number and move to the next field, and processing the entire report took minutes. The network performance was absolutely horrible, and as I pointed out before, we would have mentioned it in the hopes of having the performance improved somehow, except that we all realized that our jobs were essentially superfluous anyway and that we could all be replaced by a very small shell script that could parse the orders as they came in instead of printing them out and having us enter in all of them by hand.

Of course the lot of us at the data entry farm had CNN.com, Slashdot, and All Your Base Are Belong To Us and Hamsterdance open while we waited for the pages to load. (It was a simpler time back then.)

Of course, if we didn’t have outside Internet access, we could very well have distracted ourselves offline with desktop toys or conversation. We did that often anyway – as I said, it just took forever for those fields to come up.

I’ve also heard, second and third-hand, stories of other companies who are shocked to find that employees are going on to do other tasks while they wait for reports to generate, fields to come up, and pages to load – so if you’re honestly worried about dwindling attention spans, it might be better to not curse Google or the Internet, but to go in and actually improve things where you can.

Recently, we did an unscientific (and really, I cannot stress that word enough) but real-world test of performance using the Ono plugin for BitTorrent client Vuze/Azureus. Our results were inconclusive.

David Choffnes, the author of the Ono plugin, responded to the test in our comments section of that article:

Regarding your results, it is difficult to run controlled experiments because even when you download the same torrent, you're doing it at different times with necessarily different swarms. My research group's evaluation is not limited by this, and we showed that performance improves *on average*.

Also note that if Ono doesn't find any nearby peers, it can't help your performance. You can see if Ono found nearby peers (and is using them) in the "Ono" plugin view … Also, the plugin's effectiveness is limited by the fact that "only" 180,000 users have installed Ono. The more people use it, the more likely you'll find nearby peers.

One last point -- even when Ono doesn't dramatically improve performance, it encourages better "Internet citizen" behavior. Why transfer data from halfway across the world when you can get the same data and (potentially better) performance from peers nearby? Ono makes it easier to do the latter, which should eventually help everyone using the Internet.

Ono is part of Aqualab, a Northwestern University computer science project researching large-scale distributed computing. Choffnes, a doctoral candidate, will present his findings at SIGCOMM next month, and his paper on the subject can be found here – which is great if you like trigonometric functions in your technical literature.

There’s also a telling paragraph which may explain why we got the results we did for our tests (other than just the random variability of different BitTorrent swarms), instead of a massive throughput boost.

In our analysis, we compare statistics from peers located by Ono (referred to as Ono-recommended peers) to those from all peers selected at random by the BitTorrent protocol, which also includes those located by Ono.

In Network Performance Daily's analysis, we compared statistics from peers located by Ono combined with peers selected at random from the BitTorrent protocol, against only peers selected at random from the BitTorrent protocol.

To determine the cosine similarity value for a peer, Ono must be able to compare its ratio maps with those of other peers. The latter information can be obtained in a number of ways: through direct exchange between peers, from distributed storage and from trackers. Ono currently supports the first two options. With direct exchange, when two peers running the Ono plugin perform their connection handshake, the peers swap ratio maps directly… Though Ono enjoys a large user base, it is still a small fraction of the total BitTorrent population. Thus Ono also attempts to perform DNS lookups on behalf of other peers that it encounters, to determine their ratio maps. This enables Ono to perform biased peer selection over a much larger set of peers, including those not running the Azureus client. From both direct exchange of ratio maps and DNS lookups, our Ono clients locate over 180, 000 peers per day using our CDN-based approach.

When Ono determines that a peer has similar redirection behavior, it attempts to bias traffic toward that peer by ensuring there is always a connection to it, which minimizes the time that the peer is choked. Due to limitations of the Azureus plugin API, we are currently unable to bias other aspects of peer connections, e.g., the bandwidth allocated to each connection.

In addition to Ono, Aqualab also does other projects that are designed for improving Internet performance in a number of other areas. Choffnes’s advisor, Dr. Fabian Bustamante, has been working on "sustainable scalability in distributed systems,” called the 3R project. Many P2P and internet VoIP systems are built in a way that routing is controlled at the application layer, and that in order to identify better paths and faster throughput, the application probes the network environment repeatedly, as the application has no quick way to determine whether a particular peer or node is performing well except by trying to connect to it. The 3R project seeks to decrease probing by re-using the view of the network gathered by long-running, ubiquitous services.

While enterprise networking and Internet networking are two different beasts, performance advances in one usually lead to advances in the other, and with cloud computing promising to make enterprise networking a hybrid of LAN, WAN, and Internet connectivity, these advances remain important.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Two-story tall monstrosity of metal automatically finds application performance problems, destroys problems at source.

AUSTIN – April 1, 2008 – As network teams seek to ensure continued application performance according to the service level agreements entered into with backbone network providers, it becomes harder to make sure that you get the service you are contractually entitled to receive.  To solve this problem, NetQoS^® Inc. has launched NetQoS Destructobot v1.0, an automaton designed to seek and destroy network performance problems.  Integrated laser arms give the Destructobot™ advanced troubleshooting capabilities.

“NetQoS Destructobot is the only flesh-rending robot that unites application performance monitoring metrics with a warped, blasé attitude towards human life,” said Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing for NetQoS. “This new network performance tool includes automatic and on-demand investigations to speed problem diagnosis and enhanced trend reports to aid planning for future deployments, all with a complete lack of anything resembling a human soul.”

NetQoS Destructobot v1.0 Capabilities:

Automatic and On-demand Problem Termination: Destructobot v1.0 troubleshoots faster by automatically investigating when a performance threshold, such as a certain number of retransmissions, is exceeded. The robot master can also initiate an investigation on demand at any time. Destructobot, not knowing human limitations, will not rest in either case until the problem is located and terminated.

No network overhead:  Unlike some solutions, Destructobot v1.0 will not harm network application performance, or through inaction, allow network application performance to come to harm.

Advanced Reporting:  Destructobot provides enhanced abilities to analyze where unused resources can be re-allocated, including information about how much metal is in a human body and how that metal can be used to increase throughput and decrease latency.  These reports, which include per-capita statistics and can be provided within ten seconds of deployment, are especially useful for negotiating contracts with service providers. 

Support for Distributed Environments: For customers with multiple locations to manage, a distributed configuration is available through the Destructobot Army option.

When the product was announced, there were some skeptics, such as Dr. Smith of Alpha Centauri Adventures, who said “I don’t see how this ludicrous lump of latency sniffing lasers will help me.”

However, two minutes interacting with the Destructobot demo and Dr. Smith became quite impressed with its capabilities.

“I’ll use this in my network!” Dr. Smith said. “I’ll use a thousand of them! Just call it off!”

“Destructive robot based technology is becoming mainstream in enterprise NOC centers and in military applications, and we plan to use NetQoS Destructobot to ensure that our customers are getting optimal performance, or else,” said Michael Funke, director of application development and monitoring for Wily Industries, Inc. “In addition, the Destructobot provides us with one platform that not only manages our network, but also crushes all those who oppose us along the WAN.” 

NetQoS Destructobot, a recent winner of the Popular Mad Science Product of the Year Award, is available now at a starting price of $40,108. The NetQoS Performance and Domination Center portal is available to customers at no additional cost with the purchase of one or more NetQoS product modules.

Visitors to the United Nations may view a demo of Destructobot’s awesome destructive power at 12:00 noon on April 4^th. For more information about Destructobot, go to http://www.netqos.com/solutions/destructobot/index.html