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" »

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…)

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. 

For a couple of years now, lobbyists for large copyright-holding businesses, most notably the music industry, have lobbied in multiple countries and jurisdictions for what they call the “three strikes” rule. Under the “three strikes” rule, if you are accused of infringing someone’s copyrights online three times, the ISP will be mandated to cut you off from the Internet. If you only have one ISP to choose from, you are effectively prohibited from accessing the Internet.

Note that it only takes three accusations. That is, not only is there a presumption of “guilty until proven innocent,” but the accused have no opportunity to prove themselves innocent. There are a number of ways that this can be abused, of course, beginning with silencing political dissent, silencing parody, silencing critics of companies, corporations, or cults, and just plain old meanspiritedness. What better way to get back at someone than to ban him from the Internet?

The U.K.’s Lord Mandelson, Privy Council, announced that the U.K.’s Labour party policy would be to implement this three strikes-rule as soon as Summer 2011. Because of the nature of the U.K.’s parliamentary system, where the executive is drawn from the legislature and there is very little party dissention compared to the U.S., it is likely to pass.

It may just be me, but I don’t think this is a good idea.

Already, companies, politicians, and organizations make accusations that are more or less baseless to get videos taken down from YouTube. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that they might decide it might be easier to ban critics from the Internet altogether. Both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, for example, were hit by this – the anti-gay marriage Stand for Marriage Maine had a takedown issued by NPR, for example. A separate anti-gay marriage group called “The National Organization for Marriage,” that tried to silence pro-gay marriage critics who posted audition videos for their anti-gay marriage ad, which undermined their position. You also had Ralph Lauren trying to censor criticism that their models were extremely Photoshopped, a parody of diamond ads getting a takedown from DeBeers, and the Warner Music Group not only putting out claims against YouTube videos that not only featured their recorded music, but people singing acapella renditions (including that famed video of the music of John Williams sung a capella,) and teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland.” For this reason, various Internet civil liberties groups, such as the EFF, come out against such legislation.

What’s interesting is that law enforcement agencies, such as MI-5 and the Metropolitan (London) Police’s e-crime unit, have also come out against this legislation. The reason is because since file-sharing accusations would have such harsh penalties, people would take action to make sure that they are never accused of file-sharing. That would mean that encrypting Internet information would not only become a more popular behavior, it may even become a default behavior. That increased encryption will increase the costs and workload for law enforcement agencies with legitimate reason to snoop on communications. Right now, encryption is mostly done by two groups. The first group is those of us in the computer fields who know enough about computer communication to be paranoid.

The second group are those who actually have something to hide, like say, violent criminals (as opposed to copyright infringers) or child pornographers (as opposed to legal but socially embarrassing “adult entertainment”). By increasing the penalties to include Internet disconnection, suddenly the general file-sharing public, the non-violent criminals start encrypting traffic as well.

Right now, encrypting your data makes you stick out like a sore thumb to law enforcement agencies, who can then get a warrant to decrypt that data if they think you’re about to pull something really naughty. But an increase in demand for encryption will result in simple ways to enable it. (Already, encrypted traffic is built into several BitTorrent clients.) With everyone using encryption, encrypted communication no longer sticks out. Then you have to start decrypting everybody’s data to find the “bad guys.” Law enforcement with regards to the Internet is sufficiently Orwellian as it is. When even MI5 balks, you know it’s bad.

But beyond that, it holds bad news for enterprise network engineers as well. If you know how to encrypt Internet traffic from your home computer, you also know how to encrypt Internet traffic from your work computer – and many will. Some may even think that they’re doing the company a favor by doing so – after all, encrypting the traffic protects it from corporate sabotage. Encryption of IP addresses, source/destination ports and payload information renders traditional traffic shaping and QoS policy less effective for dealing with network congestion.

Whatever your views on copyright infringement, this is a solution that creates more problems – and bigger problems – than it is supposed to solve. The only people who win, in this scenario, are those businesses who would benefit from sabotaged network performance.

As Halloween approaches, I’ve got a bit of a horror story to keep you up at night. 

There’s an interesting quote that’s somewhat appropriate now.  Well – song lyrics anyway.  “Did you feel you were tricked / by the future you picked?” Which, I’m told, are part of a Peter Gabriel tune for a Pixar movie, but which I only came across when reading speculative fiction about quantum AI computers running 419 scams.

The thing about the future is that by the time it gets here, it’s already the present. Wait, I’m sounding like Criswell there… what I mean to say is that only a couple years ago, the big story in technology was how IT departments were becoming centralized due to advances in virtualization technology that cut down on hardware requirements and power consumption.  Now the next level is cloud computing; an idea, fundamentally, that you can centralize data centers even further by centralizing them with the data centers for other companies via a third-party provider. 

Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to think of a day when even these cloud computing centers become even further consolidated – perhaps one on each inhabited continent.  “A world market for maybe five computers” indeed…

Except, it’s not quite that easy.  The transition from in-house architecture to cloud computing resources is just about as difficult as the transition from real servers to consolidated virtual ones, and the big problem is ensuring network performance – that data gets where it needs to go quickly.  

Much as the server consolidation/virtualization problem was helped with better virtualization technologies and advances in WAN optimization, the current rush in IT tool development is in the cloud computing area (not that we still don’t have a-ways to go with virtualization and consolidation).  And some of these cloud-computing tools are starting to appear – for example, self-managing environments…

One of the newest approaches is the concept of the "dynamic infrastructure." Rather than a simple collection of humming boxes or cards designed to push data this way or that, the dynamic infrastructure brings together virtual networking, automation and resource management with tools like application management, security and policy management to create a self-managing environment that can react to changes in workloads and other needs with minimal human interference.

Lori MacVittie, technical marketing management for application services at F5 Networks is one of the prime movers of the concept, which she says will be the inevitable result of the transition to the cloud. 

"When the entire data center is founded on a dynamic infrastructure, the infrastructure can react itself to changing network and application conditions and needs," she says. "When the entire ecosystem is sharing status and information about performance, every component can adjust itself dynamically to what’s needed now to improve performance or maintain availability. And it happens automatically, based on the specific needs of the business and IT."

Virtualization has underscored the need for performance management; back when everything was run on actual servers, you could almost always fix a problem by finding out where the bottleneck lied and increasing the amount of stuff.  Not always, but almost always.  But with virtualization, you’re essentially managing an interconnected ecosystem of stuff and… well, stuff that’s not stuff.  “Unstuff,” to borrow a bit of NewSpeak. 

And this management is so complex that it has increased the demand for network engineers, yes, but it’s also increased the demand for software to come along and replace the more tedious tasks of network engineers, automating the processes where possible.

But what if there is no upper limit?  What if self-managed cloud computing software is exactly that – with computers calculating exactly what needs to be done to preserve performance and then automatically fix it? 

And that network monitoring software…. WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!! 

by Ben Erwin

NetFlow or NetFlow-esque technology (Jflow, Cflowd, NetStream, IPFIX, etc.) has been around the network management world for quite some time.  Thousands of IT shops worldwide leverage its capabilities to analyze traffic flowing across the network. 

Recently, some vendors have recently made somewhat misleading statements about NetFlow’s capabilities.  There are very good reasons why NetFlow is a de facto standard (and through IPFIX, soon to be an IETF standard).  Here are some quick reminders on why NetFlow is still the king:

• 100% visibility across all network links.   A common misconception about NetFlow is that it samples traffic.  Netflow exports every transaction it sees, and provides a full picture of what traffic is flowing across the network.  Now, it is true that sFlow samples traffic for flow export, but NetFlow exports every transaction it sees.


• Enabling at network aggregation points.   Instead of enabling NetFlow on every router, most NetFlow aficionados are able to enable NetFlow only on those aggregation routers that see the majority of network traffic.  This way, network managers can visualize their network traffic while not having to go overboard with router configuration. 


• Granularity versus TCO.  It’s true that NetFlow does not provide Application Layer (Layer 7) information.  But even so, remains the best bang for the buck for network visibility – yes, you could deploy probes all over the network to gain Layer 7 visibility – but there’s a significant opportunity cost in time and manpower for deployment, configuration, and ongoing monitoring, and the total cost of ownership for a probe solution for Layer 7 visibility simply isn’t worth it.  Many IT shops have dumped probes altogether and gone with NetFlow despite this limitation. 


• Free (if you use Cisco).  NetFlow is free on all Cisco routers.  All you have to do is enable it.  This makes it a very cost-effective solution compared to alternatives. 

These are all reasons why NetFlow will continue to be top dog for network visibility.  And while there are improvements to be made, certainly (there is no such thing as a “perfect” machine,) right now some of the best solutions for network visibility take advantage of the capabilities that NetFlow provides.