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

This problem has been solved.

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

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

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

During a recent NetQoS - Cisco WAN Optimization Seminar Series, and to some extent at Interop, NetQoS launched a survey regarding WAN Optimization. We found some interesting things:

Over 90% of the survey respondents said that it is either important or very important to be able to quantify accurately the results of WAN optimization.

Over 80% say it is important/very important to have integrated WAN optimization and performance reporting.

We also found that most respondents – 60% - believe that the most relevant measure of WAN optimization impact is in application and network latency. 30% believe that link utilization is the most relevant measure, and 10% believe that the two are equally important, with a handful of respondents saying that protocol distribution is the most important.

What this tells us is that many enterprise IT organizations do not want to deploy a WAN Optimization solution that is going to break their application and network performance monitoring. However, WAN Optimization devices perform local TCP ACKnowledgements, thereby confusing performance monitoring and making it near impossible to accurately quantify the results of WAN Optimization.

We go into this challenge more in “WAN Optimization’s Dirty Little Secret” and John Mao and Ben Erwin have uploaded some videos in Network Performance Daily’s Whiteboard Series to illustrate the points, but basically, many WAN Optimization devices (WOD) split a TCP/IP session between a client and server into three separate sessions – a client segment, a WAN segment (or “channel”), and a server segment. But data center-resident passive network monitoring tools assume only one TCP session between the client and server – which means that when WAN optimization is deployed, they only have visibility into the server segment response time – between the server and the data center WOD. So, visibility into all the components that make up end-user application response times, including network round trip time and data retransmission time, is lost.

If ultimately, IT is about application delivery – the reliability and speed with which you can deliver applications to the end-users – then forgoing application and network monitoring is not an option. We’ll have more on this problem next week. In the meantime we look forward to seeing you at Cisco Networkers in Anaheim.

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More information:

On Quantifying the results of 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

Ben Erwin, product manager at NetQoS, quickly explains the impact of WAN Optimization on TCP-based Applications in a short video, kicking off our "Whiteboard Series."

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

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

Also in our Whiteboard Series:
- The impact of WAN Optimization on NetFlow/IPFIX measurements

With Ben Erwin:
- Third Party Integration and UI in the Enterprise

WAN Optimization solutions are designed to do a couple of things: increase the performance of applications running over the WAN by reducing latency and help companies achieve efficiencies in bandwidth usage. This can help avoid costly infrastructure upgrades and reduce the downtime and lost revenue associated with poor network performance.

For most companies, a big value proposition of WAN optimization is data center consolidation. If you can make your WAN performance rival that of your LAN, you can do away with remote data centers and repurpose or liquidate the expensive hardware in each branch office.

It also simplifies making backups in preparation for disaster recovery because much less data needs to travel across the link in order to get a full backup of the branch office to the home office. It becomes feasible to back up key data remotely on a regular basis. (The alternatives are to saturate the link with a scheduled backup, hire on-site staff simply to do the backup, or trust that the end-users will back up their data locally - which isn't much of a guarantee.) Keeping your data backed up and in one central location also means that it will be easier to verify compliance with government regulation.

There is also a "green effect" as it may also cut down on power requirements too - similar jobs done by separate servers in each branch office can now be handled via a single server at the home office, running virtualized server environments. While that one server requires more CPU cycles, chances are the tradeoff will result in lowered electricity needs. And of course, it eliminates maintenance costs for all that hardware, and the ability to keep your IT staff in your home office rather than sending them on planes to the four corners of the earth when something goes wrong.

There are numerous trends driving the demand for WAN optimization. So, how do you know where you can get the biggest improvements from your investment? Which applications will benefit the most? And, what about the pitfalls? One of the downsides to WAN optimization is that is obscures end-to-end performance monitoring for TCP applications because it breaks the connection between client and server into three separate segments. Most WAN appliances also obscure Netflow data which is used for security and traffic analysis purposes. Traffic prioritization via QoS can also be interrupted. Some WAN optimization solutions address these concerns. Others do not.

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Network Performance Daily will address these questions in a series of upcoming posts on WAN Optimization. Subscribe to our RSS feed to get weekly updates. Also, chime in with your thoughts on what you hope to get from deploying WAN Optimization in your organization. Feel free to leave comments below.

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

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

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

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

We’re having a Webinar today at 10:00 a.m. PST / 12:00 p.m. CST / 1:00 p.m. EST on “Evaluating WAN Optimization Options and Quantifying the Results.”

It’s co-hosted by Cisco and talks about what WAN optimization solution is best for your organization, and how to prove the effects of WAN optimization on application performance. Speaking will be Vijay Iyer, Product Manager for Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Dr. Steve Fulton, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at NetQoS.

We’ve set up this area on the blog to get attendees questions before the Webinar so that we can get to them in case the presentation runs long. Please enter your questions below. We moderate comments to keep out spam, so there may be a delay before seeing your question appear. If we don’t get to your question during the Webinar, we hope to produce a Q&A on this blog to answer your question.

(Edit: Thanks for participating in the Webinar. We're working with Vijay Iyer to answer the questions and should have the answers up sometime next week.)

By Brian Boyko

"Jesus has come back, and he's a phone now."

The Apple iPhone might not be the second coming, but it will certainly be popular. Already the Web is being inundated by speculation, information, mis-information, rumor, innuendo, and anyone with an opinion on Apple writing about the iPhone.

So we thought: Why buck the trend?

The truth is that when this device comes out, many people are going to buy the iPhone, they will use it at their jobs - including those in a corporate IT environment - and that means it is going to become the responsibility of the IT manager.

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Continue reading "Why Apple's iPhone means more work for the IT department" »

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.

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

by Jeff Hicks

There's a number of reasons why a company would move to VoIP. Generally there's been some component of cost-savings - it may be in regular long distance savings, it may be in hardware cost savings (versus a PBX system), it may be that you only have one network infrastructure to deploy and manage.

But it's interesting how in the past couple of years, costs have become less of a factor in the decision process. Long-distance rates have dropped, so the cost factor is not quite as pronounced as it used to be, especially considering short-term rollout costs.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "VoIP Traffic Isn't Just Normal Traffic" »