application performance

We Are Headed for an Internet “Tragedy of the Commons”

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:02:16 -0400

At the risk of sounding Chicken Little-like, we hypothesize that the Internet is heading toward a "tragedy of the commons". The tragedy of the commons plays out when a collective system is destroyed due to overuse. An example is the Boston Common that was set aside for communal livestock grazing during early colonial times. It wasn't long before overuse made it unusable for grazing. In the case of the Internet, consumer access networks are the commons—and they are oversubscribed. It's a fact of life that as we all use the Internet more, the oversubscription problem will progressively worsen.

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Stop Comparing the Internet to the Highway System

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:04:50 -0400

Although once apt, it is time to stop comparing the Internet to the interstate highway system. The reason is that when it comes to traffic congestion and performance for the average Joe consumer Internet user, today's Internet is actually the inverse of the highway system. Here's why. In the highway system most congestion occurs on major arteries, while local streets are usually free and clear—but on today's Internet the opposite is true.

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The "American Idol" of WAN Acceleration

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:51:55 -0400

Results of our WAN acceleration product feedback are in, and here is a quick summary of what we heard. For starters, if this were the application delivery system version of American Idol, Riverbed’s Steelhead would win.

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3 Free Web Measurement Tools Debut at Velocity Conference

Sevcik and Wetzel — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:53:08 -0400

At the first ever O'Reilly Velocity conference in San Francisco yesterday we witnessed the debut of three new tools to measure website performance - KITE, Jiffy and CloudStatus. Not only are these tools very cool and useful, they are also free!

All about making websites faster and better, the conference was packed with more than 600 performance jocks - premiere among them Google's Steve Souders, who as Yahoo's performance guru developed a bag of tricks to make Yahoo speedy. Souders created YSlow, a Firefox add-on that analyzes web page performance, and wrote the book "High Performance Web Sites". Along the way he convinced O'Reilly to create the Velocity conference which he co-chairs.

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Blazing apps=no bandwidth contention

Schratboy — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:29:30 -0400

The single biggest problem causing application performance are wild users. When a company fails to teach users about the intended uses of the network, users assume that it's there for their entertainment. Downloads. Streaming. Chatting. It's the same as if you put a sign out in front of your house "Free room and board--ALL WELCOME!" Before you'd know it the place would be swarming with people and it would be wrecked. Application performance is a function of sound network management. Unfortunately, today everyone equates good management with buying more and more automated gear.

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Cisco's vision for the virtual data center

Cisco Subnet — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:40:52 -0400

Cisco has a vision for the so-called virtual data-center and is executing with products that automatically provision, manage and optimize virtualized environments, reports a story from Network World's New Data Center special issue. Cisco has been ramping up technology geared toward pulling together server, storage and network capacity needed to meet an application's demand. The approach is, not surprisingly, network centric, as opposed to server centric, or even (oh my!) having the application shoulder the burden of its performance itself. Still, the underlying premise makes sense.

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Tell Us What You Think of Packeteer’s PacketShaper and iShaper

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:26:13 -0400

This week it is Packeteer’s customers’ turn to describe their experiences with the Packetshaper and iShaper distributed application delivery system (DADS) products. This is the last chance for the world to hear about your experiences with Packeteer-branded products, because Blue Coat is set to acquire Packeteer any day now. We know that there are a lot of Packeteer customers out there--more than 10,000 of you according to official sources--and we hope to hear from many of you.

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Tell Us What You Think of Juniper's WX

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:00:53 -0400

For the third installment in our "ADS Customers Speak" series we ask Juniper customers to share their experiences with Juniper's WX solution.

Juniper got into the distributed (a.k.a. dual-ended) ADS market by buying Peribit, the layer 3 compression and caching pioneer. Juniper integrated the Peribit product in 2005 and renamed it the Juniper WX. Juniper's WX application acceleration solution optimizes traffic flows by applying compression and caching techniques, quality of service (QoS) enforcement, bandwidth management, path optimization, and TCP acceleration, as well as acceleration of HTTP, Microsoft CIFS and Microsoft MAPI-based applications.

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Wane of the Application Front End as a Standalone Appliance

Sevcik and Wetzel — Thu, 22 May 2008 08:54:46 -0400

We are intrigued by a stealthy little British company called Zeus Technology that recently emerged on the US scene with a software application front end (centralized ADS). Developed by engineers in what those of us who live in Massachusetts call “the other Cambridge”, ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) runs on standard Intel machines and is easily slipped via VMware into an application’s path to speed it on its way.

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Tell Us What You Think of Cisco’s WAAS

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:28:11 -0400

A common theme emerged during several briefings with distributed (a.k.a. dual-ended) ADS vendors at spring Interop--let the voice of the customer be heard. Last Wednesday we posted our first "customer voice" blog, and today we ask Cisco WAAS customers to tell the community about their experiences with the technology.

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What’s the Difference between Centralized and Distributed Application Performance Solutions?

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:21:32 -0400

Folks often get confused about the difference between centralized (a.k.a., asymmetrical or single ended) and distributed (a.k.a., symmetrical or dual-ended) application performance solutions.

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Bringing Order to the Chaos of WAN Application Performance Solutions

Sevcik and Wetzel — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:31:07 -0400

With so many products claiming to help applications perform well over WANs, how do you know which solutions solve which problems? To bring order to the perplexing chaos of product offerings, we have created a taxonomy for Application Delivery Systems (ADSs). Over the course of the coming weeks in our blog we will fit each of the technologies into this taxonomy and give you a thumbnail sketch of what problem each technology solves and how it works.

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It Ain’t Over Yet in the WAN Optimization Market

Sevcik and Wetzel — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:51:54 -0400

Some would have us believe that the die is cast in the WAN optimization market - that the winners have been chosen, and there are no up and comers. After talking to as many vendors as we could fit into two days at Interop, we beg differ. There are some very interesting strategies and plans in the works that we predict will change the current market dynamics.

Several things are percolating to keep the market interesting - here is an early list:

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An Application Response Time Equation for Geeks

Sevcik and Wetzel — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:27:51 -0400

Last week we posted a simple equation to explain the basic factors influencing application response time. Because it is pared down to show only the most influential factors and not all the factors affecting performance, our simple equation uses an approximation sign. For those of you itching to dive into the bowels of application performance, today we present a much more detailed equation that uses the equal sign. If you really want to understand why your application response times are what they are, read on.

Here's the application response time equation for the number lovers among our readers.

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Strangeloop Uses NetForecast’s Response Time Equation to Explain ASP.NET Performance Issues

Sevcik and Wetzel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:14:14 -0400

Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad at Strangeloop Networks use the NetForecast response time equation to explain ASP.NET performance issues in an article entitled "Scaling Strategies for ASP.NET Applications" published on the Microsoft MSDN Magazine web site.

The article discusses user application performance satisfaction (response time) and the throughput needed to support many users (scale). They propose ways to measure each key equation element in an operational system and improve its value.

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An Equation to Explain Application Response Time

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:34:14 -0400

Ever wonder why it takes so long to get an application reply over the WAN? Why do applications that work well during test and acceptance become performance dogs when rolled out to the user population? What factors govern response time and what can be done to improve them? We developed a simple equation that explains the basics.

Poor application performance renders users unproductive-therefore, application performance measurement over a WAN must capture the user's experience. The most useful measure of the user's experience is task response time.

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Who Is CDNetworks?

Sevcik and Wetzel — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:33:14 -0400

Who is this up-and-coming CDN service provider expanding our way from Asia? Here’s what we’ve been able to glean about CDNetworks so far.

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Korean Dragon Crashes Akamai’s Party

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:58:53 -0400

As with many markets born in the US, we predict that the US content delivery network (CDN) market is poised to experience its comeuppance from Asia, as Korea-based CDNetworks enters the US market in earnest. CDNetworks’ Chief Strategy Officer Steve Chung told us in a recent conversation that after spending the last eight years building its business in Korea, China and Japan, CDNetworks is now intent on expanding its sales and delivery capabilities into the US and Europe, and hiring “a small elite force in the US who are industry veterans”. NetForecast has independent confirmation that CDNetworks has been busily hiring sales and technical staff away from US comp

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Where Do You Fit on the Performance Management Maturity Scale?

Sevcik and Wetzel — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:36:07 -0400

In our March 24 and 25 blogs we laid out an architecture covering both infrastructure and application performance management. Although it looks daunting, it really is not if you build the capabilities of incident, availability, capacity and service level management over time. Each capability constitutes a building block that relies on the others to create the structure, and each capability can be applied with varying levels of sophistication or "maturity".

You can't deliver any of the processes to their full extent or rigor from day one.

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Performance Optimization Services from Swisscom and Telindus

Sevcik and Wetzel — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:37:22 -0400

Improving application performance as a service is hot among European carriers. We already profiled offerings by Orange, BT and Vanco - and today we examine offerings from Swisscom and Belgacom's system integration arm Telindus.

Announced in January and now in play at 10 customers, Swisscom's Application Performance Management (APM) offering is a value-added service layered onto its LAN-Interconnect International IP VPN offering. Swisscom expected robust initial uptake among large customers, but a company spokesperson told us they were surprised to find small to medium sized enterprises strongly represented among the early takers.

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