The Performance Zone

Vacations – Good, Bad, or Evil?

Submitted By Michael Valladao, Product Marketing Manager for NetScout

This morning I received yet another message from a colleague asking me to fill in while they are on PTO. It’s the end of summer and it seems like everyone is going on vacation.  There are vacant cubes all over the office and plenty of open parking spaces outside.  What’s with that?  Don’t people understand there is work to do?

The same thing happens when I call folks back at our Corporate Headquarters outside of Boston.  Apparently, New Englanders go to “The Cape” a lot.  We don’t have a Cape here in California.  Even if we did, the Pacific Ocean is cold during the summer months.  So it is hard to relate.

It’s hard to believe, but IT people take vacations too.  That often means the help desk is understaffed or there is a summer intern covering the phones. How is a network supposed to run at peak efficiency when a key person who genuinely understands the network is floating down a river somewhere with a six-pack of beer and no cell coverage?  Just another hurdle in managing today’s Modern IP Network.  The most productive network teams I have ever worked with always manipulated their vacation schedules to ensure at least one high ranking network guru was available during the busy vacation season.  If you planned properly, colleagues would go the same destination to scope things out and figure out the best way to pass the time.  That way, when they returned, you could make the most out of your vacation. 

Going Green or Spending Greenbacks?

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout Director of Product Marketing

So I was catching up on my technology reading over vacation last week and stopped to read Mike Fratto’s Information Week article “Face to Face, But Miles Apart” – it was a review of the New LifeSize products introduced to help companies cost-effectively deploy telepresence solutions, sometimes referred to as, high-definition videoconferencing.

It first caught my attention because it was about LifeSize, and NetScout’s booth at Interop Las Vegas this past May was across the aisle from LifeSize.  As I was often in this corner of our booth giving demos and talking with IT professionals, I couldn’t help but occasionally look over at their screens promoting sessions back to their headquarters.  I have to say, I was impressed by the quality of the sessions!

Network Management Haiku for LDAP

Submitted by Heidi Gabrielson, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

Packet details show

LDAP servers not in sync;

nGenius System.

This haiku was inspired by a customer in the financial services area who noticed that two of its six LDAP servers were showing  increased conversations. Using the packets stored on a continuous capture device, the network team was able to analyze the packet decode and bounce charts to determine that the two servers were unsuccessfully attempting to re-sync. Once they were both reset, performance of the LDAP servers and overall traffic volume returned to acceptable levels and the company’s thousands of remote employees were once again able to login in.

For the complete case study, see http://search.netscout.com/b/trk?uid=5bbce60469fb1512&sn=155802288&ip=207.15.192.251&lgkKy=ldap+server+sync&rn=1&http://www.netscout.com/docs/appnotes/NetScout_appnote_Reducing_MTTR.pdf?cpid=blog

When the Modern IP Network Fails, It Makes an Impact

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout's Director Product Marketing

It is hard to miss the news reports on the latest Netflix shipping problems.  Apparently, they have had difficulty in shipping DVDs to customers since Tuesday morning, August 12.  A company with 55 U.S. distribution centers that distributes approximately 2 million discs a day is experiencing only their second incident of missed shipments in their nearly 10 year history.  It appears that no discs were shipped Tuesday or Thursday while some got out on Wednesday, affecting approximately 2.8 million of their 8.4 million subscribers.  Netflix company spokesman Steve Swasey has been quoted as saying that Netflix is “having severe system issues on our shipping.” 

Monitoring the Modern IP Network Requires a Unified Management Solution

Submitted by Heidi Gabrielson, Solutions Marketing Manager for NetScout

Huge investments in faster servers, better protocols, high-speed backbones and virtualized services have turned yesterday’s low-speed, data-only networks into information technology platforms ready to support a multitude of 21st century business services rapidly and reliably.  The amount of redundancy and re-routing architected into these networks has mostly hidden hardware or circuit outages from end users.  The bigger challenge is how to address persistent and intermittent application degradations that can present an even greater threat to revenue, customer service or public reputation.

Indexing – Finding what you need now

Submitted by Adam Reeves, Product Marketing Manager for NetScout

I’m a messy, unorganized person (and hopefully my manager isn’t reading this). Everyone agrees (wife, family, colleagues, me). Until recently my process for keeping track of paid bills and other important papers was to put them in a carton until I either a) needed something at which point I would frantically sort through the box, (hopefully) find what I was looking for, and then pile everything back into the box or b) got motivated (more likely embarrassed) and filed them away by company or topic.

That’s great, but what does it have to do with performance management, indexing, and MTTR?

Data Center Consolidations are Big Money - How are you Going to Manage the Project Lifecycle?

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout's Director of Product Marketing

I have been a regular reader of Information Week for some time, and as I read this latest article about Microsoft’s data center consolidation and build out, I had a deja vue experience – IBM had an article a few days ago about similar needs and challenges associated with their data center build outs.

And just last month there was an article on the State of Oregon consolidating 11 data centers into a single Tier 3 data center.

In all these cases, the investments are substantial – in some cases hundreds of millions – Google’s investments are reported at $600 million, IBM’s at $360 million, the State of Oregon at over $40 million. Microsoft attributes tens of millions in cost-of-revenue increases due to the increased costs associated with the data center build outs.  That kind of spending will get the attention of executives, but also put new and increased pressure on the IT staffs tasked with supporting these infrastructures throughout the life of the projects.

Femtocells – A Force for Change and More Traffic on Mobile IP Networks

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

I watched a webinar on femtocells presented by the Yankee Group back in June, and just came across my notes.

Yankee and Research Fellow Roberta Wiggins are predicting, in what she described as “cautious” forecast that femtocells will have 17.8M shipments worldwide in 2012 bringing the installed base of users to 23.9M or about 5.3% penetration of the global broadband market. Coupling this with dual-mode phones over wi-fi like that being provided by T-Mobile and the carriers could be running significant IP traffic (in addition to that enabled by the iPhone - See blog entry "Is the 3G iPhone still what's hot?") onto their networks. A big if in this is the assumption that the cost of CPE drops from its current price (above $200/instance) to below $50. She seems to think that initial deployments competing and complimenting wi-fi hotspots may have the capacity to drive volumes and reduce this cost – I’m excited about  the technology, so let’s assume she’s right.