Participate in Network Instruments survey to share details about your network and your IT management strategy.

By Denise Dubie

Ever wonder if what you’re doing with technology stacks up to your peers? Or are you curious about the latest technology advancements and how they might impact your network? Network Instruments hopes to answer these questions with its fourth annual State of the Network Survey.

Network engineers embrace cloud computing, Cisco Live survey says

The vendor’s 2009 survey revealed that three-quarters of the more than 440 IT professionals polled had implemented virtualization, but the same percentage noted they lacked adequate tools, visibility and information to troubleshoot problems. The economy played a big role in the survey as well with 73% of respondents reporting that they were being asked to do more with less. Yet nearly two-thirds of IT staffs had not experienced layoffs.

Continue reading "What’s the state of your network?" »

Online IT games challenge players to showcase their project and portfolio management skills and network management know-how. Can you compete?

By Denise Dubie

IT professionals aren’t all about business. Many enjoy some friendly competition in the form of online gaming. Two such free online games challenge players to put their IT-specific skills to work in winning them PPM Hero or Network Rockstar status.

PPM Hero, created by CA Technologies in association with The Burton Group, asks players to answer questions on three floors (or game levels) to eventually achieve the status of PPM hero. Using project and portfolio management expertise, players would advance through the levels dubbed Information Technology, Business Operations and The Executive Offices.

The game offers some bonus features as well as some potential pitfalls. For instance, answering questions marked “Q” will give players the opportunity to boost their budget. Yet every wrong response takes budget dollars away and the more time you take the more likely the cash reserves will continue to shrink. Red “Project Police” could cause issues completing tasks, but blue shields can protect against the potential danger the police present.

Successful players that reach PPM Hero status can then challenge friends and submit their own questions for future gamers. IT professionals looking to increase their skills for the game could check out CA Technologies’ PPM blog and the company’s IT governance blog.

And if you’d rather get down and dirty with network know-how, don’t forget to test your network management skills with a game created by NetQoS (acquired by CA Technologies). In the Network Rockstar Challenge players are asked tons of technical trivia only those proficient in network technology could know.

Network Rockstar players choose an online persona and fielding questions through several rounds. The more rounds completed, the higher the status of the character. The game quizzes players on their high-tech knowledge with questions ranging from what does the acronym ATM stand for to what is the speed of an OC-3 network line. Players nailing seven out of 10 questions successfully earn the right to go on tour. Those that fall short get bounced to the alley.

Know any online games that test IT skills? Please share them with me by leaving a comment here or e-mail me the information directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

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Enterprise Management Associates’ Radar report for Application-Aware Network Performance Management names CA Technologies and OPNET Technologies as value leaders.

By Denise Dubie

CA Technologies can attribute its acquisition of NetQoS for its high rank on Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recent Radar report that analyzed some 20 vendors and their Application-Aware Network Performance Management (ANPM) product capabilities.

How savvy network management optimizes application performance

CA Technologies certainly isn’t shy about shopping for technology -- the vendor since the beginning of 2009 alone has acquired 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS, Nimsoft and Oblicore. And recent research shows that the company is also pretty savvy when it comes to picking companies and products that will best round out its technology portfolio.

In the case of NetQoS, CA Technologies invested $200 million in 2009 to acquire the Austin-based network performance management vendor and is already seeing the fruits of that acquisition by way of industry recognition for its technology capabilities. Combining the NetQoS portfolio with products acquired years ago with Concord Communications, namely eHealth, CA Technologies caught the attention of Jim Frey, research director at EMA, author of the recent EMA Radar report on ANPM products.

Continue reading "NetQoS buy lands CA Technologies in ‘value leader’ position" »

Enterprise Management Associates’ Radar report for Application-Aware Network Performance Management proves the importance of network health for optimized application performance.

By Denise Dubie

Network management is considered a mature IT discipline, yet recent research proves that even advanced practices can be updated when technology and business needs demand it.

Take application-aware network performance management, for example. Bringing together network performance data with metrics on applications and services running across the environment will help high-tech managers deliver an optimized IT end-user experience, according to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

CA Technologies earns BSM nod from EMA

“Application-aware network performance management (ANPM) in our Radar report is looking at tools that are doing performance management by monitoring the network and in doing so the tools are also revealing application details and services that are active, who’s using them and how often, what’s the responsiveness and the quality of experience,” says Jim Frey, research director at EMA.

The EMA Radar for Application-Aware Network Performance Management Q3 2010 Summary details the four key mechanisms used by vendors in tools designed to provide application awareness in a network management product. To start, tools should include packet inspection capabilities. This “technique delivers application visibility by looking into packet headers as well as deeper packet contents in order to recognize and monitor application and service use by user,” according to the report.

Continue reading "How savvy network management optimizes application performance" »

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" »

What's in a name? Plenty, according to the branding powers that be at the company once known as Computer Associates, then CA and now CA Technologies. In this case, not only is change good, it is inevitable, according to CA executives, and with some internal and external updates, the company plans to embrace the IT industry evolution and provide customers with tools and guidance to help them do the same.

Chairman and CEO Bill McCracken told some 7,000 attendees during his opening keynote address at CA World '10 in Las Vegas about the updated name as well as the company's "we can" motto. When it comes to helping customers take on technology challenges, CA Technologies new response will simply be "we can." The updated moniker matches the software maker's revamped mission to help its customers use technologies such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service, virtualization management, mainframe 2.0 and security to enable their businesses to rapidly respond to changing market needs.

"IT will not be in a year as it this year," McCracken explained to the audience, detailing the three drivers that push industry advances such as cloud computing: economic conditions, technology capabilities and user need. Considering the history-making recession the U.S. and other markets are just now starting to recover from, McCracken said there is no doubt cloud computing is coming in full force. "Nothing is going to stop this," he declared.

What hasn't changed is that IT departments are being tasked to do more with less. In the past decade, most IT shops have faced that reality multiple times, which is in part the reason why technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization took off immediately with overworked, understaffed IT teams.

"The biggest problem the CEO has is how to change business rapidly enough to meet competitive challenges," McCracken said. Cloud computing can help IT teams tap resources quickly to deliver new applications to market faster, maintaing a competitive edge. And virtualization can help companies consolidate overgrown and underused infrastructure and apply resources to busines-critical applications on-demand, for example.

Yet the technology often in theory is much different than in practice. As it is with most new technologies, the management challenges follow the adoption hype and represent a drain on the potential ROI such IT implementations promise. For instance, research has shown that IT departments "hit a wall," McCracken said, with virtualization when 15% to 20% to 25% of servers become virtual because the tools to manage the complex environment are lacking.

And cloud computing faces a similar bugaboo in the security realm, but McCracken explained CA Technologies completed it own cloud efforts and now "can" pass along the knowledge and experience to its customers. McCracken pointed to ongoing partnerships with Salesforce.com on internal projects as well as some external, customer-facing product delivery models."

"We're moving secdurity into the cloud," he said. "Because we as a user had to deal with some of the same things you have had to deal with."

CA Technologies has already been working at pulling together the technological pieces it needs to enable customers to more smoothly and securely move to the cloud, manage and automate virtual environments and continue to tap mainframe systems for extended value. Acquisitions such as NetQoS, Nimsoft, Oblicore, 3Tera and Cassatt (just to name a few recent ones) and investing about two-thirds of $1 billion toward internal research and development have equipped CA Technologies to guide customers through this evolved IT realm.

"CA Technologies will be the industry thought and technology leader in this new evolution," McCracken concluded.

Posted by Denise Dubie

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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…)

InfoWorld’s Paul Krill recently reported that Richard Marcello, President of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys, said something that could be regarded as a bit of a PR blunder at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo.

“We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”

Well, great for those two guys in India, and I’m sure it’ll go a long way towards helping the Indian economy recover from its recent invasion of Dahler Mendi Clones… FROM SPACE! Still, I’m sure everyone who works in IT in the U.S. felt a chill go up their spine when reading that quote.

Now, part of the reason that Unisys was able to cut those jobs was because they set up a “private cloud” in the company, which allows them to do server provisioning in five minutes, compared to 10 days of manual provisioning. These provisioned servers could then be managed remotely.

This is true enough, as far as things go, but oftentimes it seems that companies view IT as nothing more than a capital expenditure which should be cut as much as possible. IT is not just a capital expense – it is, and always has been, the “force multiplier” of the business. IT doesn’t just cost money, it enables your company to grow with new challenges. Smart IT is about developing or delivering applications – and if you have a surplus of IT, consider using that surplus power to either improve performance for existing applications, or work on developing the applications to simplify workload.

The real power in cloud computing and virtualization is not just that it saves hardware costs, but that it frees up your engineers from doing things like maintenance and administration when they could be engineering – solving problems and improving solutions. In other words – IT doesn’t generate revenue directly, but they make the revenue generating parts of the business generate more revenue. If you don’t see value in that, you’re doing something wrong.

Harwell Thrasher, author of “Boiling the IT Frog: How to make your business information technology wildly successful without having to learn anything technical,” has a blog post out talking about how, during the current economic situation, which has gone beyond “depression” and towards “the pit of despair,” companies are making dangerous cuts to IT staff.

He compares it to an ice hockey tactic called “pulling the goalie,” in which a team is down by a goal in an important game, and they will swap out the goalie for a sixth offensive player in a desperate effort to score.  Doing so is within the rules but leaves the goal undefended.  For example, an IT department that cancels offsite backup recovery solutions, stopped updating virus prevention software, and laid off the only guy in the company who really understands how to maintain and support custom systems all lead to the possibility of a grave disaster that threatens to seriously harm the company.

But the metaphor is flawed.  Pulling the goalie in hockey may reduce defenses but it gives hockey teams a better shot of playing on the offense.  A lot of IT cuts seem to be not pulling the goalie – most companies at least know to keep their anti-virus software up to date – but they might not take network performance as seriously as they once did, and make reductions in IT without realizing that it can be a false savings.

That is, it is difficult – but not impossible – to determine the costs of letting a particular application, like, say PeopleSoft, experience a “brownout” – still technically “up,” but performing poorly.  Losing money in lost productivity or sales or customer satisfaction.  At that point, it’s a simple equation: did the money saved from the IT cost cover the productivity, lost revenue, or irritated customer? If the answer is “no,” then it’s clearly a case of false economy.

This is especially important considering that companies are starting to reconsider the “do more with less” mentality and are now thinking about “doing less with less.”  And indeed, this can be a viable tactic – if you can save money by going for three nines of uptime instead of five nines of uptime, it can be worth it if you only need three nines of uptime. 

Network performance requirements can be cut in the same way, sort of.  I mean, while it actually hurts me, emotionally, to suggest this, “the best” network performance isn’t always the most cost effective network performance.  So, for example, if you can save money by allowing some periods of congestion on the WAN, so long as that congestion never gets over an acceptable amount, then it might work.

The problem is finding out what’s “acceptable.”  This means baselining performance and understanding what kind of performance your business applications need.  It’s for this reason that cuts in IT should not include the network engineers that make those determinations, nor the (self-interest alert!) network monitoring solutions they depend on.  IT without the former is “pulling the goalie,” while IT without the latter is putting the goalie out there without a stick, protective gear, or skates.