By Brian Boyko

Fingerpointing - it's a frustrating and lingering problem for IT organizations. Whenever, application performance degrades, all of a sudden application, server, and networking teams start pointing the finger at one another in an attempt to pass the blame. But isn't that why we have network monitoring tools in the first place - to tell you where the problem is, so that you can fix it faster.

Theoretically, yes. Unfortunately, network teams may be suffering from an undeserved "credibility gap" that prevents companies from taking timely action when problems arise.

For so very long, problems with network performance have often been laid at the feet of the networking team because, quite frankly, to the end user, an application problem, a server problem, and a network link problem all look like the same thing. "The network is slow." So even when it's not the network, the network team often gets the blame.

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Continue reading "Fingerpointing, Frustrated Network Engineers, and the Application Performance Blame Game" »

By Dr. Cathy Fulton

In the beginning, Al Gore created the Internet. (Okay, I have to be fair, Vint Cerf has given Al Gore a lot of credit for his work in government.)

IP version 4 was created back in 1981, and in August of 1990, at an IETF meeting, three individuals predicted that the IPv4 Class B address space would be consumed as early as March of 1994, the “date of doom,” and that would cause all sorts of issues.

That stimulated a lot of publicity and action, on how the address space seed shortage would be handled. A working group was formed in December 1993 that published a request for whitepapers asking for solutions to the IPv4 problem – including next-generation IP protocols.

They were so worried, however, that they would run out so quickly, that they believed there would be no time for new features. The ALE working group was tasked with determining how long they had before the Internet collapsed, due to routers unable to keep up with the increased routing tables. Could next-gen IP add new features, or did they just have to implement an emergency measure?

The working group came back with an estimate in 1994, and said that the collapse of the net would be somewhere between 2005 and 2011. That gave the IETF time to develop a full protocol, add new features, and figure out where they were going next.

In 1994, technical criteria by which the IP next generation protocol would be judged were introduced. The current specification was proposed in 1998, and is now a draft standard – one step away from full Internet standard.

So, where’s IPv5?

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Continue reading "The Evolution of IPv6" »

By Brian Boyko

Back in November of 2006, (which seems like such a long time ago,) Network Performance Daily published a column by Carol Schiraldi about "why enterprise developers use Java and game programmers use C++."

We published this for a number of reasons - but the main one was that typically, enterprise developers are programming for function first, reliability, second, and performance over the network, if it's even considered at all, is a tertiary thought.

What this means is that applications, developed originally for the LAN environment, often take up valuable network resources unnecessarily when placed into a WAN environment.

[Full disclosure: NetQoS sells network performance management software which diagnoses problems like "chatty apps," and we want you to buy them. Anyway…]

But one area where this isn't a significant problem is in game development, which was the thesis of the original column. Game developers, who realize their games have to perform well over the Internet, typically build with performance in mind first.

This was confirmed when we had a chance to talk to Timothee Besset, a game developer at ID Software, developers of the famous Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake series of games. Here's what he said about this issue:

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Continue reading "ID Software Developer Timothee Besset on Network Performance in Games" »

By Brian Boyko

If you spend some time poring through RFC documents (something I don’t recommend for the 99% of the population that is still sane) you’ll find tons of improvements, modifications, case-specific optimizations and alternatives to TCP, the workhorse of networking transport protocols since the 1970s.

Seth Noble, President and Founder of Data Expedition, Inc., believes that he can do one better. His company claims that their proprietary transport protocol, MTP, for “Multipurpose Transaction Protocol,” provides a scalable alternative to TCP that uses bandwidth more efficiently. According to Mr. Noble:

“TCP's 1970's data model makes dealing with this problem more difficult than it needs to be. TCP was created with the assumption that packet loss would "rarely" occur, and so it is rather fragile in our modern, congested networks. A lot of very smart people have tried for many years to patch TCP and help it cope, but it still carries its 30 year old legacy with it.”

“MTP/IP was designed from scratch to operate in congested environments where packet loss and other network problems are common. As a result, MTP/IP does an exceptionally good job of quickly AND correctly identifying whether or not data has really been lost and then recovering that data with little or no disruption.”

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Continue reading "Proprietary MTP: an alternative to TCP?" »

By Ben Erwin

When you talk to people in the enterprise - engineers, directors, and VPs - they've made a lot of investments in toolsets. They've either built their own internal custom data sources, or they've invested across the board in a lot of different vendors. That creates a lot of complications when they're trying to manage their network for consistent service delivery and when they try to solve problems quickly.

They're looking for more of a consolidated view in the network. There are many vendors that have made acquisitions to build in certain components into their suite. That's why two big movements in IT are third-party integration and added focus on user interface.

Third-party integration helps engineers take their existing investments, and put them all into a single location, streamlining network management, correlating data to help troubleshoot problems faster, and to give it the executive appeal to help provide consistent service delivery across all of the different data systems in the environment.

Continue reading "Third Party Integration and UI in the Enterprise" »

By Brian Boyko

"Jesus has come back, and he's a phone now."

The Apple iPhone might not be the second coming, but it will certainly be popular. Already the Web is being inundated by speculation, information, mis-information, rumor, innuendo, and anyone with an opinion on Apple writing about the iPhone.

So we thought: Why buck the trend?

The truth is that when this device comes out, many people are going to buy the iPhone, they will use it at their jobs - including those in a corporate IT environment - and that means it is going to become the responsibility of the IT manager.

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Continue reading "Why Apple's iPhone means more work for the IT department" »

[Editorial Note: As of January 7, 2006, we have been contacted by Prof. Yoo, who has said that he sent us some clarifications and corrections that we did not receive before publication deadline. As such, the article that appears in this space has been retracted. An explanation of what occured and the corrected version of the article that contains Prof. Yoo's corrections can be found at this location. Those with questions about the article can e-mail brian.boyko at netqos dot com with any questions or concerns.]

By Ben Haley

I’m a developer for NetQoS, and I’ve been mulling over the idea that Cisco is planning to take the IOS in their routers and break it into different modules, which they can then provide separately. As a developer I am always interested in architecture, but as a customer do I really care how the code is implemented? After all, I buy a router to direct traffic. My main interests are that it does this reliably, quickly and for a reasonable cost. What difference does it make if the IOS comes feature-by-feature or in a single package deal? In this case I believe the change will be very positive.

The IOS is the Internet operating system for the router. Everyone tends to think of the router as a piece of hardware you plug in, but it’s really a specialized computer that has an operating system on it that can be tweaked to do different things. Every switch and every router has some type of operating system built into it. In fact, people have been able to figure out how to install Linux on a few models of consumer routers and add new capabilities.

Moving to a modular system provides some interesting ideas. For IT administrators, it might increase the cost, or if relatively few features are needed, save money. (Cisco, I think, tends to make money on the hardware, not on the software.) Either way, it’s an interesting concept to say “How would you do this, and what would be the impact?”

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Continue reading "Thoughts on Cisco's Modular IOS" »

For more information on this topic, you can download our Tech Brief on Cisco WAAS, available here

by Steve Fulton

Users expect a ubiquitous and instantaneous network, as well as consistent application performance. This, combined with a proliferation of business critical, Web 2.0, (and recreational) applications that consume precious WAN bandwidth, forces IT to get very creative in squeezing more performance out of existing infrastructure.

Hence the red-hot market for application acceleration and WAN optimization products that address WAN performance problems caused by latency, congestion, and applications (such as WAFS and CIFS) that were designed for the LAN and now have to traverse the WAN due to data center consolidation.

Cisco shook things up in late 2006 with the introduction of WAAS-short for Wide Area Application Services-technology that is transparent to the underlying network infrastructure. According to Cisco, WAAS combines WAN optimization, acceleration of TCP-based applications, and Cisco's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) in a single appliance or blade.

WAAS addresses problems related to traffic congestion that need some sort of optimization done at the branch. It complements Cisco's Application Control Engine (ACE), which is a data center optimization product that integrates server load balancing, application security, and unique virtual partitioning capabilities.

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Continue reading "WAAS Up with Cisco's WAN Optimization Initiative?" »

Compiled by Brian Boyko

We (and many other experts) believe that there needs to be an industry discussion between developers and networking groups, because it seems that people - at least the people we come in contact with regularly - talk often about how applications designed and tested to run over a LAN perform horribly over a WAN.

Because this dialogue doesn't seem to be happening much yet, we've decided to try to take the initiative and help jump-start the discussion between appdev teams and networking groups.

Despite the fact that this blog deals with network performance, and as such would most likely appeal to IT managers, network engineers, and the occasional CTO/CIO, this blog's earliest success was an article by Carol Schiraldi speaking about games programming. That article made it on the front page of DZone - it's kind of like Digg for developers. While getting a developer audience was entirely unexpected, that article is what convinced us that we were starting to produce some compelling content, and caused us to set our sights very high. Over the past week, we've received over 15,000 unique visitors; which is not bad for a site that has been up less than 6 weeks!

On the other hand, some members of DZone had complained - fairly, in my opinion - that much of what we wrote didn't really affect developers. Although we got back on their front page again with an article by Russell Wilson regarding UI development, DZone has mostly remained a bit aloof to our offerings - and who can blame them. So we asked one of their editors, Lowell Heddings, how we could better serve the DZone community (and by extension, the developer community.) He had this to say:

"My main question for network engineers is... aren't routers boring? =P"

I'm pretty sure he was trying to blow us off. But he's got a point. Aren't routers boring? So I actually posed this question in a company-wide e-mail. Here are some of the best responses:

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Continue reading ""Aren't Routers Boring?" the developer asked." »