The Performance Zone

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.

A conversation with Brian Noone - Attending Cisco Live

Submitted by Brian Robertson, Product Marketing Manager at NetScout Systems

We sat down with Brian Noone, Manager of Network Systems at NetScout Systems to get a first hand account of his experience at cisco live.

If you also attended Cisco Live and would like to share your thoughts about the event we would like to hear from you.

Mozilla’s new world record could have been better!

Submitted by Michael Valladao, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

Mozilla is petitioning Guinness for a new world record category for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period.  Earlier this month, Mozilla released Firefox 3, hosting a Download Day event and Bar-B-Que at their Mountain View headquarters.  They also prompted users to join in on the fun by adding “Download Day” buttons to websites and encouraging friends and associates to download within the 24 hour period.

Get Ready to Engage!

    

We are pleased to announce the official launch of Engage '08 - the 7th Annual NetScout User Summit. Attend Engage '08 and experience the next evolution of your favorite nGenius and Sniffer solutions.

Exciting News for Riverbed Technology, a New NetScout Alliance Partner!

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Solutions Marketing Manager

Congratulations to our new alliance partner, Riverbed Technology, on being identified as the market share leader in WAN optimization controllers! Gartner has recognized the company as the market share leader for first quarter of 2008, the 7^th quarter in a row that the company has been recognized as the market share leader in this space! (Read the Gartner article)

Is the 3G iPhone still what's hot?

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

So how did you spend your weekend?  Were you in line to get one of the new iPhone 3Gs?  Looks like a lot of folks were given that 1 million have already been sold in just 3 days.  Yahoo News "Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days"

That’s potentially a million new mobile IP users that AT&T is going to need to support – no small challenge if you consider simply the activation challenges that ensued over the weekend.   Ongoing services performance for everything from music downloads to web surfing to VoIP calls will also need to be managed and monitored to keep the subscribers satisfied. 

08-08-08 - Oh Great!!! - Olympics Overload

Submitted by Heidi Gabrielson, NetScout Solutions Marketing Manager

Today, NBC announced that it will be providing an unprecedented 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage over seven NBC Universal networks, as well as on NBCOlympics.com.  NBCOlympics.com will feature approximately 2,200 total hours of live streaming broadband video coverage across 25 sports over the 17 days of the Beijing Games (Aug. 8-24).  Are you and your network prepared for this potential onslaught?