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Small Scale QoS

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:18:25 -0600

I have a new respect for the guy that has to decide QoS policies for the enterprise. Not that I didn’t before, but recently I had to start worrying about QoS policies at home.

Allow me to explain. Earlier this year, Time Warner Cable decided it was going to roll out caps on broadband in Austin, much as it had done in Beaumont, Texas. Doing a quick calculation, I estimated that those caps were going to cost me around $300 a month. Since I didn’t have any other broadband providers in the complex I was currently living in, I decided to move back in with my old roommates, in a 4/4 condo. This condo came with free internet – Time Warner’s business class, which was not going to be capped. Even if it was, the condo also had access to AT&T DSL, so we could always switch if Time Warner brought in caps.

The bad news is that the free connection on the Internet was limited to 2mbps down, 256kbps up, and because of the middleware involved by the condo owner, there were frequent connection problems and just plain connection destructive behavior. Uploading to YouTube often resulted in failed file transfers due to the low speeds. Upgrading the connection through the condo was possible, but the prices, based on Time Warner’s business class prices, were exorbitant. The only upside was that each port had it’s own dedicated 2mbps connection, so whatever happened on one person’s computer didn’t affect anyone else.

Time Warner was expected to roll out broadband caps in September. September has come and gone, and it looks like Time Warner has abandoned plans for broadband caps in Austin after the glum response they’ve gotten from the high-tech test markets. (Looks like I didn’t have to move after all, though my roommates are still pretty cool. ) So, with the understanding we’d switch to AT&T or go back to the condo’s broadband if Time Warner ever did roll-out caps, we decided to get TW residential service in the condo – and since there were four of us sharing the connection, we decided to get the highest speed service they offered – 22mbit down, 2mbit up. (The actual speed was closer to 18mbit down, 1.6mbit up, but still impressive.)

Thing is, for the first time, my three roommates and I were on a shared Internet connection. And we’re all geeks of high magnitude. I have a media center PC, desktop for video editing, laptop for travel, and an iPhone, Patrick, Brendon, and Mike all have laptops, and Mike has an Xbox 360.

It actually went pretty smoothly, considering the relative complexity of the network. The Xbox and the Media Center both get wired connections, everything else runs on wireless. Simple enough, and we were up and running within hours.

It wasn’t until the next day when I noticed something strange. I would queue up a whole bunch of downloads on the Media Center PC, and it would saturate the connection. Doing some Web browsing from my computer in my room however, was slow. YouTube videos stuttered. Congestion had reared its ugly head.

But, hey, I thought to myself. I work for a company that deals with this sort of stuff all the time. QoS policies are the solution! And Tomato Firmware had support for QoS policies, so this was a cinch! I’d be ready to go in no time.

Didn’t quite work out that way. Yes, I could set QoS policies, and I made a reasonable guess as to what those policies should be, but I realized, with some dawning sense of irony, that I had no idea what to give high priority, and what to give low priority. I made some guesses, of course, retaining the defaults of giving high priority to the first 512k of packets on Port 80, but lower priority to anything past 512k (likely a file transfer). Then I gave the Media Center low priority, because, by definition, anything done on that box was entertainment, not work or communication. And Skype, Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, and the Xbox Live all got the highest priority – all were time sensitive applications. But after that, I drew a blank. Quite simply, I realized I was making guesses. What was the name of that new game that Mike bought? Borderlands or something? What port does that run on? How do I set high priority for Netflix streaming, and only Netflix streaming? What about YouTube? And how much uploading do we do, anyway?

Quite simply, I had no visibility into my network. Tomato Router is great, but it’s not going to give you information like what applications are running on the network, or what sites are drawing the most traffic during what hours. And even though I had power – I didn’t have the knowledge to make the most effective use of it.

I’m sure many in IT management have gone through something similar – ending up with lopsided traffic policies where 10-20 apps ended up in the highest priority class, because they didn’t have a historical analysis of their network to reference.

All the stuff I’ve been preaching over the last three years – they had finally hit me at home. That’s a sobering thought. And this is just one night. We have no way – other than to try to watch a YouTube video in our rooms while downloading off the Media PC – to determine if we see improvement.

I’m going to need to sit my roommates down soon and talk to them about what gets highest priority. This type of discussion really should occur before deployment, but I just didn’t think it through.

At least I can upload YouTube videos now.

This post was compiled with the help of Jesse Najera, Technical Marketing Engineer

Can you tell me how to interpret… how to interpret this networking data?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:36:07 -0600

Sesame Street is celebrating its 40^th anniversary today, and the Os in Google’s Logo are the distinctive eyes of Sesame Street’s greatest gourmand, Cookie Monster.

Since its beginnings, Sesame Street’s main purpose has been to use Madison-avenue style techniques to give kids the information that they need in a manner that they can understand. The show was set in an urban environment to mirror the urban environments of most children that did not have access to preschool, and they always made sure that they understood their audience.

One of the most memorable events in Sesame Street history – at least for me, anyway was the death of Will Lee, who played Mr. Hooper. Rather than broach the topic by having another actor take his place, or having Mr. Hooper “go on vacation,” Mr. Hooper was also to die. In that episode, the CTW producers took every precaution not to upset the audience – children. They avoided using euphemisms such as “passed away,” for example, dealing directly with the issue and not confusing the audience. They researched the concerns kids have after a loved one passes away, found that kids worried that their immediate needs wouldn’t be taken care of, and they made sure to include information that Big Bird would still have someone to make birdseed milkshakes for him. They aired the program on Thanksgiving so it would be very likely that parents would be around to watch the show with their children.

Additionally, the show has continued to evolve over its 40 years, so much so that the original 1969 show was put on DVD with a disclaimer that the show was for grownups reminiscing and not for today’s preschoolers – the 1969 show shows Cookie Monster smoking a pipe as Alistair Cookie in Monsterpiece Theatre, Oscar not just a grouch but also plain mean, and a scene where Gordon invites a little girl (without her parents) into his house for milk and cookies – innocent enough, but by today’s standards, a little creepy. But that’s the point – the show has adapted to changing needs over time.

It should also be noted that Sesame Street is just the American version of the show. “Sesame Tree” is the show in Northern Ireland, and the first episode had Potto and Hilda learning that you can’t just split the Sesame Tree up – you have to share and get along. Tantan, Moman, Putri, and Jabrik talk about cultural diversity in Indonesia’s Jalan Sesama. The documentary “The World According To Sesame Street” deals with adaptations in Bangladesh, Kosovo, and South Africa. In short, the show has always addressed some of the most complex issues that children have to deal with and explained them in a way that a child of a particular culture can understand.

“The Sesame Workshop is a not-for-profit organization that goes to different countries and says: ‘Tell us what your children need.’ Then they have meetings and seminars where they bring together child educators and child psychologists and children’s artists and animators and all of these different people who work the world of children, to create education and entertainment for them. In that way, the people on the ground within a certain country, for instance Bangladesh, get to create their own curriculum and their own puppets and their own street, and so then ‘Sesame Street’ is no longer an American show—now it’s a Bangladeshi show.”

Now, obviously, network engineers typically don’t have to deal with children very often. (That’s a job for the help desk – kidding, of course!)

More seriously, though, we’ve taken so many life lessons from Sesame Street over the years, and I see no reason to stop simply because we’re “grownups.” And that lesson is this: When you’re presenting something complex to an audience that may not understand it, you have to tailor your message to that audience. Give the audience the information that they need, and don’t make it either over-complex, or over-simplified. For example – when talking to C-level executives.

In some cases, reports are literally filled with red/yellow/green traffic lights, in an oversimplification. It’s a great way to explain networking performance to a typical watcher of Sesame Street, but… for a CIO ~~CEO~~, it’s oversimplification. What executives typically want is information that’s summarized, not simplified. For example, it doesn’t matter what happened on one particular day for one particular link – it’s more important to know the trend over the month for that link.

And sometimes meaning trumps accuracy. At the ground level, at the engineering level, guesswork and estimation are not very useful to the network engineer. Heck, it may even bother you. But at the summary level, at a broad view, that can provide very meaningful information, even though it's not 100% accurate. To take a note from Cookie Monster, moving to “Cookie is a sometimes food,” note that Cookie Monster doesn’t bombard the viewer with how many calories are in a cookie – nor does he note that the “anytime foods” he eats, such as bowls of fruit, also have advantages and drawbacks in the nutritional area; and that everybody’s nutritional needs are different – but he still gives the viewers information that they can use. “Cookie is a sometimes food. Fruits and Veggies are an Anytime Food.”

“Well, me known for eating cookie,/When me don't, they shout,/"Look, he trying to throw loyal fans a curve!/What he doing eating fish,/Or vegetable dish?/Man, he sure got a lot of nerve!"

Well, me answer you straight,/When me filling up plate,/Taking only cookies is all wrong!/'Cause you also got to eat/Fruit or veggies and meat/If you want to be healthy and strong!”

And explain what needs to be done – add actionable items to the report. You notice that every time Sesame Street introduces a letter, like for example, “C”, they actually give examples of its use – such as “Cookie.” It’s one thing to say “The link to Houston is suffering from poor performance” – tell the CIO what he can do to improve that performance, whether it’s a new server, recoding the application, or more bandwidth.

I guarantee you that you’ll get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside if you do.

SimCisco

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:34:52 -0600

Cisco has had success promoting it’s ASR routers through the “Cisco Edge Quest” games – the first one being a 3D “shoot-em-up” without the shooting, and the second one being a rail racer much like AudioSurf.

But Cisco’s released a new game called “myPlanNet” which is essentially a SimCity clone based around Cisco technology… a… “SimCisco,” if you will.

It reminded me especially of AeroBiz, the old airline simulator games from the 16-bit era. At any rate, Cisco’s myPlanNet game consists of you choosing to be a Phone Service company, a Cable TV service company, or a Mobile Service company. It doesn’t matter what you choose because within a few turns, all three are basically indistinguishable. You roll out services (enabled by Cisco products you buy) and try to manage consumer satisfaction while making a profit.

I’m not quite sure what kind of company you’re supposed to be running, as you pay to develop technologies that you need to buy Cisco’s gear in order to use. I’m also not sure that it’s a little overbroad – and that if it wasn’t a computerized fantasy world, you might have to deal with the FTC before going into so many markets that you end up becoming the ruler of the entire telecommunications infrastructure of the known game universe.

It’s not a particularly hard game, but the networking screen gives you a very good overview of Cisco’s product line, and you’re introduced to each one when you roll out a new technology that could use it. And the technologies it covered basically mirrored consumer adoption of the Internet, and gives you a good idea of where we’re going as well. All of it is current technology, though not necessarily currently commercially viable. Things like holograms, for example, are certainly a cool Cisco technology, but I’m not sure that they’re going to have much more practical use than the television screen. Then again, I thought Twitter was a fad too.

What isn’t a fad is the idea of using interactive media in marketing; going beyond the idea of advertising in games to giving product information as the game. I think it’s probably one of those weird cultural shifts that we’ll find as the Nintendo kids turn thirty and start taking on more responsibility in purchasing decisions.

Cynical Cloud Computing

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:13:58 -0600

InfoWorld’s Paul Krill recently reported that Richard Marcello, President of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys, said something that could be regarded as a bit of a PR blunder at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo.

“We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”

Well, great for those two guys in India, and I’m sure it’ll go a long way towards helping the Indian economy recover from its recent invasion of Dahler Mendi Clones… FROM SPACE! Still, I’m sure everyone who works in IT in the U.S. felt a chill go up their spine when reading that quote.

Now, part of the reason that Unisys was able to cut those jobs was because they set up a “private cloud” in the company, which allows them to do server provisioning in five minutes, compared to 10 days of manual provisioning. These provisioned servers could then be managed remotely.

This is true enough, as far as things go, but oftentimes it seems that companies view IT as nothing more than a capital expenditure which should be cut as much as possible. IT is not just a capital expense – it is, and always has been, the “force multiplier” of the business. IT doesn’t just cost money, it enables your company to grow with new challenges. Smart IT is about developing or delivering applications – and if you have a surplus of IT, consider using that surplus power to either improve performance for existing applications, or work on developing the applications to simplify workload.

The real power in cloud computing and virtualization is not just that it saves hardware costs, but that it frees up your engineers from doing things like maintenance and administration when they could be engineering – solving problems and improving solutions. In other words – IT doesn’t generate revenue directly, but they make the revenue generating parts of the business generate more revenue. If you don’t see value in that, you’re doing something wrong.

uTP is a BitTorrent Game-Changer

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:58:38 -0600

BitTorrent, Inc., has produced a new version of the BitTorrent protocol called “uTP” which automatically throttles back BitTorrent connections when it detects congestion on the network.

For the end-user, the benefits are apparent – downloading (and uploading) a torrent should interfere less with other network activity – so one roommate can download while the other can watch NetFlix, or you could have uTorrent in the background while doing some other task, such as gaming or Web browsing, without huge stuttering.

The idea of putting network congestion control on Layer 7 also means that there’s less pressure on “Layer You” to introduce bandwidth throttling for BitTorrent traffic on the network or transport layers. This should come as a bit of a relief, although, even though two thirds of BitTorrent users either use uTorrent or Mainline, both of which have uTP, there’s still a third that doesn’t, so the guard can’t come down completely.

Where this might have a bigger impact, however, is at ISPs. For a while now, ISPs have been remarking that their networks are congested and that a large part of that congestion is due to P2P traffic. Indeed, a study by Ipoque in February 2008 showed, for example, that BitTorrent alone was responsible for 37% of Internet traffic. In Eastern Europe, that number was 56%. (No clue what the numbers are today; if anything, they may have gone down a little due to encroachment from streaming video services like YouTube, Hulu, and NetFlix.) Even so, assuming a reasonable 30% estimate for BitTorrent traffic on an ISP’s network, and two thirds of that now using the uTP protocol, you now have about 20% of your traffic that will throttle back down automatically in the case of congestion. That provides an awful lot of breathing room!

This is an especially important development considering that BitTorrent encryption is making headway due to events such as the forging of RST packet headers using Sandvine software, like Comcast attempted, and in response to ever more onerous copyright infringement laws, including “three strikes.” The large amount of BitTorrent traffic is also used as a justification toward introducing caps. Encrypted BitTorrent traffic can be harder to track, and therefore, harder to control on the network.

In fact, measures taken by ISPs in order to traffic shape BitTorrent traffic may have spurred the uTP protocol’s development. If the BitTorrent application developers view ISPs using traffic shaping protocols to defeat the purpose of BitTorrent – faster downloads using peer-to-peer connections – then encryption designed to make BitTorrent hard to throttle is the stick – while BitTorrent self-throttling is the carrot.

In many ways, uTP can be seen as more of an ideological development than a technological one. It’s been argued that BitTorrent throttling is less about network congestion and more about fighting copyright infringement of television shows – shows which are carried by the same cable companies that carry broadband. The “black market” competitor to cable TV, illegal downloads offer lower price (free vs. $50 or so a month), convenience (watch at any time), better quality (no commercials) and better selection (English-subtitled Dutch-language reality TV shows? Sign me up!) Eliminating the congestion problem at the application end then forces ISPs to either drop BitTorrent throttling – or forces them to admit that throttling isn’t primarily about congestion.

This is especially important considering that the Net Neutrality debate is heating up into a general political issue, and not a debate among techies; with Republican senators Hatch and DeMint writing an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal against net neutrality legislation, and Mitchell Baker and John Lilly, chair and CEO of Mozilla, respectively, writing the counterpoint for net neutrality legislation.

At any rate, back on the microeconomic level, all I know is that now that I don’t have to worry so much about my roommate’s BitTorrent downloads causing lag in my gaming sessions. Time to kick some online butt.

Preview of Upcoming Video

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:53:38 -0600

We’re working on some product videos and had a chance to try out the green screen lately, and we wanted to give you a little preview of our corporate communications. Click play below. The audio’s a little weak, so you may want to wear headphones.

Hockey Night in the Data Center

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:33:35 -0600

Harwell Thrasher, author of “Boiling the IT Frog: How to make your business information technology wildly successful without having to learn anything technical,” has a blog post out talking about how, during the current economic situation, which has gone beyond “depression” and towards “the pit of despair,” companies are making dangerous cuts to IT staff.

He compares it to an ice hockey tactic called “pulling the goalie,” in which a team is down by a goal in an important game, and they will swap out the goalie for a sixth offensive player in a desperate effort to score. Doing so is within the rules but leaves the goal undefended. For example, an IT department that cancels offsite backup recovery solutions, stopped updating virus prevention software, and laid off the only guy in the company who really understands how to maintain and support custom systems all lead to the possibility of a grave disaster that threatens to seriously harm the company.

But the metaphor is flawed. Pulling the goalie in hockey may reduce defenses but it gives hockey teams a better shot of playing on the offense. A lot of IT cuts seem to be not pulling the goalie – most companies at least know to keep their anti-virus software up to date – but they might not take network performance as seriously as they once did, and make reductions in IT without realizing that it can be a false savings.

That is, it is difficult – but not impossible – to determine the costs of letting a particular application, like, say PeopleSoft, experience a “brownout” – still technically “up,” but performing poorly. Losing money in lost productivity or sales or customer satisfaction. At that point, it’s a simple equation: did the money saved from the IT cost cover the productivity, lost revenue, or irritated customer? If the answer is “no,” then it’s clearly a case of false economy.

This is especially important considering that companies are starting to reconsider the “do more with less” mentality and are now thinking about “doing less with less.” And indeed, this can be a viable tactic – if you can save money by going for three nines of uptime instead of five nines of uptime, it can be worth it if you only need three nines of uptime.

Network performance requirements can be cut in the same way, sort of. I mean, while it actually hurts me, emotionally, to suggest this, “the best” network performance isn’t always the most cost effective network performance. So, for example, if you can save money by allowing some periods of congestion on the WAN, so long as that congestion never gets over an acceptable amount, then it might work.

The problem is finding out what’s “acceptable.” This means baselining performance and understanding what kind of performance your business applications need. It’s for this reason that cuts in IT should not include the network engineers that make those determinations, nor the (self-interest alert!) network monitoring solutions they depend on. IT without the former is “pulling the goalie,” while IT without the latter is putting the goalie out there without a stick, protective gear, or skates.

Why Britain’s Three Strikes Policy Harms Network Engineers

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:46:02 -0600

For a couple of years now, lobbyists for large copyright-holding businesses, most notably the music industry, have lobbied in multiple countries and jurisdictions for what they call the “three strikes” rule. Under the “three strikes” rule, if you are accused of infringing someone’s copyrights online three times, the ISP will be mandated to cut you off from the Internet. If you only have one ISP to choose from, you are effectively prohibited from accessing the Internet.

Note that it only takes three accusations. That is, not only is there a presumption of “guilty until proven innocent,” but the accused have no opportunity to prove themselves innocent. There are a number of ways that this can be abused, of course, beginning with silencing political dissent, silencing parody, silencing critics of companies, corporations, or cults, and just plain old meanspiritedness. What better way to get back at someone than to ban him from the Internet?

The U.K.’s Lord Mandelson, Privy Council, announced that the U.K.’s Labour party policy would be to implement this three strikes-rule as soon as Summer 2011. Because of the nature of the U.K.’s parliamentary system, where the executive is drawn from the legislature and there is very little party dissention compared to the U.S., it is likely to pass.

It may just be me, but I don’t think this is a good idea.

Already, companies, politicians, and organizations make accusations that are more or less baseless to get videos taken down from YouTube. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that they might decide it might be easier to ban critics from the Internet altogether. Both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, for example, were hit by this – the anti-gay marriage Stand for Marriage Maine had a takedown issued by NPR, for example. A separate anti-gay marriage group called “The National Organization for Marriage,” that tried to silence pro-gay marriage critics who posted audition videos for their anti-gay marriage ad, which undermined their position. You also had Ralph Lauren trying to censor criticism that their models were extremely Photoshopped, a parody of diamond ads getting a takedown from DeBeers, and the Warner Music Group not only putting out claims against YouTube videos that not only featured their recorded music, but people singing acapella renditions (including that famed video of the music of John Williams sung a capella,) and teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland.” For this reason, various Internet civil liberties groups, such as the EFF, come out against such legislation.

What’s interesting is that law enforcement agencies, such as MI-5 and the Metropolitan (London) Police’s e-crime unit, have also come out against this legislation. The reason is because since file-sharing accusations would have such harsh penalties, people would take action to make sure that they are never accused of file-sharing. That would mean that encrypting Internet information would not only become a more popular behavior, it may even become a default behavior. That increased encryption will increase the costs and workload for law enforcement agencies with legitimate reason to snoop on communications. Right now, encryption is mostly done by two groups. The first group is those of us in the computer fields who know enough about computer communication to be paranoid.

The second group are those who actually have something to hide, like say, violent criminals (as opposed to copyright infringers) or child pornographers (as opposed to legal but socially embarrassing “adult entertainment”). By increasing the penalties to include Internet disconnection, suddenly the general file-sharing public, the non-violent criminals start encrypting traffic as well.

Right now, encrypting your data makes you stick out like a sore thumb to law enforcement agencies, who can then get a warrant to decrypt that data if they think you’re about to pull something really naughty. But an increase in demand for encryption will result in simple ways to enable it. (Already, encrypted traffic is built into several BitTorrent clients.) With everyone using encryption, encrypted communication no longer sticks out. Then you have to start decrypting everybody’s data to find the “bad guys.” Law enforcement with regards to the Internet is sufficiently Orwellian as it is. When even MI5 balks, you know it’s bad.

But beyond that, it holds bad news for enterprise network engineers as well. If you know how to encrypt Internet traffic from your home computer, you also know how to encrypt Internet traffic from your work computer – and many will. Some may even think that they’re doing the company a favor by doing so – after all, encrypting the traffic protects it from corporate sabotage. Encryption of IP addresses, source/destination ports and payload information renders traditional traffic shaping and QoS policy less effective for dealing with network congestion.

Whatever your views on copyright infringement, this is a solution that creates more problems – and bigger problems – than it is supposed to solve. The only people who win, in this scenario, are those businesses who would benefit from sabotaged network performance.

The Robots Are Coming For You

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:42:57 -0600

As Halloween approaches, I’ve got a bit of a horror story to keep you up at night.

There’s an interesting quote that’s somewhat appropriate now. Well – song lyrics anyway. “Did you feel you were tricked / by the future you picked?” Which, I’m told, are part of a Peter Gabriel tune for a Pixar movie, but which I only came across when reading speculative fiction about quantum AI computers running 419 scams.

The thing about the future is that by the time it gets here, it’s already the present. Wait, I’m sounding like Criswell there… what I mean to say is that only a couple years ago, the big story in technology was how IT departments were becoming centralized due to advances in virtualization technology that cut down on hardware requirements and power consumption. Now the next level is cloud computing; an idea, fundamentally, that you can centralize data centers even further by centralizing them with the data centers for other companies via a third-party provider.

Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to think of a day when even these cloud computing centers become even further consolidated – perhaps one on each inhabited continent. “A world market for maybe five computers” indeed…

Except, it’s not quite that easy. The transition from in-house architecture to cloud computing resources is just about as difficult as the transition from real servers to consolidated virtual ones, and the big problem is ensuring network performance – that data gets where it needs to go quickly.

Much as the server consolidation/virtualization problem was helped with better virtualization technologies and advances in WAN optimization, the current rush in IT tool development is in the cloud computing area (not that we still don’t have a-ways to go with virtualization and consolidation). And some of these cloud-computing tools are starting to appear – for example, self-managing environments…

One of the newest approaches is the concept of the "dynamic infrastructure." Rather than a simple collection of humming boxes or cards designed to push data this way or that, the dynamic infrastructure brings together virtual networking, automation and resource management with tools like application management, security and policy management to create a self-managing environment that can react to changes in workloads and other needs with minimal human interference.

Lori MacVittie, technical marketing management for application services at F5 Networks is one of the prime movers of the concept, which she says will be the inevitable result of the transition to the cloud.
"When the entire data center is founded on a dynamic infrastructure, the infrastructure can react itself to changing network and application conditions and needs," she says. "When the entire ecosystem is sharing status and information about performance, every component can adjust itself dynamically to what’s needed now to improve performance or maintain availability. And it happens automatically, based on the specific needs of the business and IT."

Virtualization has underscored the need for performance management; back when everything was run on actual servers, you could almost always fix a problem by finding out where the bottleneck lied and increasing the amount of stuff. Not always, but almost always. But with virtualization, you’re essentially managing an interconnected ecosystem of stuff and… well, stuff that’s not stuff. “Unstuff,” to borrow a bit of NewSpeak.

And this management is so complex that it has increased the demand for network engineers, yes, but it’s also increased the demand for software to come along and replace the more tedious tasks of network engineers, automating the processes where possible.

But what if there is no upper limit? What if self-managed cloud computing software is exactly that – with computers calculating exactly what needs to be done to preserve performance and then automatically fix it?

And that network monitoring software…. WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

The Re-Education of NetFlow

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:18:59 -0600

by Ben Erwin

NetFlow or NetFlow-esque technology (Jflow, Cflowd, NetStream, IPFIX, etc.) has been around the network management world for quite some time. Thousands of IT shops worldwide leverage its capabilities to analyze traffic flowing across the network.

Recently, some vendors have recently made somewhat misleading statements about NetFlow’s capabilities. There are very good reasons why NetFlow is a de facto standard (and through IPFIX, soon to be an IETF standard). Here are some quick reminders on why NetFlow is still the king:

100% visibility across all network links. A common misconception about NetFlow is that it samples traffic. Netflow exports every transaction it sees, and provides a full picture of what traffic is flowing across the network. Now, it is true that sFlow samples traffic for flow export, but NetFlow exports every transaction it sees.

Enabling at network aggregation points. Instead of enabling NetFlow on every router, most NetFlow aficionados are able to enable NetFlow only on those aggregation routers that see the majority of network traffic. This way, network managers can visualize their network traffic while not having to go overboard with router configuration.

Granularity versus TCO. It’s true that NetFlow does not provide Application Layer (Layer 7) information. But even so, remains the best bang for the buck for network visibility – yes, you could deploy probes all over the network to gain Layer 7 visibility – but there’s a significant opportunity cost in time and manpower for deployment, configuration, and ongoing monitoring, and the total cost of ownership for a probe solution for Layer 7 visibility simply isn’t worth it. Many IT shops have dumped probes altogether and gone with NetFlow despite this limitation.

Free (if you use Cisco). NetFlow is free on all Cisco routers. All you have to do is enable it. This makes it a very cost-effective solution compared to alternatives.

These are all reasons why NetFlow will continue to be top dog for network visibility. And while there are improvements to be made, certainly (there is no such thing as a “perfect” machine,) right now some of the best solutions for network visibility take advantage of the capabilities that NetFlow provides.

Jim Metzler looks back at his 2009 predictions

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:03:18 -0600

In this video (part two of two), Jim Metzler looks back at some prediction he made at the beginning of the year, and how they're shaping up to reality in this retrospective interview with Jordan Weiss.

The Blue Screen of Deathly Hallows.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:46:22 -0600

In April 2007, I was freelancing for HardOCP.com, writing an article called “30 days of Windows Vista.” And at the end, I concluded that “this product is unfit for any user.”

On the other hand, I’ve been using the beta of Windows 7 on my personal laptop, desktop, and media PC without problem for months now, and I’m very happy with the stability and performance of the operating system. The reviews are positive, and in the U.K., where there was a substantial price cut, pre-orders for Windows 7 have out-sold pre-orders for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

The more I think about it, I wonder if Microsoft doesn’t suffer from some sort of “Star Trek” curse, with every other operating system release decent, and the rest, doomed to mediocrity, with 95, 2000, XP, and 7 as “Wrath of Khan,” “The Voyage Home,” “The Undiscovered Country,” and “First Contact,” respectively. Okay, maybe 98 doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ME and Vista, but neither does “Search for Spock” deserve to be lumped in with “The Final Frontier” and “Generations.”

But I digress.

Unlike Windows Vista, Windows 7, I believe, will be adopted more readily in office and enterprise environments, for the simple reason that there’s compelling reasons to upgrade. Which means that businesses that skipped out on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 may want to revisit some of the networking considerations that were brought up when Vista came out, like Compound TCP/IP, and 802.1x security features.

More importantly, the one thing that I think makes Windows 7 different from Windows Vista’s launch is that Windows 7 was launched by taking user concerns to heart – that is, they listened to the end-user when they developed the operating system, including optimizing Windows 7 for slower hardware on portable computers, and getting rid of the worst annoyances of the UAC “Cancel or Allow” dialog. And it just reminds you that if you want to do a good job for your customers, you have to listen to what they have to say and focus on what problems they need to fix most, and what features they would most like.

Jim Metzler looks back at his 2009 predictions

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:57:37 -0600

In this video (part one of two), Jim Metzler looks back at some prediction he made at the beginning of the year, and how they're shaping up to reality in this retrospective interview with Jordan Weiss.

Worst. Year. Ever.

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:45:08 -0600

By Patrick Ancipink

Gartner has made it official: 2009 was the “worst year ever” for IT. I’m here at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando and about 15 minutes into the opening “parade of analysts” keynote yesterday, I was really hoping the Disney location would lighten the mood a tad but the Halloween nightmare continued for a while.

The only wealth evident was the amount of statistics that point to IT hurting for another few years—Gartner predicts it will take until 2012 for broad IT spending levels to equal 2008. As a result, infrastructure upgrades are being delayed (think servers, PCs, printers) to create another source of risk. And don’t forget that “trust” in the business is at an all-time low.

Some much needed genuine humor—in contrast to the creepy, awkward laughter of Windows 7 launch party propaganda—came in the form of VP and Gartner Fellow, Andy Kyte. While his message was serious— “You all have a bloated application portfolio”—his analogy was priceless. IT and the business prefer to be in the mode of making babies (new apps) but are not into responsible parenting. That’s why there are so many orphaned applications that were only funded to be birthed, but not cared for and raised to maturity. Mr. Kyte’s direction to this audience of “the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives:

“Make every application a wanted application.”

The morning keynote wrapped up with less doom and some good points of the inevitability of social media (start harnessing it and spend less time trying to kill it). All-in-all, the morning was a solid reminder of the reality of the IT marketplace in general.

Drilling into IT operations management topics today provided some points about what CIOs are doing and should do to get through the gloom. Starting with CIO priorities based on survey data, 2009 looks like this:

Linking business and IT strategies and plans
Reducing the cost of IT
Delivering projects that enable business growth
Improving IT governance
Implementing IT process improvements
Improving the quality of IS services

The 4^th, 5^th and 6^th priorities are very related to the 2^nd, so it becomes clear to see why the IT operations management segment, which includes network and applications performance management, are among the healthiest sectors in IT. One way to think about it is that the cost savings need to be tempered with some sanity (automation and process) so application and service delivery are not overly compromised. With more dependence on the network and IT in general, the cost of downtime and poor application performance continues to rise.

None of that is surprising, but what I found interesting is the variability when you look at the changes in priorities over the years. For example, just last year reducing cost was all the way down at #10 on the list. Looking at 2012 predictions, the cost issue dives back down to #6 with the underpinning priorities (governance, process and quality) at the bottom of the list. In 2012, “leading enterprise change initiatives” rockets up the chart from #13 today to #3.

So the take away is that CIOs think they can hold the rudder steady for a few years, institute some much needed process maturity, and then be in position to contribute more back to the business.

Jim Metzler on Network Management Trends

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:19:05 -0600