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Network Engineer’s Survival Guide: Thriving in an Application-Centric World!! (by Brad Reinboldt)

Surviving the top of the chain - Applications!

While it’s true that ultimately all applications require hardware to run and a network to communicate, the mindset in the industry and more importantly corporate executives is shifting toward an application-centric focus. Those pesky folks that sign your paycheck are looking for positive bottom line results from IT investments, not just the next interesting technology “breakthrough”. Welcome to the future, where you will be hearing much more about “end-user experience” and “service validation” than “network utilization” and “spanning trees”.

Viewed from the networker’s perspective this means it’s time to think about those OSI layers you may have been avoiding (5-7) while not forgetting about the routing layers (2-4). In the old days, once you confirmed the packets got to where they were suppose to go in the right amount of time your job was done. A quick e-mail to the server and/or application teams to communicate the networks innocence and their guilt meant a quieter afternoon for you.

Application Life Cycle Management (by Brad Reinboldt)

What Application Life Cycle Management means for the IT Organization?

Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) is the latest buzz term and the one that seems to be arguably getting much of the press’ attention today. As someone responsible for network and infrastructure, you may be thinking, “Well, at least in this case it’s not my problem; this one belongs to the application development team. Direct all questions and complaints accordingly…”

Turns out if you think this, you’re either half-correct or 50% wrong, whatever your preference. Though you may not know it, with today’s multi-tiered and distributed applications, making sure the service runs in a manner that provides acceptable end-user experience demands tight collaboration between network, infrastructure and applications groups. Think of this as good news from a job security perspective.

According to Wikipedia “…ALM is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance. ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.”

Assessing Risk and Uncertainty for Optimal IT Service Delivery (by Brad Reinboldt)

Assessing Risk and Uncertainty for Optimal IT Service Delivery Server Virtualization and Beyond

As the last several years of economic and financial upheaval have vividly illustrated, we live in a world filled with risk and uncertainty. As a Network Administrator or someone responsible for application service delivery, many of you have likely been up at night—literally or figuratively—dealing with potential threats to your IT infrastructure while being asked to deliver more with less dollars. As an Adjunct Professor on the subject of technology risk management and someone with over twenty years experience in the computing, storage, and networking arenas, I’ve learned that assessing risk and uncertainty can best be achieved by first having a clear understanding of goals. Once done, the process of laying out milestones and timelines needed to meeting those objectives is possible. Having accomplished this, it’s time to begin quantifying possible obstacles in reaching these goals. It’s important to view the issue from as many perspectives as possible, especially from standpoints that you may be less familiar. Let’s take the example of virtualization. There are numerous reasons to virtualize your server resources; improved utilization rates, reduced capital and operational expenses, and, in principle, improved management from consolidated platforms are examples.

How Application Performance Management Solutions Provide Security Forensics (by The Oldcommguy)

Enhance Your IT Security with Post-Event Intrusion Resolution

 Headlines announcing the latest corporate or government network breach are only the very tip of the iceberg. In the September/October 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, William J. Lynn, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense described how an infected flash drive inserted into a military laptop located in the Middle East in 2008, spread malware code throughout the U.S. Central Command network. “That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control.”

 
For every open acknowledgement, there are numerous intrusions and violations that remain unreported;

• Once a malefactor is within the network, it can be very difficult to identify and eliminate the threat without deep-packet inspection.
• Security experts agree that the rapidly changing nature of malware, hack attacks, and insider threats practically guarantee your IT infrastructure will be compromised.
• The question is not whether your IT infrastructure will be compromised, but what to do when the breach is detected.
• The best APM solutions offer forensic capabilities with post-event intrusion resolution to track and eliminate intrusions as well as fortify existing defenses to prevent future attacks.

How APM can help your IDS, AVS, and DLP!   Read More -

 

Have some FUN, Laugh or Cry about your network experiences!!

Share Your Worst Network Horror or Funniest story and Win!

We want to hear the funniest or the worst horror network story you’ve ever experienced!

We have all had some great funny or horrifying experiences as we have worked in the network industry. Please share them as these are learning experiences – funny things like using a 1000 foot cable to hook up an analyzer. People breaking fiber cables…etc the potential is endless – sometimes scary other times so very funny, you hurt yourself laughing.

 

  OR

 
We look forward to your stories!

 The winner will receive a $30 iTunes gift card and 15 minutes of fame on the Network Instruments EYE newsletter.

If the story is super - your experience will be also be posted on Lovemytool.com

Stories only need to be a few paragraphs and will be posted with your name, with your permission. Send your story to Steve Brown - sbrown@netinst.com .

Getting Your Head Around the Cloud (by Stephen Brown)

Author Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Stephen Brown is the Product Marketing Manager for network analysis vendor Network Instruments with nearly a decade of experience in network management and security. Areas of interest include data loss prevention, network compliance, and VoIP management. Stephen is a member of InfraGard and graduated with a degree in Marketing from the University of Iowa.

Open any popular IT publication and you’re bound to see countless articles on how cloud computing is going to change everything from application management to climate change. With all these claims, it can be hard to understand what cloud computing really is and how it will impact network management.

In this article, we’ll cut through the hype and provide practical advice for monitoring the cloud.

What’s Old is New
The first thing to understand is that we’ve been here before. Terms like “private clouds” refer to existing practices of running applications over the Internet and across WAN connections. Going back even further, you might recall when time-sharing was the prominent model of computing. By allowing a large number of users to interact concurrently with a single computer, time-sharing dramatically lowered the cost of providing computing capability, and made it possible for individuals and organizations to use a computer without owning one.

The Internet has brought the concept of time-sharing back into popularity. Expensive corporate server farms and private data centers can host thousands of customers all sharing the same common resources. “New” business models, such as Software as a Service have become popular due to the cost/benefit ratio they provide customers.

UK South Yourkshire Police - VoIP Issues and Solution (by Steve Brown)

Author Profile - Steve Brown of  Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.   

Stephen Brown is the Product Marketing Manager for network analysis vendor Network Instruments with nearly a decade of experience in network management and security. Areas of interest include data loss prevention, network compliance, and VoIP management. Stephen is a member of InfraGard and graduated with a degree in Marketing from the University of Iowa.

The South Yorkshire Police VoIP Issues and Solutions! 

The South Yorkshire Police were an early adopter of proven technologies including Voice over IP, video conferencing and http-based systems specific to police practices. These applications run over a complex network infrastructure linked to two data centers.

 As a result, the department, one of the best technically supported forces in England, has saved thousands of dollars in phone bills and site-to-site transport, and has enabled manpower resources to be focused almost entirely on the needs of the force and the public it serves.

Solution

Technology is not failsafe, especially as applications become more sophisticated and the need for jitter-free IP-based communications increases. To ensure the South Yorkshire Police network and its applications are available 24 hours-a-day, the IT team has deployed a highly effective, yet relatively low-cost, network and application monitoring platform.

This comprises of Network Instruments' Observer Suite, a long-term capture appliance GigaStor, and multiple probes.

Top Network Trends in 2010 (by Stephen Brown)

Author Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Stephen Brown is the Product Marketing Manager for network analysis vendor Network Instruments with nearly a decade of experience in network management and security. Areas of interest include data loss prevention, network compliance, and VoIP management. Stephen is a member of InfraGard and graduated with a degree in Marketing from the University of Iowa.

A few weeks after the holidays seemed like a good time to look forward to a new year in network management. Gazing into my crystal ball, here are the trends that we see on the rise or meeting their demise in 2010. Rather the discussing obvious trends of increased server virtualization and cloud-based technologies, I tried to go out on a bit of a limb. It'd be great to hear what you think of my predictions – right on the mark or have I been drinking too much eggnog.

Preparing for WAN Acceleration (by Stephen Brown)

Vendor Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Stephen Brown is the Product Marketing Manager for network analysis vendor Network Instruments with nearly a decade of experience in network management and security. Areas of interest include data loss prevention, network compliance, and VoIP management. Stephen is a member of InfraGard and graduated with a degree in Marketing from the University of Iowa.

What is WAN acceleration?

Over the past few years, we have seen server consolidation occurring for many reasons ranging from security to virtualization and simple cost-cutting efforts. In addition to consolidation at the core, users are more distributed accessing the network from a variety of locations including remote and home offices and smart phones.

Having an increased number of remote users accessing applications on fewer servers can introduce significant bandwidth and latency issues. Applications are typically designed to operate in LAN environments, and may not function well when accessed via WAN. In this article, we'll look at using WAN acceleration technologies to address latency issues, types of WAN accelerators, and key issues when deploying WAN accelerators.

Monitoring and Managing VoIP (by Charles Thompson)

Vendor Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Charles Thompson is the Manager of Sales Engineering for Network Instruments.

Overview

As with most new technologies, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) brings new challenges along with the benefits. The main challenge is VoIP’s extreme sensitivity to delay and packet loss compared with other network applications such as web and e-mail services. A basic understanding of VoIP traffic and of the quality metrics provided by VoIP monitoring tools will help you keep your VoIP network running smoothly.