| Issue 15 | December 2008 | ||
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technology update WaaS  Application Acceleration is a major industry topic at the moment, and it's one we'll be returning to over the coming months. For a company like NetEvidence which is focused on keeping things simple and clear, Wide-Area Application Services (WaaS) represent a challenge. There are no standards to define how you speed up applications over long distances. Each vendor looks at the problem and comes up with its own approach: different systems that works in different ways, in different situations, with different combinations of applications. If you think that's confusing, it's simple compared to understanding whether WaaS will work for your particular environment. "It's a nightmare," is how one WaaS product manager put it to us recently. "No-one will buy the kit unless we can prove it works, and we can't do that without putting evaluation systems into their own environment". Her life consists mostly of co-ordinating trials. But with no easy way to measure results and improvements and no straightforward tools to see what's going on, how do you define success ? In practice, each vendor does a mixture of three basic functions :
The balance of these tasks, and how well they're implemented, defines how well that particular system will work in your world. And you really do need to test things before investing, ensuring you draw up some success criteria first. NetEvidence is in discussions with several WaaS vendors about adding support for visualising WaaS activity early next year. Watch out for more announcements and discussion here. company news Change Management We live in changing times. It's something we're all used to, but is understandably a major concern for IT managers the world over. In a recent survey conducted by Aberdeen Research and sponsored by NetEvidence, the deployment of new applications was identified as the biggest concern for Network Managers over the coming year. The reason is simple: it's hard to know how well the network will support these new applications, or what effect they will have on the network. Survey respondents believed that up to 9% of overall revenues were at risk if installing a new service caused existing ones to go slow or start failing. Fortunately there's a way through the swamp. Aberdeen revealed that best-in-class organisations significantly improve management of their new applications in two main ways. Firstly, they have a strategic view of managing Application Performance. They take the time to plan how they're going to monitor performance, and make it a key part of their monitoring toolkit rather than relying on basic SLAs and 'outage report' styles of management. Secondly, they ensure visibility of application and network performance is available anywhere geographically, so anyone anywhere across the business is able to check what's happening and discuss it with their colleagues. If you'd like a full copy of the report, you can download it here. alone. |
welcome ...to your new issue of The Monthly Highlight, the regular newsletter created exclusively for NetEvidence customers, partners and users of our core product, Highlight. This month as well as pulling out some key Networking News stories from recent weeks, we reveal how best-in-class organisations are managing the impact of new applications across their networks, we explain the importance of measuring CPU usage in network appliances, we discuss the value of visualising WaaS activity, and we spend a few moments NotWorking in order to sweat the small stuff. We hope you find this latest issue informative and entertaining. If you have any comments on this newsletter, please don't hesitate to contact me to share your own ideas for The Monthly Highlight. Enjoy the issue. network news Unified communications in demand Fresh research has revealed that end users do want unified communications, and that the technology could even save them money during the economic recession. The survey of 1,000 people, commissioned by Mitel and conducted by market research company Redshift, showed that nearly three quarters of UK workers would welcome unified communications which combined email, voice, video conferencing, and instant messaging. Lisa Dolphin, a business communications specialist at Mitel told Techworld that unified communications were a good investment in a recession because they could be bolted on to legacy communications systems to save costs. "It can look complex, but a teleworker solution is no more than DSL and an IP phone. Most building blocks drive a significant amount of cost savings, perhaps by reducing travel," she said. EU broadband no longer controlled by traditional telcos Major telcos such as Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom controlled just 55.9% of Europe's DSL lines in Summer 2008, compared to 77.9% in 2003, according to recently published European Commission research. ZDNet UK said the report showed the UK was more at the mercy of incumbents than other European counterparts, with 25.6% of UK lines sold directly by BT, rising to 44.6% once resold lines were factored in. The research also found that just over 15% of all Europe's DSL lines are to be found in the UK, with 1.8 million new broadband lines added in the region in the past year alone.
New .tel domain names "most significant innovation since .com" Khashr Mahdavi, chief executive of Telnic, the company responsible for rolling out the internet's latest address suffix, claims: "The launch of .tel represents the most significant innovation in the domain name system since the advent of .com." The Guardian reported that unlike normal URLs, which point to websites stored on local servers, .tel addresses return information stored on core Domain Name Servers (DNS), including phone numbers, email contacts, GPS coordinates and more. This could mean the .tel domain effectively becomes an online contacts directory, offering different forms of information tailored to where and how the URL is accessed. Owners of trademarks can apply for .tel domains during an initial 'sunrise' period, before .tel addresses go on general sale on 3 February 2009. |
feature focus CPU loads are out of the closet  That's not really a router in the comms cabinet over there - it's a computer that just happens to be programed to move packets of data around. Today, most routers still have a central processor or CPU. Over the years this CPU has become a lot more powerful, which is just as well because it's doing a lot more work. Even though much of the raw packet handling gets delegated to specialised hardware these days, the CPU is still making a lot of decisions about where to send traffic, carrying out security tests, collecting statistics and other tasks. Keeping tabs on its workload is important, as excessive 'CPU utilisation' will slow traffic or cause lost packets. Highlight tracks and displays CPU load for popular routers such as Cisco or Juniper, colour-coding the graphic and putting it alongside traffic and application behaviour to reveal what's affecting CPU load. Surprisingly, turning on features like NBAR (Cisco's application tracking technology used by Highlight to show what applications are running on your network) makes little difference to CPU workload. What really hurts are firewall or encryption activities, especially on newer Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet links. Highlight will alert you if CPU usage goes too high, including sending you an email if you're using the News Insight feature. The ability to easily spot patterns and peaks is invaluable in deciding whether your router needs an upgrade, or whether that new application or configuration change is hurting or helping. notworking  If you want to see the bigger picture, it usually pays to have a clear understanding of how things work at a more granular level. The Microscope Imaging Station, developed by Exploratorium, does exactly this. It produces high-resolution images and films using research-grade microscopes to illustrate the diversity of what can be seen beyond the limits of the human eye. If you can't visit the most ambitious microscope facility ever created for use by the general public in person in San Francisco, this website is the next best thing. Marvel at and manipulate larger-than-life videos of brain cells, worms, fish embryos, sea urchins, flies, plankton, mouse stem cells and much more. |
highlight archive You can access previous issues of highlight by following this link. how do I get highlight? NetEvidence provides Highlight in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model through partnerships with service and solutions providers (http://www.net-evidence.com/Partners/partnersTab.asp), who provide performance visibility to their customers. If you're interested in more information about Highlight, or need your login details resetting, please email support@net-evidence.com and we will liaise to action your request. unsubscribe This email was sent to [merge:EmailAddress]. If you would like to unsubscribe from this newsletter please click [lunsub:"here"], or if you are experiencing any problems receiving or viewing it, please contact newsletter@net-evidence.com. disclaimer You are receiving this newsletter as a reseller or user of NetEvidence's Highlight solution. If you want to stop receiving this newsletter, please click [lunsub:"here"]. NetEvidence is aware of its responsibilities regarding the Data Protection Act and will not share any of your personal information with third parties without your explicit authorisation. |
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