One of the best aspects of Network World’s IT Roadmap conferences is that they feature presentations by end users who talk about some of the challenges they face and what they have done to meet those challenges. At the recent event in Dallas, Josh Hinkle of the American Heart Association discussed some of his experiences with improving application delivery. Josh’s presentation was interesting for a number of reasons, one of which was that Josh’s experiences with application delivery were very different from some of the experiences that we have been writing about recently.

For example, in a recent newsletter, we described the experiences of one of our readers who wrote in telling us about a situation when one of her company’s key applications was behaving badly. Her organization used tools such as NetQoS’s SuperAgent and Reporter Analyzer which showed that nothing on the network was outside of its normal long-term baselines. Unfortunately, she still had a very difficult time convincing the other IT teams that the network was not at fault, even when SuperAgent clearly pointed to the application server tier as the source of the problem. As a result, it took a week to identify and eliminate the application server tier problems that had caused the application degradation.

Josh described how his organization was challenged to better leverage their existing infrastructure to support the American Heart Association’s current and future business initiatives. As a result, they initiated a project the goals of which included increasing the end user’s experience when they access business applications, implementing capacity planning that was both more accurate and more timely, and becoming more collaborative with troubleshooting.

Josh pointed out that they wanted to get to the point where people did not always assume that the network was the source of every application degradation issue. With this in mind, they set out to implement better alerting and reporting and to improve relationships with partnering technology departments. They also set out to lower the mean time to repair (MTTR) a trouble by quickly identifying problems. This later topic is one that we have written about extensively (see here and here).

One of the interesting aspects of Josh’s situation is that he implemented some of the same tools from NetQoS as did the other reader. Josh, however, described an environment that is much more cooperative than the reception described by our other reader. In the next WAN newsletter we will explore what made Josh’s environment so cooperative.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.