CA Technologies shares at Cisco Live how its software can enable network engineers to guarantee application delivery and manage data center performance.

By Denise Dubie

Cisco Live attendees will hear about more than just the network giant’s tablet product plans. The Las Vegas show also gives Cisco partners the opportunity to showcase how their wares can monitor, manage and optimize Cisco environments.

Application performance management, network engineers and Cisco Live

On the heels of Cisco’s introduction of its Cius tablet, CA Technologies will be presenting to IT and network professionals at Cisco Live on how they can better manage virtual machines, ensure optimal application delivery and take on performance management in Cisco data centers.

Continue reading "How to make the most of your Cisco environment" »

Going to Cisco Live? Check out these sessions on how to guarantee optimized services in virtual environments.

By Denise Dubie

Network managers in the know realize they must master the art of optimized application performance just as they conquered Cisco router configuration. The application performance related job duty fell in the laps of network gurus years ago when it became clear that the network wasn’t always to blame for poor application performance -- but that network engineers possibly held the best perspective on how to optimize bandwidth and other network resources to ensure business-critical apps performed as expected.

Poor application performance to blame for lost productivity, increased costs

Next week at Cisco Live attendees will get a chance to learn more about how to manage application performance from the network perspective.

Continue reading "Application performance, network engineers and Cisco Live" »

We came across this entry on a blog called Ksplice.com entitled "Dating is rough at the transport layer" and just had to republish it. I mean, we've come up with some ways of making TCP easier to understand before and broached the subject of falling in love with your network management tools, but this is just awesome:

Network World reports on a survey by security software vendor Symantec which talks about data center staffing. Specifically, half of the respondents said that their data centers were either extremely or somewhat understaffed.

And of course, there’s always the usual suspect to trot out – the economy – forcing IT workers to do more with less, with cutbacks and layoffs hitting IT hard. But there’s also another factor – that it’s not just that the IT staffing budgets are decreasing but also that the job of the network engineer is becoming complex, thus increasing the overall workload.

This is especially true in mid-sized enterprises where new technologies which can save money but which are extremely complex, like virtualization, WAN optimization, and cloud computing are being implemented at a faster rate than either smaller enterprises or larger ones.

Well, if you don’t have enough manpower in your data center, there are three solutions I can think of off the top of my head. The first is to hire more people. This may not be feasible given current budgets.

The second is to decrease workload. In short, taking the approach that instead of trying to do “more with less,” that it’s okay to do “less with less.” Five nines of uptime give way to three nines, and applications previously handled in-house are outsourced to a cloud services provider. There are some disadvantages to doing things this way, of course.

The third is to find a way to decrease the complexity of your network – perhaps by using management tools that provide a broad overview of the network and how the applications are performing. The only downside there is that if you don’t use these tools correctly, instead of making the job easier, an additional manager could just end up increasing the complexity of the network that much more.

All three of these solutions have the possibility of being disruptive – at least in the short term – and monitoring your network for those disruptions is the quickest way to get to the root cause of them.

Though CA Technologies and CA|NetQoS are vendors of aforementioned management and monitoring tools, I’m pretty comfortable suggesting that if you can hire more people, that it might be a good idea to do that first, if you’re making decisions about where to spend the budget money. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, no diagnostic, monitoring, or management tool can replace a network engineer with a good head on his or her shoulders. All a tool can show you is where the problem lies; the engineer has to come up with the solution.

Second, if you have engineers who know what they’re doing, they’ll be the ones to suggest the tools that they need, rather than buying tools first and then trying to train engineers on the proper use of the tools chosen on their behalf. A good engineer with a mediocre management tool is better than a mediocre engineer with the best stuff in the world, after all.

(Not that we don’t want you to buy the best stuff in the world - which, if you haven’t guessed our particular bias, is our stuff…)

Monitoring your network is crucial to maintaining your network; but the two are obviously not the same. You can have all the data, have it presented in an easy to understand format, run report after report, and it won’t matter if, at the end of the day, the person whose job it is to interpret the data misinterprets it.

If you look for the wrong things – for example, if you’re still primarily concerned with availability rather than latency – you can miss the most important details and come to the wrong conclusions about your network.

It reminds me of this guy, who has analyzed the Mars Rover photos on the JPL Journal Web site, and believes that there is a vast conspiracy at NASA to trample tiny humans (about 5cm in height) under the wheels of the Mars Rover.

“Next three images shows [sic] typical areas on Mars where three sizes of humans and primates live a symbiotic lifestyle. Strangely, the primates appear to be sentient…”

“Next is the Tiny humans [sic] attempt to disable a Mars Rover. The reason; it is the machine that has cause numerous deaths among the smallest Humans who cannot detect or hear the Rover coming.”

“***Warning next 5 images show scenes of death by crushing.*** Americans have Constitutional rights to know this information I have discovered from public posted JPL images…. The second image is gruesome. It shows the Rover has driven through a thickly populated tiny human’s area, killing a great number of them…. We are not at war with them. Someone will answer for these deaths.”

The photos, obviously, contains blurry images of rock formations and dirt, the silhouettes of which may look vaguely human-like in a Rorschach-ian way. Personally, I don’t even think they look vaguely human.

I bring this up because it reminds me of the idea that network data can often be an ink blot test of sorts; if someone’s looking only for availability, they’re simply not going to see the problems that are caused by poorly performing (but still available) applications.

That sound you’re hearing is the screaming of my soul being crushed.

All great journalists can maintain complete objectivity in the most trying of circumstances. I am merely a good journalist.

Well, I’m adequate.

But I think I should disclose my biases here, as this is an issue that affects me personally.

DSLReports.com reported that Time Warner has decided that Austin will be one of four “trial cities” to test out their new “Tiered Bandwidth” plans – which are essentially paying roughly the same amount of money you were before (give or take about $5) plus $1 for each gigabyte of data you transfer, over a set cap. The highest plan will be 100GB. Omar Gallaga over at the Statesman worries that the top plan it might not be enough for him and his family – I know it certainly won’t be enough for me.

The New York Times once estimated the wholesale cost of bandwidth to Time Warner at something like $0.10 per GB. At $1/GB, that’s a markup of 1000%

So I got upset. The Internet isn’t just how I make my day-job livelihood, it’s also what I use to transfer and upload the high definition videos that I put out on the Web for my moonlighting. It’s how I send raw footage to documentary collaborators. Since YouTube is the only affordable outlet for my work at this time, a bandwidth cap will make it cost prohibitive for me to continue as an independent filmmaker.

Best estimate yesterday was that I was I was using 400GB a month, and that my Internet service would increase 650%. Since then, I’ve actually looked at my home traffic data for the past 15 days. I’m happy to report that I’m only using 300GB a month, and at $1/GB, the bill would only go up about 500%.

(I could go for go for business service, which has no caps, but the equivalent of my current “Turbo” service, which provides 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up, would cost $280/mo. There are plans at $120, which is merely a 200% markup, but the $120 business class service provides only 10Mbps down, and 512kbps up.)

But what was even more upsetting was that I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first. I first found out about the story from DSL Reports. Calling up Time Warner customer service, they told me there was no plan for tiered bandwidth in Austin. Chatting with Time Warner tech support, they said it would start this month.

The actual truth is that monitoring end-user bandwidth will begin this month in Austin, but we won’t be charged for bandwidth until a couple months down the road.

But I didn’t know that until I literally had Alex Dudley, VP of Public Relations at Time Warner Cable on the line.

Time Warner is a monopoly in my apartment complex. I have checked – AT&T, Grande, Verizon – none of them offer service to my apartment.

I like my apartment. My apartment is very close to work, it has a nice swimming pool, and there’s a 100% lack of cockroaches. Essentially, I can’t justify staying there if I’m going to be paying $300/mo (or even $120/mo) for Internet service, compared to $60/mo elsewhere. In essence, I’m being kicked out of my home by Time Warner. (If one of your bills shot up 500%, you’d move too.)

I’m just lucky that my lease ends around the same time that TWC will be instituting these caps. It would have been cheaper in the long run to break my lease otherwise.

So journalistic impartiality? Well, I give it my best shot, that’s all you can ask of me in this situation.

One last thing before we get to the interview: We’ve covered bandwidth caps from Time Warner and others before in this publication. I really hope that if you’re interested in this subject, you read “Bandwidth Caps and the Cognitive Surplus.” In short: The Internet has finally given people something better to do than watch “whatever’s on” TV, and it’s creating a more participatory culture. Bandwidth caps are an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle. There’s more to it, of course, which is why I suggest you take a look at the full article.

A transcript of the interview with Alex Dudley – which at times seemed more like a debate – is below.

[The following transcript is mostly verbatim. A few words have been changed (ums, some interruptions, confused & corrected technical terms such as saying “gigabyte” when meaning “megabyte” and vice versa, etc.) so that the interview reads more clearly. Reporters following up on this story who need to verify the accuracy of the transcript are welcome to contact brian.boyko@netqos.com for details.]

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Brian Boyko, Network Performance Daily: As you know, I'm a customer of Time Warner in Austin. I have the biggest bandwidth plan, I think the Turbo...

Alex Dudley, VP of Public Relations, Time Warner Cable: Turbo, yes. You like it?

NPD: Well that entirely depends on the answers to some of the questions that I'm about to ask you!

Dudley: [Laughter] It always does, it always does.

NPD: It does, you know? We've actually covered a lot of this stuff, like for example, when Beaumont, Texas came out with the 40 gigabyte plan. I actually did a couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations, and - I can't give you an exact number, but I'm pretty sure I would probably go over the largest limit - which was 40 gigabytes - just myself personally. So, I'm wondering - let's just talk about the largest plan, 40 GB - how much after that, per gigabyte does the Beaumont plan cost?

Dudley: A dollar.

NPD: A dollar per gigabyte. Here's one of the big things. I called up Time Warner in Austin, through the [customer service] number - that's the customer service for Austin - everybody I've talked to says there are no plans to do monitored bandwidth, or metered bandwidth, or data caps, or however you want to call it - there's no plan to charge per gigabyte. I called up - or rather, I chatted online with a representative - a technical support representative for Road Runner, and he said that the plan would begin for Austin residents in April. So this is conflicting-- the first question is obviously, what is the story with regards to Austin, Texas, and I assume the other plans in Greensboro, and San Antonio - is it Richmond? Let me check my notes.

Dudley: Rochester, New York. So, the plan is a little bit different in some of those places. In Austin, we are going to begin metering usage in April. But we are - let me back up. The best way to think about this is that we kind of do it in three steps. The first is that we get our technical house in order so that we can actually do this. And we start metering bandwidth. And we give customers a three month grace period, so that they can see what they're consuming, get used to the new plan, figure out the right plan for them without being charged. After which, we begin to mail the first bills. So - we are going to be technically ready to meter usage in Austin in April, and we're going to begin doing so, but we are not going to begin the grace period for a couple more months. Probably early Summer. So the first time that people in Austin see a bill is likely to be Fall. Septemberish.

NPD: I was a little concerned about that - when I heard that metering would begin in April, I thought that you would start charging in April. And - I guess not. And that was exactly what I was hoping that you'd say, actually, and I didn't expect you to say it. Because, I called up, I tried to find out my usage over the past three months exactly. I couldn't do that.

Dudley: Yeah - that's - you know, look, that's one of the keys to this. We understand that this is basically a wholesale change in the way that people talk about the way they use the Internet. We get that, that this is hard. So, what we want to do is make it as clear as possible. So - in addition to the three month grace period, we've also created what we call a gas gauge that will rest on your RoadRunner home page, so you can get instant up-to-the-minute calculation of how we are measuring your usage. And that will launch at the same time that we begin metering.

NPD: The only problem is, and as I've said, these are all back-of-the-envelope calculations - I don't have hard numbers, but personally, I'm not only a journalist, I'm also a filmmaker. I make short documentaries for the Web. And the idea is that-- Essentially, I'm sending 250 megabyte files over and over and over, so one video could take about 2 gigabytes themselves. And I'm downloading stuff like the Prelinger archives - for stuff to use - public domain footage to use in my video, I wouldn't be surprised, if you add in things like Netflix, (I'm a Netflix subscriber,) YouTube, Hulu, things like that - I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up being one of the highest usage customers in Austin. Probably - if I had to guess, maybe 400 Gigabytes - and that would cost around $400 a month - which is about... my rent.

[Ed. Note: I’ve since checked my Internet usage over the past 15 days based on what Vista’s Network connection reported during that time. A more accurate estimate would be 300 GB/mo.]

Dudley: Yeah, I think there's a number of different things that you can do. First and foremost, we are going to introduce a 100 GB plan. Kind of as a response to the folks who feel that the caps are low - we're going to offer that. We haven't finished pricing it yet, so I don't know what it's going to cost. That said, I mean, if you are using, consistently, 400 GB a month, then clearly, you're a target of what's going on here. And basically, what we're saying is - because of consumers that are using amounts like this, what we're seeing is a need for network expansion. Basically what we figure is that the top 25% of users use 100 times more network bandwidth than the bottom 25%.

NPD: Well that's just standard bell curves.

Dudley: I’m sorry?

NPD: Well, when you put any system on a graph like that, I mean, that actually seems a little low because of the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle or whatever it's called. When you put something on the bell curve, of course the top 25 are going to use the most bandwidth because they're the top 25. The lowest 25 are going to use the least amount of bandwidth. It seems like - funny numbers.

Dudley: Let’s use a metaphor then. You live in a small apartment. And, you're on the same electric grid as a very fancy neighborhood with big houses. And the guy in the big house leaves every light in the place blazing all night long - has a bunch of lights outside, spotlights on his beautiful house. And you have to subsidize his electric bill, just because you happen to share the network with him.

NPD: Right... but that doesn't...

Dudley: You conserve energy; you live in a small apartment, that's what we're saying. As we need to make improvements in the network to accommodate the increased demand, we can do one of two things. Either we can just charge everybody more, and we let the smaller user subsidize the top users, or we could create a plan that has a consumption element to it that asks people to pay for what they use.

NPD: Right, but that's kind of a false choice in that-- haven't you considered using -- it's kind of a false choice because what you can do is - first of all, when you talk about something like that, with congestion, the problem with the electric grid - using that as a metaphor - is that there's a finite amount of oil in the world. There's a finite amount of output. With a cable company, what you're really talking about is bandwidth, and bandwidth is simply a measure of how much you can have over time. So when you're charging for the data, basically, to use your metaphor, I think it's particularly unfair to charge more for the person who is using 40 gigabytes after letting a download go off overnight, compared to a guy whose using, maybe, under his cap, but he's doing it the most congested part of the day. And, what I'm thinking might be a solution without caps - and I was wondering if you ever considered this - is simply tracking the high-end users, and when they're downloading a lot and the line is congested, and only when the line is congested, then perhaps, throttling back their service using QoS priorities. Giving them...

Dudley: That’s exactly what Comcast did about a year ago, and it caused a complete outrage and the FCC hauled them before the committee and told them they had to stop doing it.

NPD: Actually, I covered that. That's actually the result that Comcast applied after the FCC asked them to choose a different system. You're talking about the Sandvine stuff that was sending forged RST packets and the issue there was that the RST packets looked like they had come from the sender itself, which was essentially kind of a classic "Man In The Middle" attack. A kind of a fraudulent thing.

Dudley: So here's what I'd say about that, then. What I'd say is that there are a number of ways you can address this problem. And the way that you've mentioned is certainly a possibility. We think this one also has some merit, and we're going to test it. And we'll see what happens.

NPD: Well, I can tell you right now that it probably won't work as far as congestion is concerned, because you're not attacking congestion. You're attacking data, while data is unlimited, while bandwidth is finite. And I'm already paying, as I said, I'm a Turbo customer - I'm already paying more for more bandwidth. If you want to charge me more for that bandwidth, I can go down to a lower tier in order to have it remain affordable. But, one of the things that I really can't do is, I really can't cut back on my consumption, because I do need this for both of my jobs - both this job as a journalist and as a filmmaker.

Dudley: Then it sounds like you should be a commercial customer, then, which is also possible. You know, for $140 bucks a month, you could be a commercial customer. And then there's no cap.

NPD: And can you give commercial customer service to residences?

Dudley: Yes.

NPD: That's good. That's a little bit more reasonable. Here's what I'm wondering. If a bill for a month goes consistently over, 140 GB a month - or rather the bill ends up being more than what it would cost for a commercial customer - let me start over. Basically, will customers be notified when it seems like they're going over and maybe they should upgrade to a bigger plan? Like a lot of the cell phone companies do, if they see you have like $30 worth of overage charges in a month, they'll tell you, "If you're going to keep doing this, you really should upgrade to the higher plan?"

Dudley: In the early parts of the trial, we are going to try to do that - try and alert folks when they're getting close, get them into a proper plan. But look, someone in your scenario, if you're really consuming 400GB a month, then that's not - we'll work with you on ways to curb your consumption, but clearly, if you're dependent upon it for work, you're not going to be happy with any of those discussions. So I think that for someone like yourself, a commercial account is probably the best option.

NPD: What about families that perhaps have multiple users. For me, I understand that I'm a high user, because I do videos. But the thing is, especially with services like Hulu and Netflix, and things like that - a lot of families could end up paying for one account, and everybody thinks that they're fine because they are only downloading 20 gigabytes which is half their cap, but if there's four people in the family, downloading 20 gigabytes - you start to have a problem. Will this negatively impact those larger families that need the Internet more?

Dudley: Well, I think that what you're failing to account for is that even in Beaumont, where the trial is active, 86% of our customers are unaffected.

NPD: Right, but 14% are!

Dudley: And by customers, I mean households, I don't mean individual people. So, the assumption is that the family may need more, but we haven't found that. Basically, we're targeting the highest end-users, to pay their share. So, I think that what we found is that for the majority of customers - for the overwhelming majority of customers, it's not even an issue.

NPD: Right, but 14% is a significant minority, and, I mean, my publication's called "Network Performance Daily," Chances are that my readers fall into that 14 percent. A great deal - and as time goes on, more users use the Internet for different services, and people get more Internet savvy, that 14% is just going to keep on growing. I mean, to me...

Dudley: But there's nothing to say that the plan couldn't grow with it, either.

NPD: Well, can I get your promise on that? That the plan will grow over time as Internet consumption increases overall?

Dudley: [long pause] That's a tricky spot for me. No. You can't. I don't make that decision. But what I'm saying is that there's nothing inherent in the capped levels that prevents us from doing that from an engineering perspective.

NPD: Alright. I just have to ask this stuff, and I'm sorry for putting you on the spot like that, but you know...

Dudley: Nah, this is okay. This is what I do. I'm happy to have a debate, so, it's not - no big deal.

NPD: Well, there is another aspect to this, and that is - Time Warner is a cable company that not only sells Internet service but also sells cable service - and I've mentioned services like Hulu, YouTube, AppleTV - those services - couldn't this be seen as anti-competitive? That all of a sudden it costs - you not only have to pay a dollar for a movie rental, but you also have to pay Time Warner a dollar and a half on top of that, for the extra bandwidth to make the movie rental - can't that be seen as anticompetitive?

Dudley: [pause] Only as much as it's anticompetitive for ExxonMobil to charge you the gas to drive down to Blockbuster to rent your video.

NPD: Right, but if you walk to Blockbuster, you're fine. I mean...

Dudley: That’s right, and if you stay under your cap, you're fine.

NPD: I - well you're still, if you stay under your cap, you're still charging per gigabyte - it's like... if you

Dudley: No we're not. We're charging for an allotment of gigabytes. We're charging for a monthly plan.

NPD: Right, but what I'm trying to say is...

Dudley: It has a limit. Much like you're - look, I don't know why this is such - why this is foreign to folks. You know, you're either paying for consumption... I mean, the concept of paying for what you consume is not a foreign one. I understand that it's different from the way we've charged for the Internet in the past, and we admit that. But the concept that you pay for what you use is how you buy just about everything.

NPD: Yeah, what I'm trying to say is that there's a way to pay for what you use and tackle consumption, without a data cap which has all these other side-effects.

Dudley: It's not a cap - you're thinking about it wrong. I mean we're calling it a cap, but it's not a cap. We don't stop you from consuming after you go over that cap, we just charge you differently. It's the same thing with a cell phone plan.

NPD: Yes, but it's effectively - it's a de facto cap. The argument is entirely that you are doing this entirely to get users to change their behavior. And what I'm--

Dudley: No we're not. We don't care - use as much as you want. All we're asking is that you pay for what you use. We're happy when you use - I mean, if you want to use 400 GB a month, and pay for it, we love you.

NPD: So this isn't a congestion solving problem?

Dudley: It is in -- it's a congestion solving problem in one of two ways. Either it will provide us with the revenue stream needed to beef up the network, or folks will change their consumption habits, which is entirely possible. But - it's not - that's not to say that-- it's completely content and protocol agnostic. We don't care what you download from where.

NPD: And that's great. I love that.

Dudley: I'm sorry?

NPD: I love protocol agnostic solutions - I think they're great - I just think that there are other protocol agnostic solutions that, perhaps, would be better than what you're doing.

Dudley: And if there are, and we will certainly look at all of them, then we will naturally be incorporated into this. And again, this is just a trial, so... I understand that as a heavy user, you're concerned - and your readership maybe heavy users too, and they're concerned about their personal skin in this game, and that's understandable. But I think that basically, it would be hard for anyone who consumes 400 GB a month to say that that doesn't cost us as your network provider a lot to service you. And it doesn't impact the levels of service on those with whom you share your bandwidth.

NPD: Right, but the point that I'm trying to say is that I'm perfectly fine for you charging me more, but charge me more based on the bandwidth I use, not on the data I download. You can use QoS policies - because I can't filter how congested the lines are on my end. You guys have to do that on your end. I'm just - what I'm trying to say is - yes, I'm a heavy user, but the heavy user isn't making problems for his neighbors if he's doing it when none of his neighbors are using the Internet.

Dudley: Hmm - and I don't disagree with that point, that that doesn't impact... I mean, you can't impact service on someone who is not online. And I don't disagree with that. But it still costs us money - the increased usage still costs us money to make the network able to accommodate that. And that's just a fact of business.

NPD: But you've already charged me more for my Turbo plan... You've already established, that "if you want this level of service, if you want this level of bandwidth, you're charging me for that Turbo plan." Now you're also saying, "In addition to that, you're going to also charge me for consumption?"

Dudley: That's exactly what we're saying.

NPD: Alright. No disagreement here. I know. I'm being rough. I don't like to be rough.

Dudley: No, it's okay. Look, I understand. This is a very passionate issue. It's very close to people like yourself that are heavy users. I get it. It's fine.

NPD: This corporate plan that you're talking about, how is it different from a personal plan? So, let's say that I do decide to go to the $140 a month plan.

Dudley: Just call us and ask for a business class account. And basically we come and hook up a corporate connection. It's a different customer service queue too. There are other advantages for you.

NPD: This is interesting - can we resell that? I know that residential services, you are not allowed to resell that, there was an article about someone who was trying to pull a fast one and resell 35 cable modems - with business class, am I restricted? Because I'm thinking - if it's going to be like $140 a month - that's still a pretty penny, and if I can get my neighbor to go with me on it, if he's got a Wi-Fi - if we can work out some sort of sharing deal, I have the landline so I'll maybe pay a little bit more - sort of like, "Internet Roomies."

Dudley: I don't know if that's possible or not. I'm not familiar with the service agreement on that. But they'll - just give us a call and the people that sell that service can answer that question. I mean, look, we're not interested in folks reselling our services, so I think that's what we're trying to prevent, but whether you guys could link as one business account, I don't know. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility, but I could be wrong.

NPD: Well, thank you very much for talking - I know that I talked a lot - is there anything else you'd like to add?

Dudley: No, I think - for your readers it's different, but for the vast majority of our customers, they won't even notice a difference, and I think that - and I know that's probably not music to your ears, but at the same time, what we're doing is trying to ensure that we're maintaining a level of service that folks are happy to pay for, and if we don't make some sort of investment in this, or if we don't at least acknowledge that there's an issue here that needs to be addressed, then by the time we need to do it, it'll be too late. So this is an experiment. One of the things we're going to measure is customer reaction, so, you know, it's an important part of the process and we're happy to listen to our customers. But, you know, so far, the reaction has been what we've expected, fairly even across the board. So we'll see what happens and we'll make decisions based on what we see.

NPD: Alright, well again, thank you for your time.

By Patrick Ancipink

So far, so good at Cisco Networkers in Barcelona this week. Despite spirits being a little tempered by the worldwide financial crisis, attendance seems to be quite good and we are noticing a radical shift in what enterprises and service providers are trying to accomplish with their networks.

One topic that’s a bit been very popular with this audience is the concern about VoIP and video quality on converged networks.  So you could say network pros are more jittery here about latency-sensitive UPD applications than they are about the macroeconomic situation.

Heh…

Moving on...

The primary concern about video has shifted from quashing recreational YouTube viewers to ensuring the network can carry video. We spoke with several different companies (with headquarters from Sweden to Qatar) that have requirements to stream video across the WAN as part of their mission. I was involved in several conversations and overheard several more where the main topic was using application-aware network management tools and techniques like IP SLA and how to determine, validate and assure QoS.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised about the awareness of the Cisco NAM support we announced the day before yesterday. It seems like before the news even hit the wire we had several attendees asking how they could use their NAMs alongside NetQoS. There are some monster implementations of NAM out there so everybody’s happy when you can leverage the existing investment for better application response time monitoring and performance troubleshooting.

Tapas and Rioja are nothing to complain about either.

Technically, it’s a powerpoint presentation, not a whiteboard sketch, but here, Robert Webb, Principal Network Consultant at NetQoS, brings a short sample of the type of training he does for the NetAnalyst program – in this case discussing TCP Slow Start.

The embedded version is low quality – you can head to the appropriate YouTube page for a high definition version of the video.

Part 7 in a series adapted from Joel Trammell’s Keynote Speech at NetQoS Symposium 2008

Think back three years ago. Back then, how many of you had an MPLS environment?

The carriers have been busy. And in that MPLS environment you lose visibility.

So how do you quantify how the performance has changed and how that carrier network is performing? After all, carriers claimed that by going to MPLS you would get better performance. But since they don't really monitor their own networks, how would they know? With MPLS, you don’t have a lot of data to validate whether it has improved performance. The ability to quantify how that carrier network is performing is critically important.

Additionally, how do you gain traffic visibility into the traffic flows, such as voice, that can now, instead of being in a traditional hub and spoke design, go from any location to any other location? The ability to understand the traffic flows without having to put devices out at each of your local sites to get visibility back into that traffic is crucial.

Finally, anomaly detection is important because often we see with MPLS routing changes that “just occur” that often affect performance. Suddenly the route changes on a major protocol, unknown to you, and suddenly performance is dramatically affected. So, you'll detect that in response time but you'll also see it in changes in traffic flows that will show up in anomaly detection.

EMA analyst Dennis Drogseth had a column in Network World yesterday talking about end-to-end application management. In it, he had this to say:

You might believe, and with some real justification, that the term “end to end” is only used by vendors who custom-fit the definition to the scope of their particular product.

Does “end-to-end” application management, for instance, include the mainframe? You bet it does if you’re a vendor that manages the mainframe environment! Does it include capturing the end user experience at the end station, desktop, or mobile device? Once again, the answer is a definitive “yes” if you’re a vendor that has strong QoE (Quality of Experience) roots. Or how about insights into the code and design of the application itself? If you’re one of the few vendors that does this, you’re proud of it and wouldn’t have it any other way!

And this concerned me because, if you do a google search for: [site:networkperformancedaily.com “end-to-end”], you get 122 results. The phrase, “end-to-end” appears in a little more than 1 in 5 posts we’ve made to this blog.

So, what do we mean by “end-to-end?”  We’re usually using the phrase in connection with network response times and the end-user experience at the end station; NetQoS is a “vendor that has strong QoE roots.”

Now, we do have some insight into the code and design of the application.  But that isn’t the focus of our tools; the focus is to tell you whether the problem is in the network, server, or application, and if it’s in the application, give you a good idea of where to start your investigation.  (For example, an application that is slow due to unnecessary round-trip transactions behaves differently from an application that is slow due to a memory leak on the server where it is being run.) 

Drogseth is right when he says that no one vendor is optimized to do it all.  In the future, there could be, but then you run into the quality vs. quantity problem.  Is it better to do it all adequately or to do a few things extremely well?

EMA defined five major technology spheres, and last June, they polled more than 400 respondents to find out which of them they believed “most critical to end-to-end application management in 2008.”  The answer was “Network Application Management,” focusing on application flows and end-to-end (as we define it) transaction capabilities. 

For more information on this, I recommend you read the original article up at Network World.  Additionally, Drogseth promises to follow-up in his next two columns.