Here on Network Performance Daily, we've documented the effects of recreational traffic on the network. We've shown you a 3D visualization of the Slashdot effect on your network, and even created a Del.icio.us directory of recreational network use articles devoted to the problems associated with sporadic bursts of unauthorized network use triggered by events such as March Madness and Super Bowl Sunday.

As the results of a recent NetQoS survey on recreational use of network resources show, the network performance problems associated with non-business usage of network resources is only getting worse, especially with the growing popularity of social media sites such as YouTube and MySpace. So, after years of helping customers prepare for network traffic overload, NetQoS is now publishing a Calendar of Recreational Network Traffic Madness for 2008. And, to make it even more useful, we’re posting it as a Google Calendar.

This handy little 2008 calendar is a month-by-month timeline of key events that can generate enough traffic to push many enterprise networks to the limits and adversely affect business-critical application performance. Print a copy and keep it by your desk; add it to your personal organizer or Google Calendar, or view it here.

And because it’s a Google Calendar, you can take it back to your own preferred apps and create a mash-up with it.

There are some reports of the calendar not showing up in certain versions of IE7, but we've found that reloading the page usually takes care of the problem. We also have a year at a glance text version of the list.

While this calendar of upcoming network overload events won't help you plan for the insane success of the next killer viral video, we hope that it will at least give you a timeline for planning or maybe prepare you to make the case to add network monitoring tools to your 2008 budget. As we wrote in The Cyber Monday Blues: How to Use NetFlow and Network Monitoring Tools to Ensure Online Shopping Doesn't Impact Network Performance, a NetFlow monitoring product can help you avoid problems in 2008:

"By putting your network monitoring tools to good use now, you can examine exactly how your network performs when a large spike in traffic occurs - so that you know what to do to be ready for the next spike in traffic when it occurs. Specifically, we advise network engineers to take action now to:

• analyze network traffic flows to identify unauthorized network traffic
• quantify its impact on network performance
• and implement quality of service policies to ensure business-critical applications have priority access to network resources

Admittedly, this is not the trickiest of problems to solve. You just need the right tools. As we detail in this best practices white paper on NetFlow monitoring most of this online traffic is fairly easy to identify and measure if you are using NetFlow and a NetFlow monitoring product like NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to analyze traffic."

Did we miss any key events? If so, let us know, and we can add it to the calendar!

Continue reading "Recreational Network Traffic Madness Calendar, 2008" »

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Slashdot recently linked to an article from MacWorld showing that the amount of time that people spend watching online video has steadily increased. (In other news, water is wet…) Google's YouTube and Google Video served up over a quarter of all internet videos.

I think we can assume that a fair percentage of them were watched from corporate networks. Not just because of recreational use but because video is a very compelling medium that can convey work-related information, sometimes more quickly and more accurately than text alone.

For example, our Whiteboard Series was created with the expectation that people would watch our videos on WAN Optimization and VoIP from work, where they would find the information most useful.

One really can't just block YouTube, or Veoh, or Yahoo Video and expect blocking it to solve the problem of tying up vital bandwidth, because video is increasing not just as a 'bandwidth hazard' but as a method of communication. And it's only going to get more bandwidth heavy - and more useful - as MPEG4+ACC "Moviestar" Flash Video, or WMV using Microsoft's Silverlight increase the quality of online streaming video.

Don't think there won't be content producers - like us - taking advantage of this as well. High definition full-fledged video cameras cost less than $1000 these days. A flash-video "YouTube camera" can record 720p HD for less than $200.

The way to prepare for this is to have good QoS policies in place, so that the day-to-day business data transactions aren't interrupted or slowed when people access online streaming video - which is quickly becoming a necessity.

One big thing that complicates this is hard shut-off date for the end of all analog TV transmissions in the U.S. on February 17, 2009. It is possible to use a converter box to use an older TV with the ATSC standard - but most people will probably get a high definition television instead. High-definition television will prompt high-definition content. That includes home movies.

Right now, High Definition home video cameras are sold to computer geeks, early adopters, and indie filmmakers. They will be more widely adopted when most families have a high definition TV set and want to play back home movies. And as many YouTube videos are harvested from the ranks of home movies, it is possible to then imply that there will be demand for a high definition video hosting service.

That's going to mean more bandwidth usage. QoS policies become crucial.

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.

(Continued…)

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

John Mao, product manager at NetQoS, quickly explains the impact of WAN Optimization on Cisco IOS NetFlow/IPFIX information gathering in a short video, as part of our "Whiteboard Series."

If you have questions about the video, please leave a comment below and we'll do our best to answer them.
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More information:

On WAN Optimization:
- NetQoS and Cisco Webinar: Evaluating WAN Optimization Options and Quantifying the Results

On NetFlow Monitoring :

Also in our Whiteboard Series:
- The impact of WAN Optimization on TCP Applications

With John Mao:
- Six Tips for Improving Network Visibility and Performance Using Cisco IOS NetFlow Data

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.

(Continued...)

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

By Ben Haley

I’m a developer for NetQoS, and I’ve been mulling over the idea that Cisco is planning to take the IOS in their routers and break it into different modules, which they can then provide separately. As a developer I am always interested in architecture, but as a customer do I really care how the code is implemented? After all, I buy a router to direct traffic. My main interests are that it does this reliably, quickly and for a reasonable cost. What difference does it make if the IOS comes feature-by-feature or in a single package deal? In this case I believe the change will be very positive.

The IOS is the Internet operating system for the router. Everyone tends to think of the router as a piece of hardware you plug in, but it’s really a specialized computer that has an operating system on it that can be tweaked to do different things. Every switch and every router has some type of operating system built into it. In fact, people have been able to figure out how to install Linux on a few models of consumer routers and add new capabilities.

Moving to a modular system provides some interesting ideas. For IT administrators, it might increase the cost, or if relatively few features are needed, save money. (Cisco, I think, tends to make money on the hardware, not on the software.) Either way, it’s an interesting concept to say “How would you do this, and what would be the impact?”

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Thoughts on Cisco's Modular IOS" »

For more information on this topic, you can download our Tech Brief on Cisco WAAS, available here

by Steve Fulton

Users expect a ubiquitous and instantaneous network, as well as consistent application performance. This, combined with a proliferation of business critical, Web 2.0, (and recreational) applications that consume precious WAN bandwidth, forces IT to get very creative in squeezing more performance out of existing infrastructure.

Hence the red-hot market for application acceleration and WAN optimization products that address WAN performance problems caused by latency, congestion, and applications (such as WAFS and CIFS) that were designed for the LAN and now have to traverse the WAN due to data center consolidation.

Cisco shook things up in late 2006 with the introduction of WAAS-short for Wide Area Application Services-technology that is transparent to the underlying network infrastructure. According to Cisco, WAAS combines WAN optimization, acceleration of TCP-based applications, and Cisco's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) in a single appliance or blade.

WAAS addresses problems related to traffic congestion that need some sort of optimization done at the branch. It complements Cisco's Application Control Engine (ACE), which is a data center optimization product that integrates server load balancing, application security, and unique virtual partitioning capabilities.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "WAAS Up with Cisco's WAN Optimization Initiative?" »

by Nathan Bragaw

We just entered into a strategic partnership with Network Instruments. Their GigaStor appliance captures and stores all the packets traveling networks for historical packet-level analysis. Our SuperAgent identifies the source of performance problems, application, server, or network, and isolates when and where they are degraded. Together, the products can monitor large networks, isolate performance issues, and provide packet-level analysis specific to the problem.

For example, this allows an engineer to identify a network that is showing slow web performance. The engineer can then drill down to a packet capture that includes network traffic 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after the event. This capability is changing the troubleshooting capabilities by replaying network traffic prior to the issue occurring. It's like having a TiVO for your network.

Engineers get an alert from SuperAgent, identifying the time and location of a network problem. Then you go into GigaStor and sort through the traffic to identify the root cause of the problem. We’re pretty psyched about GigaStor’s ability to reassemble packet streams to recreate e-mails, web pages, IM sessions and VoIP calls.

We call it Retrospective Network Analysis, or RNA for short.

We should have the products completely integrated sometime in the next six months or so. We’ve already started selling Network Instruments’ GigaStor products through our sales team and our Web site.

By Steven Maercklein and Zack Belcher

While we haven’t had a chance to play with Vista yet, (both of us are on the road all the time and we don’t have access to a lab,) we have been doing a lot of research on the new TCP/IP features of Vista and Longhorn.

We spent some time poring over a document from Microsoft’s Research Asia (the guys who designed the Compound TCP/IP [CTCP] algorithm) and it details how the algorithm works. It doesn’t detail how Microsoft has implemented the algorithm – there are alpha, beta, and gamma values that are tweakable, but it doesn’t go into how Microsoft has tweaked them. It looks like this was a document just to prove that CTCP was feasible and ready to be included in Vista.

It does teach you about the behavior of it and what to expect when seen in action, and it makes reference to the current technologies for congestion avoidance that CTCP is based on. However, there are several features of Vista of concern to those involved in network performance.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Vista's TCP/IP Promises and Perils" »

by Russell Wilson

This is a follow-up article to "Why UI Design is Important - and so Difficult - in Enterprise Apps"

There are many iterations to a well constructed interface. The way we typically approach it is first from the idea of usability. What is the user trying to accomplish and how can we provide interactive elements that let them do that in the easiest way? Initially you work with a wireframe -- rough sketches applied to scenarios. Once you have something that makes sense, you create an interactive prototype to test some of the more complex interactions. Good testing at this stage saves money down the road. Then comes polish and aesthetics. The polishing process has more of an effect than just making the product “look good.” The application of real graphic design principles such as grid layout, the golden ratio, and the gestalt principles of perception have a huge impact on the ease of interaction with screen elements and the emotional ties a user develops with the product.

Many product offerings – including our own at NetQoS – were developed independently by different teams, which resulted in very different interfaces. We've made a lot of progress bringing those products together into a single suite, sharing common controls – for example: if you can print to PDF in one product, you should be able to print to PDF in another product and it should work the same way in all products.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "The Enterprise UI, Part 2: Constraints in UI Design" »