When it comes to boosting application performance, it's about a lot more than just the bandwidth.
Ensuring you get pizza with sync tools
07/06/09
Here's the answer to missing files compromising your plans for pizza, beer and TV.
The 10 dumbest mistakes network managers make
07/05/09
When you look at the worst corporate security breaches, it's clear that network managers keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and that many of these mistakes are easy to avoid.
Psystar bails on bankruptcy, promises to 'battle Goliath'
07/05/09
The Mac clone maker embroiled in a legal dispute with Apple asked a federal judge last week to dismiss its bankruptcy case, saying that it had been unable to reach a payment agreement with its law firm.
"Our network is scattered across the country with 82 field offices and 10 regional locations. Our field offices don't have local servers, and they had pretty slow lines," says Chris Finucane, CTO for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General in Washington, D.C. "We optimized the network and upgraded all our links to T-1 lines, and the field offices didn't notice a huge difference. That's when we realized bandwidth can't be everything and we needed to investigate other means to improve application performance."
Finucane's challenge is not unique, according to industry watchers who say today's increasingly complex applications simply aren't designed to run smoothly across large distributed networks that support branch, remote and mobile workers. That has network executives scrambling to invest in new technologies - such as application acceleration and WAN optimization tools - and others working with system administrators and application developers to tweak internal servers and fine-tune application code. We spoke with a handful of network professionals and industry analysts to get their advice on how to boost application performance across a network.
1. Emulate WAN conditions.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. That's the premise behind products that simulate network - specifically WAN - conditions to help network managers (and application developers) get a handle on how an application will behave on a given network under certain conditions.
|
Does Verizon's Voyager stack up to the iPhone? |
5 IT skills that won't boost your salary 
[1,407]
Women 4 times more likely than men to cough up personal info [589]
Japan's 10 funniest tech-related commercials [Videos] [407]
Throwing away a promo CD is "unauthorized distribution"? [1,265]
Adults too quick to dismiss educational video games [682]
Attack of the iPhone clones [Slideshow] [578]
10 things IT needs to know about AJAX [1,258]
This Year's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries [Slideshow] [409]
NetScout and analyst Jim Metzler have teamed to deliver a series of IT Briefs on Network and Application Performance Management leveraging research from NetScout's nGenius & Sniffer users.
Delivering IT business value by evolving our thinking from managing application performance to focusing on services.
Successful IT organizations must know how to make the right application delivery decisions in these tough economic times.
Discusses the growing emphasis on network management and the need to implement a holistic view of the end-to-end experience of the user.
Network World on Twitter: Get our tweets and stay plugged in to networking news