June 16, 2007, Network World:

"We're telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says. "This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities and it's important that it be recognized as such."

March 6, 2008, Network World:

During a media conference at its San Francisco headquarters today, Apple unwrapped a host of new features that are designed to make the iPhone more attractive to corporate users.

Six months is a long time in the tech world…

We've warned that eventually the iPhone would be appearing on corporate networks and that the new (at that time) devices would introduce vulnerabilities into the corporate network and take additional resources. What we weren't counting on was Apple making overtures to enterprise networking - we had assumed that, much like the original iPhone was hacked to run on multiple carriers, that those who wanted to use the iPhone for enterprise applications would have to provide their own, messy, stop-gap solutions.

Back in January of 2007, when the iPhone was first announced, we wrote:

"That's another question - will this device have VPN support so that traveling employees can get the information they need while on the road? And if they do - how do you secure the data? The iPhone, like all small devices, is easy to lose, and easy to steal. That makes it vulnerable to illicit access. Does the iPhone have cryptographic abilities to make sure data stays safe?"

Well, apparently, Apple didn't take that as a rhetorical question because the fruit-based tech company is going to support Cisco IPsec VPN in the next iPhone update - the same one that will bring secure Exchange support as well as the possibility of an "iTunes Store for iPhone apps" - current Apple plans are to allow third party development but that Apple would have the final say on whether or not the applications could run on the iPhone. (Of course, clever hackers have already found a way around that.)

At any rate, the iPhone now seems to be competing directly with the Blackberry, which is good in the sense that competition in technical markets lead to innovation, and companies will have to expect new types of devices using different types of traffic, which - well, isn't bad, but which can be frustrating, absent a network device monitor.

Personally, I'm a bit confused by Apple's insistence to cripple the iPhone into only running "acceptable" applications on the iPhone, as A) it's clear that people are going to use it the way they like anyway, and B) if Apple took the same attitudes with their Macintosh/OSX general purpose computers, some of the best Mac apps (Quicksilver, Colloquy, Transmission, Burn,) simply wouldn't exist. Perhaps this increases the security of the device but at the obvious cost of utility.

It's just rhetorical, and I'd love to get some comments on this, but is the tradeoff between security and utility a false one? I'm not sure - havening not worked much in the security side of technology - but it seems to me that if the iPhone can be hacked to make it more useful, it can also be hacked to make it malicious, and so the choice is not between security and utility, but rather between a lack of security with utility, or a lack of security without utility. Hmm… maybe I should ponder this more.

I first heard about this pressing enterprise information technology concern when a friend directed me to MyTractorForum.com.

Now, I know more people with Segways than tractors. But the story involved the Kingsbury electrical substation less than five miles from my condo, and it involved someone who apparently broke through the fences in order to dig up the copper grounding wire of the electrical substation. He was ultimately - in a "BZZZZZZAP!" way - unsuccessful.

He is currently in "extremely critical condition." And I'm a monster for laughing, but let's face it, this is stuff that is supposed to be confined to the realm of Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

Speaking of Wile E. Coyote cartoons, it made me think of the Road Runner - or Road Runner cable, in this case. See, the apparent thief was stealing copper wire because copper prices are sky high, and this brings me to two interesting points: First, it's not inconceivable that someone might dig out the copper wires in your company, raising havoc with the physical layer of your network performance. Second, if copper prices are high enough to risk electrocution for, it's high enough that companies might want to start thinking about transitioning away from copper-based technology.

It is because human stupidity is particularly destructive that this is something to watch out for. Any large electrical equipment - like, say, a data center's power plant - will have copper in it, either as grounding wires, or as part of the construction of the machine. Or, let's take Cat-6 cable: four twisted pairs of 24 gauge copper wires, running throughout the infrastructure. Sure, it would be a repetitive and tedious task to strip out the cable, a task that requires the inhuman patience and obsessiveness of, oh, say, a habitual methamphetamine user, or "tweaker."

The major concern isn't that a thief will "get away with your stuff." Repairing and replacing copper cable, even with the high prices involved, are not likely to be significant expenses for companies. However, the costs of repairing the auxiliary damage to equipment that can be done in a theft attempt, and the opportunity costs from waiting for service to be safely restored, are likely to be significant. The Kingsbury station man who did his impression of a bug zapper also cut off power to 7,300 nearby homes.

It's strange because while we worry about viruses and worms, hackers trying to get at valuable data and cause disruption; people often don't think about the physical layer of their networks.

Of course, you could just put some sort of deterrent up to prevent people from stealing copper. Perhaps
some sort of electrified fence, because you'd have to be pretty dumb to… oh.

Which brings me to the next point: with copper prices sky-high, perhaps it's time for new technologies - specifically fiber optics - to start becoming even more widely used. Yes, fiber is expensive and difficult; better suited to long-haul connections, but it will become less expensive and difficult with increased adoption; and copper is inexpensive and simple, though it becomes more expensive and difficult as time goes on.

Last Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2007, Carolyn Duffy Marsan at NetworkWorld wrote, "The American Registry for Internet Numbers plans to post proposed changes to its IPv4 address space transfer policy on its Web site this week."

According to NetworkWorld, that would allow ISPs to transfer IPv4 address registrations; and thus fuels speculation that IPv4 addresses would become "tradable goods." As many IPv4 addresses were assigned before the current popularity of the Internet was seen, this benefits those large corporations, universities, and government institutions that were allocated large blocks of IP addresses.

In fact, the next day, Feb. 14, 2007, NetworkWorld ran an interview with Internet Assigned Names and Numbers (IANA) general manager David Conrad, in which he basically confirmed that there would likely be a market:

"I can't actually imagine there not being a market. The market will either be black or white. If black, it will have a negative impact on the ability of ARIN to maintain accurate databases, such as, Whois. If white, ARIN (and the other Regional Internet Registries) will undoubtedly get dragged into politics related to fairness, particularly with respect to the developing world."

Indeed, if adopted, this would be a major reversal of policies by ARIN, [PDF] which made this statement in a press release last October:

"There are, however, those who propose that the democratically established governance principles now be abandoned, to create a market in IP addresses. A market that abandons these existing, consensus-driven core values would encourage speculators to take advantage of the upcoming time of relative scarcity of IPv4 addresses to profit from less foresightful users' remaining need.

The purpose of this memorandum is to assure the community that the democratic principles of Internet governance will be adhered to by ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry serving Canada, many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, and the United States.(7) The resource-allocation policy under which ARIN operates has been produced through an open, transparent, and democratic process over more than a decade. ARIN is fully dedicated to preserving universal access and stable functionality of the Internet, and our policies do not encourage profit-driven speculation in the Internet addresses."

The humor value in watching the gullible bid for 172.0.0.1 on E-bay aside, I find it difficult to understand how a market for IP addresses - black or white - would sustain itself. Yes, IPv4 addresses are scarce - but it is only an artificial scarcity.

IPv4 prices can only rise so high, because if the cost of buying IPv4 addresses becomes higher than the cost of moving to an IPv6 based infrastructure, companies will move to IPv6. And, of course, the more companies that do move to IPv6, the more the intrinsic value of IPv6 versus the intrinsic value of IPv4.

Even before IPv4 addresses and IPv6 upgrades hit a break-even point, it may be a smarter move for businesses to go to IPv6 directly instead of having to pay twice - once for an IPv4 address at its peak, and again down the road to move to IPv6 after it becomes the new de facto standard. Eventually, IPv6 addresses will have more real utility value than the IPv4 address. Those speculators left holding onto IPv4 addresses for too long will find their worth had dried up quickly. Either way, it's unlikely that a company that buys an IPv4 address will be able to make a profit reselling it except as speculation. That doesn't sound like a very stable market.

The speculation about who will move to IPv6 and when really doesn't make a big difference. Yes, we're probably going to run out of IPv4 addresses in a couple years, but there is already an established infrastructure to replace it. When companies are forced to move to IPv6, they will move to IPv6, and it looks likely that, one way or another, companies will be forced to move to IPv6.

With mysteries abounding about the undersea cables cut in the Middle East, Network Performance Daily talked to Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst at TeleGeography, a market research firm specializing in telecommunications supply, demand, and pricing. We wanted to get to the bottom of what's happening with the undersea cables and widespread network outages, and see if there's any truth to the various rumors floating around.

Network Performance Daily: Could you tell me a little bit about the effects of the undersea Internet cable cuts?

Schoonover: The undersea cables that were cut are part of the global network and in fact a heavily used part of it. And as such when they were cut, it limited the amount of capacity connecting the Middle East to Europe. I'm specifically referring to the cuts on January 30th - the first two. And because of that, the Internet and things that relied on the communications to Europe, you know, phone traffic and business-to-business type communications were severely hampered until the carriers that were affected were able to find alternative routing.

Network Performance Daily: When they were able to find alternative routing - was that immediate? Did the traffic find they couldn't get connectivity and just routed around it, or did someone have to pull a switch somewhere?

Someone had to pull a switch. With this amount of capacity, in terms of percentage, there's not that level of restoration available on the direct route. So, for instance, I know an affected carrier that has been quite vocal about the things they have done to restore capacity to their customers - even to the point of having to enter into some short-term contracts to transit traffic around the other side of the world, you know, via India, Sinagpore, Japan to the U.S.

So it does take a little bit of time. And each carrier that was affected responded a little differently in a little different time as well. So anywhere between a few hours to a few days to get service back, depending on the type of carrier and their relationships with the wholesale providers in the area.

Network Performance Daily: Has this increased network latency for those kind of connections?

Schoonover: Absolutely. Two kinds of factors increasing the latency - anytime you go the other way around the world from the Middle East, it's going to add a little bit of distance and distance equals latency, because of that "physics" thing. The other thing is that 75 percent of the capacity connecting the Middle East to Europe was cut, which, when you try to move that type of demand around, then you're going to create congestion on the remaining line.

Between those two factors there is a higher amount of latency and it does take some creativity on the part of the carriers to keep their business customers operating and keep their voice calls at a higher performance level.

The thing to suffer the most would be the Internet. Because that's not as latency sensitive as voice or real-time business communications, the carriers allow it to be more affected by the problems than the other services.

Network Performance Daily: Is there any basis for any sort of conspiracy theory here at all?

Schoonover: No, I don't think so, really. Cables are damaged with relative frequency, and I think that this is more along the lines of coincidence that there were a few different incidences within a couple days than anything else.

Network Performance Daily: What about the two main lines?

Schoonover: Well the two main lines were close enough that it probably was the same event. Whatever cut one most likely cut the other one as well. I know that the initial speculation was that a ship had dragged anchor across the two cables which would very easily snap them. That was later refuted by the Egyptian regulator. You can then look at things like seismic or geological events, something like that.

But most likely because those cables went down together, and they were so close - most likely that's one event.

The other cable breaks in the gulf - there's two others - were separate events that happened within a few days of the initial one.

Network Performance Daily: So if this stuff happens all the time, what can companies do to preserve mission-critical network connectivity and performance?

Schoonover: Finding restoration paths and having existing agreements for having restoration in place is very important, and many carriers have diversity in route and upstream providers, as well as the option to exercise a backup plan. And as we've seen, even if it takes a few hours to a day to get things back up and running with some amount of regularity, that's a result of having these pre-existing redundant relationships available.

I think businesses are getting smarter about that and I think carriers as well, particularly after the Taiwan Earthquake from December [2006], that cut a significant amount of capacity in the inter-Asia region. A lot of businesses quickly realized that their disaster-recovery plans were not sufficient, and went about getting better ones.

The fact that businesses have been able to recover relatively speedily is indicative of good planning to a large extent.

Network Performance Daily: How important are these sea cables to global communication?

Schoonover: Very. A lot of people don't realize, but undersea cables are the backbone of the global communications network. Obviously Europe has a lot of terrestrial cable as does the U.S., but as soon as you need to cross an ocean, the bulk of the traffic is travelling via submarine cable, not satellite.

Network Performance Daily: Well, why couldn't we just use satellite?

Schoonover: Higher latency, less capacity, and more expensive.

Network Performance Daily: What's the most important thing that people are learning from this incident?

Schoonover: I think there's a fragility to any sort of infrastructure, and I think you can take away that businesses and carriers do need to prepare for the unexpected. With the Taiwan earthquake taking seven of eight cables, and this taking two of three on a particular route, there has to be physical redundancy, both geographical and capacity.

But that being said, the carriers knew that and they're working towards it. There's at least four cables being planned and built on the exact same route that the cables that were cut are on. It'll be another year or two until the new cables are operational, but the demand for this type of thing was known and is being addressed, it's just that the timeline didn't work in the favor of the Internet users in the Middle East.

Network Performance Daily: The whole thing - just to get this whole conspiracy thing out of the way - what would it actually take to knock Iran's communication infrastructure off the Internet?

Schoonover: Well, it would take a lot more than what's been done. Really, when you look at Iran's connectivity, while they have been affected by the cable cuts, they are not the most affected country. They have terrestrial connections to surrounding countries, satellite connectivity, and redundant submarine connectivity.

Really, what's been done, if it were a directed attack, it has not been particularly effective.

• Network World: What those oceanic cable cuts mean to you.


• Wired/Threat Level: Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web

How is your company weathering the cable cuts? If you've been affected, let us know how you got back up and running by leaving us a comment below.

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" »

NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It's the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It's the right place to be.

In addition to Dr. Malone's keynote and NetQoS's Solution Provider Session, I also went to a talk by Thomas Shelman on the second day of the Summit. Shelman is CIO of Northrop Grumman Corporation, the second largest defense contractor in the world. As you might imagine, he runs a very large IT organization. Seven CIOs from different business units report to him.

He said his greatest challenge and most rewarding experience, although devastating too, was leading the organization to restore computing and networking infrastructure and services after Katrina pounded two key Northrop Grumman facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The two NG data centers in La. and Miss. were fully configured for redundancy with hot fail-over between systems in both locations. To ensure both data centers would not be affected by “traditional” disasters, such as local power failures, flooding, accidents, etc., they were located 150 miles apart. Unfortunately, the destruction of Katrina was more than 150 miles wide and took both data centers out. (Northrop Grumman put out a press release describing the devastation they encountered.)

Continue reading "Notes on the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Part 3" »

By Steve Harriman

NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It's the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It's the right place to be.

It is worth noting that one of the key themes of the first day is that Network professionals should move beyond the plumbing and be part of the solution to the application delivery problem. The idea that network professionals need to look at response time and focus on end-to-end performance is a message NetQoS has been trying to spread. Here are a few details from the first day keynote to put this into context:

Continue reading "Notes on the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Part 1" »

The Gartner Symposium ITXPO was a hotbed of information and debate on the topic of network performance management, and a venue for the exchange of ideas from people throughout the IT industry. We expect this debate to continue at the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit in Las Vegas November 14-16 and we will report on those details from the event. Don't miss it.

In the mean time, here are some highlights from ITXPO:

Continue reading "Network management the hot topic at Gartner symposium ITXPO" »