Friday, December 15, 2006
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." »
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
by Nathan Bragaw
We just entered into a strategic partnership with Network Instruments. Their GigaStor appliance captures and stores all the packets traveling networks for historical packet-level analysis. Our SuperAgent identifies the source of performance problems, application, server, or network, and isolates when and where they are degraded. Together, the products can monitor large networks, isolate performance issues, and provide packet-level analysis specific to the problem.
For example, this allows an engineer to identify a network that is showing slow web performance. The engineer can then drill down to a packet capture that includes network traffic 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after the event. This capability is changing the troubleshooting capabilities by replaying network traffic prior to the issue occurring. It's like having a TiVO for your network.
Engineers get an alert from SuperAgent, identifying the time and location of a network problem. Then you go into GigaStor and sort through the traffic to identify the root cause of the problem. We’re pretty psyched about GigaStor’s ability to reassemble packet streams to recreate e-mails, web pages, IM sessions and VoIP calls.
We call it Retrospective Network Analysis, or RNA for short.
We should have the products completely integrated sometime in the next six months or so. We’ve already started selling Network Instruments’ GigaStor products through our sales team and our Web site.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
By Steven Maercklein and Zack Belcher
While we haven’t had a chance to play with Vista yet, (both of us are on the road all the time and we don’t have access to a lab,) we have been doing a lot of research on the new TCP/IP features of Vista and Longhorn.
We spent some time poring over a document from Microsoft’s Research Asia (the guys who designed the Compound TCP/IP [CTCP] algorithm) and it details how the algorithm works. It doesn’t detail how Microsoft has implemented the algorithm – there are alpha, beta, and gamma values that are tweakable, but it doesn’t go into how Microsoft has tweaked them. It looks like this was a document just to prove that CTCP was feasible and ready to be included in Vista.
It does teach you about the behavior of it and what to expect when seen in action, and it makes reference to the current technologies for congestion avoidance that CTCP is based on. However, there are several features of Vista of concern to those involved in network performance.
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Continue reading "Vista's TCP/IP Promises and Perils" »
Thursday, December 07, 2006
by Ted Romer
I would say, compared to Windows XP’s TCP/IP stack, the Vista stack has been redesigned from the ground up, instead of merely patched. The result is that there are a number of features in the new stack, (which Microsoft calls “The Next Generation TCP/IP Stack”), which are a bit exciting. (Windows Server Longhorn also runs the same stack as Vista.)
There’s been some pretty interesting changes with Receive Window Auto-Tuning and Compound TCP, which provide more aggressive scaling for the network window. Windows scaling is now enabled by default, and is also configured automatically.
If we think about a TCP conversation right now, a sender is given a window as to how much they can send without acknowledgement. The service slowly ramps up in a linear fashion, and if something happens (like a packet loss) we go back to a slow start and slowly ramp up again.
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Continue reading "Vista's "Next Generation" TCP/IP Stack and the Enterprise" »
Thursday, November 30, 2006
by Joel Trammell
Microsoft released Windows Vista (along with the new Office suite and Exchange server) to business customers today.
From a networking perspective, there have been several changes in the networking stack in the move from Windows XP to Windows Vista. We’re doing a fair amount of work, because we understand what Microsoft says they did, and we’re doing a fair amount of work to find out if that’s the way things actually work in reality. There’s testing that needs to be done, once network engineers understand the new Vista network stack, changes in the way that network engineers need to think.
For a networking person, I think Vista’s a pretty big deal, whereas some of the other Windows upgrades, maybe from a pure networking perspective, weren’t. You’re going to see some changes because of it. We'll have some details about how networking is different in Vista on this blog soon.
Joel Trammell is the CEO of NetQoS.
Monday, November 27, 2006
by Cathy Fulton
For any technical mistake, there’s usually a technical solution. Losing time while a problem persists is embarrassing, but you can recover from such delays. Much bigger problems occur when you try to change the workflow of the people who use the software. That’s when IT projects become difficult.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to get people to change the way they’ve been doing things. If you deploy an expensive piece of software in the expectation that people will automatically change the way that they normally do their jobs as a consequence of the switchover, you will greatly reduce your chances of success.
Continue reading "Perspectives on What's Missing in the Field of Network Management" »
Monday, November 20, 2006
by Cathy Fulton
Monitoring business transactions over the network has never been more critical to operational efficiency. Yet, there’s much confusion over methodology.
The implementation choices consist of different deployment strategies (client-site or server-site, agent or appliance) and distinct monitoring technologies (active or passive). Each of these options has individual strengths and weaknesses. This series of articles discusses industry best practices for effectively monitoring business transactions in a global environment.
Part 1 of 2: Deployment Strategies
One of the most important decisions is the deployment strategy for the business monitoring solution. Should monitors be deployed at the client sites or should they be deployed at the data centers? Should software agents or hardware appliances be used? While this may seem like a minor matter, it has the most serious ramifications from both an immediate “headache” and long-term recurring cost standpoint.
Continue reading "Best Practices for Monitoring Business Transactions, part 1 of 2" »
Thursday, November 16, 2006
By Steve Harriman
NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It's the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It's the right place to be.
The speaker for the second day’s keynote speech was Dr. Thomas Malone, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management.
I noticed that a surprisingly large number of hands went up when he asked attendees if they had corporate blogs and if their organizations allowed individuals to have their own.
He discussed organization models and how organizations are becoming more distributed, both physically and in how they operate – more distributed decision making. Successful organizations have found the way to fully leverage the intelligence and creativity their employees have.
Employees who are empowered to use their capabilities to the fullest have more fun and are more productive. The networking tie-in here is that the network is the enabler of organizational empowerment.
Continue reading "Notes on the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Part 2" »
