Applications /

New products add automated features

Future network design tools will address application-layer behavior and wireless devices.

By Barry Nance
Network World, 12/03/01

Wherever new network technologies and protocols go, network design tools will follow. If you need to build it, then network design tools need to model, simulate and document it. Less obvious is how vendors are positioning themselves in this changing market. To find out where the network design marketplace is headed, we asked the experts - the designers and managers of several network products reviewed in this issue - three key questions.

What's been happening?

Richard Zambuni, vice president of marketing and business development for Visionael, says the biggest change in network design/planning is the tremendous growth it has experienced in recent years. Zambuni says that as service providers and large companies rapidly increase the size of their network infrastructures, they've found they need comprehensive tools to accurately track and monitor network topology, configuration and physical attributes so they can plan for growth and manage complex networks in real time.

According to Zambuni, service creation and deployment have become dependent on accurate network inventory to reach what he terms the "Holy Grail" of flow-through provisioning. Zambuni says most service providers have realized that flow-through provisioning is impossible without the process being inventory-based.

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Jeff Erwin, general manager of Microsoft's Network Management Group, says the most important enhancement in network design/planning tools is the addition of in-depth autodiscovery, which lets a planner design changes to an existing network. There are a number of tools that have emerged in the past four years that try to do some level of automated design and design verification, but Erwin says the problem with them is that the hardware evolves faster than the tools, so they tend to be incomplete.

A considerable drop in the use of capacity planning departments for planning network infrastructure growth was noted by John Seal, EcoPredictor product manager for Compuware. With the pressures of meeting tighter deadlines to get an application to market, not to mention the IT activity caused by company acquisitions and mergers, Seal has noticed companies redeploying capacity planning engineers for software development and other functions.

As a result, Seal says, someone in network operations gets the budgeting and planning job handed to him when a manager says, "I need some figure for the budget planning meeting this morning. What resources do you need for the next two years?"

What will change

Compuware's Seal sees management of PDAs and wireless devices as a new frontier. For more traditional network components, he says network professionals will need to more accurately gauge how applications behave on their networks. But they'll want to get this information without having to perform the data entry necessary to maintain huge capacity planning models.

Automated reporting of capacity planning metrics becomes necessary in this case. "Network managers walking into their offices in the morning will not only want to quickly see the last day, week, and month's performance and bottlenecks, but they'll also want to know where the application problems are likely to occur in the near future," Seal says.

Further, network professionals know they'll need to control spending on the most volatile component of performance, the WAN. "They'll want just-in-time provisioning of WAN resources," he says.

Visionael's Zambuni says the trend toward consolidation in the network design and management market will continue unabated. He says inventory management for service providers will be increasingly subsumed into the service creation/provisioning world. Inventory will not only be the responsibility of engineering but also of the provisioning and operations teams. "Enterprises will need to introduce the best practices of successful service providers in order to run their networks effectively in-house," Zambuni says.

Stephen Post, founder and CEO of Analytical Engines, predicts network design and management will become more of a disciplined engineering process. Moreover, design tools will be integrated into routine network management and they'll become easier to use. "The guesswork and overbuilding of the past will no longer be competitive," Post says.

Microsoft's Erwin is more sanguine about changes in the network design marketplace. "You will see more specific tools for configuring a network to a specific purpose. For example, an IT organization planning to deploy Active Directory will have tools that autodiscover the network fabric and suggest a site topology, then populate the Active Directory. For someone planning or managing an Exchange environment, tools will be available to discover the router groups and suggest modifications."

The other big change Erwin foresees is ongoing automated "actual vs. planned" capacity planning analysis. A network executive could monitor the extent to which an application's operating environment varies over time from its planned environment. He surmises that the analysis tool may even suggest ways to adjust the operating environment to bring the application back into compliance with its operational goals.

What's missing?

Seal says network-planning metrics are still too focused on infrastructure, not on applications. As more businesses begin treating applications as revenue-generating assets, the tools that manage, predict and monitor those applications must provide more useful and accurate information.

Zambuni predicts that vendors will need to provide out-of-the-box integration with alarm and event managers, trouble ticketing products, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) interfaces, asset management applications and performance management tools. Extensive device libraries, easy customization, sophisticated discovery and multifaceted data import will be important, as will three-tier architectures for scalability and open APIs for easy inclusion in a companies' existing tool set. He also forecasts that design tools need to become even easier to use, with intuitive user interfaces that make creative use of Web browsers.

Post is of a similar mind. He envisions better integration with discovery and traffic-monitoring tools, advancements in training and ease of use and direct design tool support for management decisions.

Erwin says future network designs will require application-oriented design tools. One important feature that will be required is what is sometimes called �pivot diagrams' that allow for the layering of application requirements (such as Windows site topology) onto the physical Layer-2 and Layer-3 network structure. This will let the IT professional see the effect of physical changes and problems on the application environment," Erwin says. "Right now the IT group that manages the applications on the network is different than the group that manages the network itself, causing this type of analysis to be very difficult or impossible to create."

Network planning/design vendors are enhancing their products to support market-driven technologies such as voice over IP, streaming media and VPNs.

You can expect to see vendors integrating their software with third-party products to overcome the lack of specific functions and features in their software. You can plan on using design tools that are more responsive. In the future, via modeling and simulation, expect to see these tools to address application-level behavior, multitier transactions and wireless connections.

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