Role of network continues to grow

The network plays important role in optimization of applications and how they perform, Zeus Kerravala, senior vice-president of technology at Yankee Group, told a Toronto audience on Thursday.

“The cost of computing continues to drop, the role of the network continues to grow,” he said, “and I think the network does become the most cost-effective, scalable platform for apps and services.”

He was speaking as part of a 10-city North American seminar sponsored by network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. and Netscout Systems Inc., which makes network performance management tools. Officials from both vendors as well spoke at the half-day session about how their products fit into network trends.

As networks become platforms for delivering applications as a service, Kerravala said, they have to continually be optimized and monitored. That means the way the network is managed has to change as then.

“It’s not thinking about fault management and what device is up or down, because we’ve built networks so redundant today you can lose a device and it in effect doesn’t affect it. What you have to understand is what the normal operating parameters are, and at that time when you reach a certain deviation that should alert you there’s some kind of problem.”However, he said, legacy tools aren’t sufficient for real-time network management. Static maps are common on such tools, he said, however the environment isn’t static any more. Probes and agents are good for troubleshooting yet not for ongoing monitoring, he added.

The largest cause of network downtime – 37 per cent -- is human error, Kerravala said. [“When I was a network engineer I probably contributed to that number,” he confessed.] They survey as well showed that 90 per cent of the time administrators spend resolving a problem is identifying it. If you want to find a way of doing more with less money, he concluded, find ways of finding problems faster.

Voice over IP and video are unequalled applications, he argued, that many organizations have little experience with. VoIP, for instance, isn’t bandwidth intensive however is sensitive to jitter, latency and packet loss. That can make troubleshooting difficult.

The network

“You want to think about UC having its own life cycle where you are continually watching the network, understanding how traffic’s flowing,” he advised, “and at that time continually optimizing it.”

Thinking of the network as a control point for security can create a more scalable security environment, Kerravala as well said. Understanding how your network more often than not performs means any suspicious activity gets on the spur of the moment noticed.

Desktop and server virtualization brings their own problems, nevertheless with real-time network analysis tools will show sudden shifts in network traffic patterns to identify problems, he said.

Automate operations as much as possible, he advised, particularly mundane processes that can cause human errors. Focus on tools that can help drive down problem identification time, he said, which makes network managers more pro-active than waiting for users to complain about problems you don’t know about.