Business Needs vs. Network Performance: Critical Challenges
Facing Network Managers
Networking is getting tougher. Networks must deliver a growing
range of services, from ERP, CRM and email to VoIP and web
services applications, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies
and requirements. Each new service introduced onto the network
contends for available resources with every other service,
impacting the network’s ability to support the business.
Meanwhile, the network itself is constantly changing. New
locations are added – some of which may be in another country or
on another continent. Equipment is upgraded and/or
re-configured. New management and/or security tools may
themselves impact service performance. Decisions about data
center consolidation and business re-organization also affect
the network in different ways. All of this makes the network a
highly dynamic environment where even subtle changes can have a
major, unforeseen impact on application performance and
availability.
Yet business users expect this complex environment to be as
reliable as electricity – despite the fact that networking
budgets are not being increased in proportion to these growing
challenges. So network managers can’t simply over-provision
network infrastructure to make sure every service has all the
bandwidth it needs. Moreover, over provisioning may not even
solve the problem and/or ensure the required level of
performance.
That’s why network managers are facing many challenges,
including:
1) Pinpointing potential network
performance issues early in the development lifecycle
Ideally, the impact of the network on a new application or
service should be dealt with from the very beginning of the
development process – when potential problems are much easier
and less expensive to fix. Unfortunately, this is rarely the
case. Problems with an application’s “networkability” are
typically discovered only after its roll-out into the production
environment is initiated. At that point, it’s usually too late
to make any significant changes in the application’s design. So
the problem gets pushed onto the shoulders of the networking
team. That’s why, in ’05, smart network managers will focus on
nipping these problems in the bud.
2) Validating new or modified applications and infrastructure
before they are deployed in production As the network becomes
more complex and more critical to the day-to-day-operation of
the business, network
performance related risks associated with application and
infrastructure change are continuing to rise. In fact, some of
the worst business interruptions that companies have
historically experienced have not been the result of unexpected
equipment failure. They’ve been the unexpected consequence of a
planned modification. Networking teams must therefore implement
change management best practices in ’05 that prevent them from
having to put out fires that they accidentally started
themselves.
3) Improved troubleshooting of intermittent/transient network
problems One of the most frustrating things for a network
manager is dealing with a problem that keeps disappearing before
it can be adequately understood and remedied. However, as the
business’s tolerance for network interruptions continues to
drop, these intermittent problems will become a bigger
management issue. So this year, network management teams need to
develop more effective methods for capturing transient network
conditions and discovering the root causes of these problems.
4) Accelerated time-to-benefit for new and/or upgraded
applications When C-level executives decide to make investments
in new applications and services, they want to see those
investments pay off quickly. That’s why the slow, staged
production roll-outs of the past won’t cut it anymore. Instead,
networking teams need to be able to quickly deploy new
applications across the enterprise. This can only happen if
caution and uncertainty about the actual behavior of these
applications in the production environment is replaced by
confidence and certainty in ’05.
5) More intelligent planning for and support of business growth
Network managers constantly have to cope with change. They have
to determine how increases in network utilization will affect
application performance. They have to decide how to best
engineer the network to support business expansion,
re-organization or mergers and acquisitions. However, they can
only do so if they have an effective means of performing
capacity planning tasks and assessing a full range of “what-if”
scenarios. Such scenarios are also critical for formulating
realistic contingency plans that can ensure business continuity
under a variety of possible conditions.
Looking at these challenges, it quickly becomes evident that
conventional production network management tools alone are no
longer sufficient for today’s networking teams. These tools are
great for monitoring the production network and discovering
certain types of problems – but they don’t enable network
managers to validate new technologies and applications before
they’re deployed on the production network. They also force
network managers to solve problems that should have been
addressed in application design.
Conventional tools aren’t very helpful for troubleshooting
intermittent and/or transient network problems either, since
they don’t provide a means of reconstructing and analyzing such
intermittent conditions. Nor do they help accelerate production
roll-outs, facilitate experimentation with “what-if” scenarios,
or support formulation of network contingency plans.
So what’s an overworked, under-resourced network manager to do?
The answer is to look at network modeling technologies. These
technologies provide an environment in which new applications,
technologies and problem-solving strategies can be safely and
thoroughly evaluated. Because they allow an application’s
network behavior to be fully validated before it’s deployed in
the production environment, these technologies also empower
network managers to perform more rapid, glitch-free roll-outs.
Plus, modeling technologies are uniquely able to provide insight
into any number of “what-if” scenarios – so network managers can
make plans for growth, corporate re-structuring and/or disaster
recovery.
“Empirical” modeling solutions offer today’s network management
teams particularly excellent business value, because of their
accuracy and relative ease of implementation. This accuracy and
ease is achieved by running the actual applications against a
model that uses captured conditions from the production
environment. The result is a clear understanding of the user
experience well ahead of deployment.
For this and other network performance articles, white papers,
and industry resources, please visit Shunra at
http://www.shunra.com/resource_center.aspx.
About Shunra
Shunra’s solutions empower organizations to address service
level and performance concerns before rollout. The Shunra VE
solution creates an exact replica of the production network
environment, enabling IT professionals to safely develop, test
and experiment with applications and infrastructure before
deployment, and effectively plan for growth and change. Tailored
for networking, performance and testing professionals, and
software developers, Shunra VE facilitates collaboration across
IT disciplines so IT organizations can quickly and more
efficiently uncover and resolve problems before they impact the
business. Over 1,500 leading enterprises and technology vendors
worldwide are using Shunra’s award-winning solutions including
3M, Boeing, Cisco, Dow Chemical, EMC, FedEx, General Electric,
General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Kelly Services, Merrill Lynch,
Motorola, Nestle, Pitney Bowes, and Vodafone. Shunra’s
headquarters are located in New York City and Kfar Saba, Israel,
with worldwide offices in the UK, Sweden and India. Shunra is
also supported through a global network of channel partners.
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