Issue 10 | May 2008
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industry spotlight

Biotechnology

Business continuity on a global scale is of the highest priority to Biogen Idec, a global leader in the biotechnology industry serving patients in over 90 countries worldwide.

Founded in 1978, Biogen Idec's business is the discovery, development, manufacture and commercialisation of innovative therapies, creating new standards of care in therapeutic areas with unfulfilled medical needs. 

Managed by a professional in-house team, the IT and data infrastructure at Biogen Idec's corporate HQ in Cambridge Massachusetts is a very advanced combination of high-speed local and wide-area network connectivity coupled with a high level of redundancy. It comprises OC3 connectivity to the ATT MPLS network, redundant internet access (100Mbps and 45Mbps), plus a Gigabit Ethernet MAN to local offices and to a co-location. Regional hubs with internet egress and larger offices each have T3/E3 MPLS connections with DSL backup, while smaller foreign sales offices rely upon T1/E1 MPLS circuits, again with DSL backup.

"Highlight is my homepage," explains Paul Beliveau, solutions architect and network engineer at Biogen HQ. "I even set it for automatic refresh on a separate PC, acting as a little NOC (network operations centre). When I see orange or red, I dive in immediately and see what's going on. In this way it can often give me the ability to respond to anomalies before the user even gets a chance to report it."

You can read more about Biogen's Highlight experiences in this month's Network World article or read the full customer case study.


highlight update

How long does that web page take to load?

Highlight's Performance Insight (PI) feature can load a web page at regular intervals and display response times on an easy-to-read graphic. Use PI to assess your own web site, the landing page for a critical web-based application, or a test transaction on a CRM system.

Sharp-eyed users of this feature will also notice two traces on the resulting report. Highlight actually logs two measurements: the time taken to connect to the web server (which depends largely on the intervening network), and the time to actually load the web page (which depends more on the server itself).

Why is this useful? Well, if the upper (overall) trace shows the page is slowing down, it's always worth checking the lower (more network-based) reading. If this hasn't changed (see below), chances are there's a web-server problem - overloaded disks or too many users perhaps?

Of course, if the lower trace has also increased (as below), it's more likely that a sluggish network problem is slowing down your users. Savvy Highlight users can compare traffic utilisation on the same display to establish if the network link into the server or website is overloaded, and even the possible source of the problem.

Jeremy Edwards, NetEvidence services director

welcome

...to your May 2008 issue of The Monthly Highlight. This is a regular newsletter created exclusively for NetEvidence customers, partners and users of our core product, Highlight.

This month biotechnology is in the Industry Spotlight as we focus on global leader Biogen Idec's experiences with Highlight, as reviewed by Network World. Performance Insight's ability to measure website response times is the subject of Highlight Update, and Feature Focus contains advanced notice of a forthcoming capability that technical support teams are going to love – the NOC Tab. Elsewhere we pick out some of the more interesting news stories for network professionals from the past month in Network News, and take some time out for a spot of stargazing in NotWorking.

As ever, please get in touch with any comments you have on this newsletter or to share your own ideas for The Monthly Highlight. Enjoy the issue.  

All the very best regards,

- Jeremy

Jeremy Edwards, NetEvidence services director
jedwards@net-evidence.com


network news


Is UK launch pad for future of wireless broadband?

Earlier this month, wireless communications specialist Qualcomm announced it had acquired 40 MHz of spectrum in the 1.4 GHz band in the UK, which it plans to use for the development of as-yet-unannounced wireless broadband technology. Andrew Gilbert, executive vice president at Qualcomm Europe told Network World: "We want to use the spectrum to explore extensions and evolutions of our current technology path, and also new technologies and applications." At £8.3 million, this chunk of airwaves looks perfect for carriers thinking about providing future lucrative mobile TV services. Ofcom told ZDNet.co.uk there is "no end date" to Qualcomm's licence, so it could theoretically hold onto the spectrum forever. Watch this (air) space.


A quarter of UK companies lose data every week

A new study has revealed that 79 percent of UK companies are losing data every month, with 28 percent leaking information on a weekly basis at the very least. The survey conducted by Computer Associates (CA) quizzed 250 senior IT staff at businesses with over 1,000 employees. Silicon.com highlighted other areas in the report that revealed network downtime occurs in 24 percent of companies, application crashes in 30 percent and slowing of applications in 27 percent. IT departments also complained of underinvestment, with 68 percent of IT managers saying their budgets were insufficient and 45 percent saying IT costs were overlooked in new business ventures.


Don't dawdle over IPv6 upgrade, warns OECD

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is warning governments and businesses get on with the task of shifting to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) or risk delays, fragmentation and the inevitable end of available IPv4 addresses. IPv6, the long-awaited incoming version of the internet address specification is taking longer than expected to be adopted widely because not everyone can see much immediate benefit to the new scheme.

The OECD is concerned that if IPv6 isn't pushed through quickly, addressing could split into regional blocks as nations progress with adoption at different paces. It also claims the last chunk of the 4.1 billion possible IPv4 addresses will dry up in three years. The BBC quotes the OECD report, saying: "Experience to-date with IPv6 also suggests that IPv6 deployment requires planning and co-ordination over several years."


Just how broad is your band?

A recent panel discussion sponsored by the Internet Innovation Alliance debated whether bandwidth would soon go down the same route as oil, and become a commodity helplessly outstripped by demand.

'The Cost of the Exaflood' panel addressed the problems ISPs might experience attempting to keep up with increased global bandwidth demand driven by high-bandwidth applications such as peer-to-peer transfers and HD video streaming.

Panelist Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist said ISPs would face major challenges in making sufficient revenues as they upgraded networks to handle increased bandwidth demand. The big problem, she said, was that while web traffic was growing at an exponential rate, access capacity had grown linearly, and so unless something changes in either traffic demand or access supply, there will not be enough bandwidth to meet global demand.

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