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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Brian Bakstran, VP of Product Marketing at our parent company, CA, recently blogged about a study from Network Instruments which talks about how 59% of IT organizations “lack the experience to manage virtualized environments effectively.”

Combined with the idea that by 2012, 80% of all new servers will be virtual ones, and you start to get this sinking feeling that the entire IT industry knows where it’s going, but hasn’t really thought about what it needs to do once it gets there… sort of like sitting in the first four rows at Sea World, all excited to see Shamu, but forgetting to pack a poncho.

And so vendors like us and our parent company offer that visibility. (In the case of CA, for right now, we’re offering it in spades, with the NetQoS stuff [PDF] and the e-Health stuff and CA Virtualization Management.) 

The main concern that the lack of visibility presents to enterprise IT shops is the idea that mission critical applications that performed fine before virtualization may perform poorly when virtualized, and the IT shop will have no way of being proactive in finding performance problems, nor will they have the tools they need to quickly find the root cause of the problem. 

And visibility is necessary even before virtualization to compare performance to the non-virtualized baseline.  There are some applications that simply will always perform poorly in virtualization, and the sooner those applications are discovered, the better.  Knowing what does and does not work in virtualized environments gives you options – you can replace the app, run the app on a dedicated server, or even recode the app to work better in virtualized environments.  But without visibility, you have no options.

Between the reduction in energy consumption and the better utilization of existing servers, the benefits of virtualization are worth the risk, but there’s nothing that says that you can’t bring in everything you can to get visibility into your virtualized servers and mitigate the risk. 

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!!!! 

U.S. broadband lags behind international competitors.  And yet another study recently showed how much the U.S. lags behind international broadband. 

This is not news.  What is news is that the study was commissioned by the FCC and executed by Harvard University’s Berkman Center, and they came to the conclusion that  the most successful countries in broadband deployment have done one thing very differently from the U.S. – they have made their main carriers open up their networks to competing service providers.

In other words, since the barrier to entry for broadband is so high, by requiring existing carriers to lease out access to their networks, it creates an incentive for competition in the broadband market, leading to lower prices, better service, and better performance. 

By contrast, the FCC, early in this decade, decided not to require open access, based on an idea that forcing broadband providers to lease out their lines would create a disincentive towards investing in higher capacity networks. 

But, according to the study:

“The emphasis other countries place on open access policies appears to be warranted by the evidence.

We  find  that  in countries where an engaged  regulator enforced open  access  obligations,  competitors  that  entered  using  these  open  access  facilities  provided  an important catalyst for the development of robust competition which, in most cases, contributed to strong broadband performance across a range of metrics. Today these competitors continue to play, directly or through  successor  companies,  a  central  role  in  the  competitiveness  of  the  markets  they  inhabit.”

The FCC is now issuing a call for public comments on the study. 

*delivered really slowly.

The Washington Post has an article on a phenomenon that we’re all familiar with – that advertised broadband speeds don’t always match up to the actual performance that the end-user actually receives. 

Actual broadband speeds lag advertised speeds by as much as 50% to 80%.

So more than half the time, and sometimes as much as eight out of ten times, consumers are paying for slower Internet access speed than they signed up for.

Now, with congestion, infrequent outages, problems on the other end of the connection, and other vagaries of Internet performance, the fact that a customer’s effective Internet speed varies widely isn’t a surprise. 

What is a surprise is that companies do not monitor the performance of their own networks – or that they do, but give consumers bad data – either promoting a peak speed as the “speed” of the network, or promoting an impossible speed. 

Really, though, do you think it would hurt sales that much to re-label a “15mbps” offering as “7-15mbps?”  (Hmm, maybe it would, if the ISP can’t consistently deliver 7mbps.) 

"This speaks to consumer empowerment. And if you are advertising one speed but delivering another, that takes power away," Kelsey said. "Consumers can't make accurate decisions based on quality of service from one provider off another."

Now, there’s the truth in advertising approach – add qualifications, like a speed range, or parenthetical like 15mbps (during off-peak times) – but I think the “up to” disclaimer is good if there’s someplace – say, the order form for the service, or the company Web site where you sign up for the service – that explains exactly what your real performance is after you sign up, as well as the performance of the average customer at each speed.  Heck, you could even have one of those LED billboards like they have for state lotteries that show you how much that day’s jackpot is worth. 

We’ve talked before about how we believe that broadband caps are not a solution to the problem and would greatly degrade the overall network performance of the Internet.  That’s still true.  We’re especially suspicious of any sort of “gas gauge” that would tell customers how much they’ve downloaded – and nothing else.  But a true network performance monitoring solution, giving ISP customers true information that is actually relevant to their performance would be very welcome. 

Imagine, if you will, if you could go to your ISP’s web page, log in, and get this information:

• Your average Internet Speed over the past two weeks is X/down, Y/up.


• Peak Congestion Times are X:00am to Y:00pm


• X% of your Internet usage occurs during peak times.


• Your average Internet Speed during peak times is X/down, Y/up.


• Your average Internet Speed during off-peak times is X/down, Y/up


• At that average speed, you can video at Xmbps.  This is (low/medium/high) quality for standard definition and (low/medium/high) quality for high definition video.


• Your latency is Xms round trip to our servers. You can expect (low/medium/high) quality for voice calls and video chat, and (low/medium/high) quality for computer gaming.


• Recommendations for improving your Internet Experience:




• Try to watch streaming video during off-peak times, or set your computer to download the video during off-peak times instead. 


• Set peer-to-peer programs to use less bandwidth during peak hours.


• Try to find gaming servers located closer to your geographic location to cut down on lag.


• We noticed a number of anomalous behaviors these past two weeks.  Please check your system for malware and viruses.

That’s not “techie” information – it’s all information the end-user can use, and it lets the user know exactly what they’re paying for. 

WAN Optimization solutions – assuming that they work for the applications you need them to work for – are like magic. Consolidating data centers, from a relativistic standpoint, actually moves users further away, so to consolidate data centers, and lowering costs, WAN performance needs to be good enough for the remote users to do their jobs.

But the irony is that as data centers are becoming more consolidated, users are becoming less consolidated. More people are telecommuting than ever before. (Even if the number of full-time telecommuters has gone down, part-time telecommuters rise). It makes a certain amount of sense – an employee too sick to come into work (and infect others) but not too sick to actually work might file some work from home, or sales teams might file reports from the road.

This creates a problem for most WAN Optimization solutions because most solutions require appliances at both ends of the WAN link. Telecommuters are usually accessing the applications from the public Internet. Software-based WAN optimization controllers (“Soft WOCs”) can do some of the work, but telecommuting requires high-performing broadband as well as optimization solutions.

The way that Soft WOCs work, is essentially to recreate a lightweight version of the client that normally sits at the remote end of the optimized WAN link in the software on the mobile computer. The Soft WOC then optimizes the stream between the telecommuter’s computer and the data center.

The problem is that WAN optimization is less efficient when you have a single user than when you have multiple users on the same stream. First, having multiple users accessing the same data means you can take advantage of caching. Caching is only useful on a Soft WOC link if the same user accesses the same data twice.

Secondly, in a normal optimized WAN link, there is only one TCP stream to worry about – the optimized one, with individual streams recreated only at the two ends of the transaction. Each SoftWOC essentially creates its own stream. For that reason, telecommuting solutions simply aren’t going to give you the same dramatic increase in performance you’d get from more traditional WAN Optimization.

On the other hand, any improvement is still improvement. Just be sure to baseline your performance and see if the value is there before deploying Soft WOC solutions.

NetworksFirst.com has recently created an online “Impact of Network Downtime” calculator, which you can use to estimate how much money it would cost if your network went down.  It makes a compelling case for fault management and worrying about outages. 

However, the cost of poor application performance is harder to quantify – or at least, requires more sophisticated tools and data - than the cost of fault.  That may be the reason that many companies still consider fault management, and not performance management, to be the core responsibility of the IT team. Our most recent research conducted with Ashton, Metzler & Associates bears this out:

Fifty percent of respondents indicated that they measure and report on the mean time to repair (MTTR) for a network or application outage. However, only thirty percent confirmed they actually measure and report on the MTTR for degraded application performance, revealing a continuing legacy of fault and availability management over performance management.

As technology has improved, fault performance problems have, for the most part, been solved.  It’s no longer a distinguishing feature for a network service provider to promise 99.999% uptime.  The next big challenge is maintaining good performance throughout the network. 

But in many ways, it’s a hard sell, because unlike a fault cost calculator, it’s difficult to show you exactly why you need performance management tools until you have the more nuanced calculation of what poor performance costs your business. What’s the difference in employee productivity when an application is 10% slower, 50% slower?

These types of metrics have typically been calculated for customer facing applications like Web retailers, but getting the data for internal IT users has been far less popular since it’s considered a soft cost in some arenas. But it really starts to add up if you pay attention.

One NetQoS customer said their typical critical business application “brownout” (before deploying NetQoS products) cost them $6000 per hour and they had about 20 of these per year, each taking about six hours to isolate and resolve. That’s $720k gone per year due to poor application performance ($6k * 6 hours * 20 events = $720k/year). True, the brownout costs less per hour than most estimates you see for out-and-out downtime, but they occur a lot more frequently.

It took some investigation and understanding on the customer end to establish the value of different applications, who was using them, and then run the numbers, but now they have some idea of the cost of all of those shades of gray between up and down and this helps them justify their investments in technology and process improvements to reduce the brownouts as well as the blackouts.

This is why vendors, such as ourselves, are willing to come out and have a conversation and demo with your company.

But even so, consider this idea as an inaccurate but useful shorthand in the form of a Zen koan: If the network is so slow that nothing gets done, is it any different than if the network were down all together?  And what is the difference between a network down for half a day than a network that takes twice as long to get anything done for a full day? 

And if a computer goes down in the woods, but no one receives an error message, did it really have an error at all? And what is the sound of one router crashing?

By Keith Bendy
Business Development Manager, NetQoS

It’s hard to miss the “human network” theme in virtually all of Cisco’s recent commercials. They are clearly advocating a lot of converged network capabilities – voice, video, and other interpersonal communication or information methods.

It makes sense – video and voice are bandwidth heavy applications, and it’s a logical growth area for Cisco if they can provide more information about video and voice traffic. The challenge, however, is that despite all the video products they’ve brought into the market, (from Telepresence to the acquisition of Flip), there aren’t a lot of robust capabilities built into the products in order to troubleshoot performance.

Medianet is one of the largest initiative in Cisco’s history, and it’s focused on bringing those exact troubleshooting capabilities to the market. The objective is to integrate media traffic reporting into Cisco products and IOS, and get the ability to really understand what performance is for video and voice traffic. And in addition to troubleshooting, even having the ability to have the infrastructure react to changes in performance (i.e., “Autoprovisioning”) is really what the overall goal is for MediaNet.

MediaNet is just starting up, but Cisco is addressing a need that is very real, so I anticipate that its adoption will be high. Cisco may be ahead of the demand curve, but the need is pretty well established.

At a very high level, what's important to MediaNet customers is the ability to understand what performance looks like, find out where the issues are, and then drill in to get the information required to get the issue on the path to resolution. And so, when Cisco wanted to demonstrate the MediaNet capabilities at Cisco Live, they used NetQoS Performance Center because they have a lot of experience working with NetQoS (on products like WAAS, ACE and NAM) and it can take advantage of capabilities that exist today (like NBAR, IPSLA, and Netflow)

With Netflow, the NetQoS Performance Center is able to show how much video is on the network, and use TOS values to determine how the traffic is tagged. We can also see what the end-point IP addresses are. But NBAR provides deeper recognition of the protocols than what Netflow will typically give you. NBAR reports on specific tags for various traffic - instead of saying "This particular TOS queue is all my video traffic, and I don't know what kind of video it is," the NBAR identifiers would say: "This is telepresence traffic, this is security camera traffic, this is WebEx traffic, this is a video-capable phone” - and tag all of it appropriately.

Below is a video, from Cisco’s YouTube page, where Aamer Akhter, Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, demos the Cisco Medianet 1.0 network.