Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-24" »
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-20" »
Way back in 1995, Network World used the economic metaphor of inflation to report The Cost of Network Complexity. While 1995 might be considered the Paleozoic era of networking -- Windows NT was barely two years old -- and the technologies have since rapidly evolved, still the inflation metaphor holds up today.
"The cause of economic inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, diminishing the buying power of the dollar. In the case of network complexity inflation, we have too much network infrastructure being chased by too few network wizards. Net service quality (the currency provided by the support staff) declines because it is spread across too many service demands."When this occurs, there are two means of bringing service quality and service requirements back into balance: reduce the number of factors contributing to the complexity [NPD Editor's note: That's not going to happen.] ... or increase the size of the support staff to handle the increased complexity. [Nope, that's not happening either]"
Flash forward to today and it's clear that infrastructure tools have progressed over time, making enterprise networks more reliable in the process. However, increased reliability doesn't necessarily mean better performance and it doesn't necessarily mean a better experience for the end-user. Today users commonly expect a ubiquitous and instantaneous network. They want it now, anywhere at anytime.
Therefore, network engineers aren't getting much sleep!
Here are three big trends that have increased the volume and complexity of wide area network traffic, made monitoring application performance a necessity and sleep for network engineers a luxury:
Continue reading "Three Big Trends Affecting Network and Application Performance" »
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-18" »
According to Neal Weinberg at Network World magazine, Gartner analysts Mark Fabbi and Bob Hafner argued that IT and network engineering departments will “waste an estimated $100 billion over the next three years by overspending on network products and services.”
He [Fabbi] expanded on that premise this week to argue that network execs should only buy what they know they will need for the next two years, rather than buying more than necessary, just in case network requirements grow. More often than not, "just in case never comes," Fabbi said.
Continue reading "A waste of $100B" »
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-17" »
Over the last several years IT organizations worldwide have spent billions of dollars implementing fault management tools and processes to maximize network availability. And now thanks to these investments and more reliable technologies, most enterprise and service provider networks operate with 99.9 percent uptime or better. So why do many IT organizations continue to focus their management resources on managing that ".01" percent of downtime?
Continue reading ""Most of the Time" Deserves Most of the Attention" »
