The big problem with WAN Optimization and Application Performance Monitoring was that there simply wasn't a WAN Optimization solution on the market that preserved end-to-end performance data, nor a monitoring solution that would work in an optimized WAN.

This problem has been solved.

At Cisco Networkers in Anaheim, NetQoS gave a presentation to hundreds of attendees to make the announcement that we've been working with Cisco to develop a management interface for accurate end-to-end application response time measurement that works on optimized networks. (In addition to the people mobbing our booth, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, stopped by for a chat and review of what we do.)

Through integrated software on Cisco Wide Area Application Services devices (WAAS), TCP header information is exported to NetQoS SuperAgent (an end-to-end application performance monitoring module) before optimization occurs - preserving that information. Finally, IT organizations can accurately validate the results of WAN Optimization deployments.

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Continue reading "Tracking The Optimized WAN: NetQoS Integrates with Cisco WAAS to Deliver End-to-End Application Response Time Reporting for WAN Optimization" »

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" »

Julie Bort interviewed George Kurian at Cisco in Network World, where they talk about WAN optimization.

The interview talks about how Cisco's optimization and acceleration products are distinguished from competitors' and (of course, considering that George Kurian works for Cisco) promoted as superior because of their transparent placement in the network. This means they can be shared among several servers and applications, as well as integrated with Cisco's existing products, and QoS and security policies do not have to be migrated or disrupted. One item only barely touched upon is the idea of using a single appliance in the branch office - the Integrated Service Router - to handle WAN optimization, security, and routing - and how having one appliance to handle all these tasks helps cut down on server room clutter and complexity.

To be sure, these appear to be advantages to Cisco's solution. But the dirty little secret is that all WAN optimization solutions on the market, including Cisco's, obscure end-to-end performance metrics. This is a major issue, of course, and makes the current state of choosing whether or not to deploy a WAN optimization solution a Monty Hall problem - do you opt to retain visibility into your network performance and the ability to solve problems faster, or you deploy a WAN optimization device and hope that whatever's behind curtain number two (the resulting performance gain) is better than what you've traded for?

Maintaining transparency of response time and latency metrics is critical in our view and any WAN optimization vendor that provides a solution to this problem will have a serious competitive advantage.

By Brian Boyko

In an early Network Performance Daily post, we spoke a bit about the impact that the Apple iPhone is likely to have on the company's IT department, and we thought that with some of the announcements of WWDC, it would be worth taking a look back and revisiting some of those ideas.

Back in January, we opined:

• People will use the iPhone at their jobs the way they use Blackberrys now.
• To the end-user, the iPhone is a personal cellphone, with no more need of IT scrutiny then their current phones. To the IT department, the iPhone is a mobile computer, increasing the complexity of the network and creating an additional demand of resources.
• The iPhone's rumored "phone over WiFi" capabilities means that even if you don't intend to roll out VoIP, you may still be dealing with converged traffic on your network.
• The iPhone's web browsing capability may draw additional bandwidth.
• The iPhone would be used as a gateway to SaaS software such as Google Docs and Salesforce.com.
• The iPhone is small enough to steal, requiring data to be secured.

Now that we know a little bit more about it, we can start to revise some of our predictions of how the IT department will have to deal with the new iPhone.

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Continue reading "I, Phone: Could the Apple iPhone's broad consumer appeal present a formidable threat to enterprise networks?" »

*Update on Wafaa Bilal and Recreational Network Traffic

The Brain Behind Paintball Artist Bilal: ‘Domestic Tension’ Sysadmin Jason Potkanski talks about how he helped keep the paintball-via-webcam site running.

Jason Potkanski, who works at the Citizendium Foundation, read the Chicago Tribune Daywatch, to find Wafaa Bilal’s site, Domestic Tension. He looked at the site and saw that it was getting swamped over a DSL link. He sent Ben Chang, lead software programmer of the project, an e-mail offering help, and got an answer back the next day. He visited the project site at the Flatfile Galleries on the 11th – a day when the gun was down most of the day due to the strain that the Internet was placing on the connection – the DSL line and commercial-grade router they used were taking a beating from the Slashdot-like effect of a small pipe.

He immediately offered some performance optimization techniques, such as setting keepalives to 3, and installing eAcellerator to speed up the PHP script, replacing the memory inefficient tail function for the chat. And of course, he told Bilal that he would need a dedicated line to the Internet, and by the next day, they got an OC3-quality connection to Steadfast, at Equinex in Chicago. Immediately he saw an improvement.

He also mounted the webcam image and chatlog/shooter log via NFS, remoted in to do the mounts and copy the application over to the Steadfast connection.

Another problem was the use of XML requests, which wasn’t viable on all browsers, and the fact that the original configuration kept three separate requests open for the chat, the shooter log, and the web cam.

If he had the system to design all over again, he’d design it to use a backend database for the logging features, combine the shooter log and chat so that the application requires only two keepalive connections, not three.

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Continue reading "The Brain Behind Paintball Artist Bilal: ‘Domestic Tension’ Sysadmin Jason Potkanski talks about how he helped keep the paintball-via-webcam site running and Recreational Network Traffic." »

By Ben Erwin, Product Manager for NetQoS Performance Center 3.0
& Steve Harriman, Vice President of Marketing at NetQoS:

We've recently held a Webinar to discuss NetQoS Performance Center 3.0. We had a Q&A session there and we would like to reproduce some of the questions attendees asked about NetQoS Performance Center 3.0, and the answers we provided. We also plan to answer the questions we couldn't get to during the Webinar on this blog by the end of this week.

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Continue reading "Q&A on NetQoS Performance Center 3.0" »

As readers can see, we’ve changed our “daily links” to twice-a-week Tuesday and Thursday links. This way we can provide a bit more commentary on each link instead of just listing them with little to no analysis. We invite our readers to give their opinions on this new format, and we’ll be looking to incorporate changes. One important note – if you have a link that you’d like to submit, please use the “submit a story” link on the left column of this page – we’ve been inundated with comment-spam and we wouldn’t want to accidentally delete your suggestion.

ZDNET: AMD versus Intel: CPU wars roadmap

George Ou at ZDNet graphs out the next two years of projected developments in CPU design over the next two years from Intel and AMD.

According to Kanter, the big reason for AMD's problem was Intel's manufacturing lead. While Intel was producing 65 nm processors all of last year, AMD was outputting 90 nm parts and barely got their first 65 nm product out by the end of the year. The significance of this is that 90 nm manufacturing with small 200 mm wafers produces less than half the number of wafers compared to a 65 nm process on 300 mm wafers. That means that while the price wars of 2006 put a damper on Intel's profits, it tore in to AMD financials because of higher chip fabrication costs.

Obviously the processing speed of the server will have an impact on request times, and if more data can be processed on the server side from more users, there will be more demand for Web-based apps – which could impact both application development and demand on network resources. Additionally, more computer cores means that there’s more room for virtualization… which you can read more about below.

Ars Technica: Buying OEM versions of Windows Vista: the facts

Ken Fisher has information about buying OEM versions of Windows Vista – you can get Vista Home Premium for $119, vs. retail at $239, but OEM versions cannot be reused with new motherboards.

OEM software is also tied to the motherboard it is first installed on. Unlike the retail versions of Windows which can be transferred to a new computer, OEM versions are not transferable. What about upgrading hardware? Microsoft says that anything is fair game, except the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard in a computer results in a "new personal computer," which the company considers to be synonymous with a transfer. It's not permitted with an OEM edition of Windows.

VMWare: Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines – Free!

Okay, imagine this scenario – you want to move to virtualization, but you have no idea whether or not you can switch over from a real server to a virtual one. Secondly, you’ve spent hundreds – if not thousands – of man-hours configuring and tweaking all the server’s settings for performance optimization, and you really don’t relish doing that again, multiple times.

VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms. Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware Converter.

Additionally, for the home user, being able to clone their existing installation of Microsoft Windows and then use it in the free (as in beer) VMWare player in Linux is a major stepping stone towards Linux migration.

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" »