* Applications are top priority
The last thing an IT manager – or anyone on the help desk for that matter – would like to hear is that they have unhappy end users. And because the majority of corporate end users probably don’t know a router from a server, they aren’t complaining about infrastructure. They just want their applications to work better.
A recent Forrester Research survey of about 70 IT infrastructure managers at large enterprise companies shows that applications dominate network managers’ top five nightmares. According to Forrester, the issues ranked from first to last in the top five are:
1. “Consistent end-to-end application and service performance guarantees”
2. “Unplanned infrastructure changes resulting in incidents and downtime”
3. “Unanticipated infrastructure consequences of consolidation and new application projects”
4. “Misconfiguration of network objects”
5. “WAN performance”
Application management starts the list and application acceleration finishes it off. And if you read closely, application concerns show up in numbers two and three as well. The first three mentions of applications fall under the umbrella of application management technologies – an extremely large umbrella – that test new apps before rolling them out, measure end-user experience with the applications, monitor application response times across IT components or ensure that infrastructure changes don’t cause application performance issues. The last item, WAN performance, depends on application acceleration technologies such as load balancing, caching, compression and traffic management.
Vendors such as BMC, Computer Associates, Compuware, HP, IBM Tivoli, Keynote, Managed Objects, Mercury Interactive, NetIQ, TeaLeaf Technology, Veritas, Wily Technology and many more develop products and deliver services to test, deploy, monitor, measure and verify that applications are meeting pre-set service levels. But still IT manager must cobble together multiple tools to get a concrete idea of how applications perform across networks, systems, storage, databases and other IT resources.
Companies such as Exinda Networks, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, NetScaler, Packeteer, Peribit, Radware, Redline Networks, Riverbed Technology and others offer tools to speed application traffic over wide area links. With multiple technologies to address the WAN – server caching, SSL acceleration, route control, traffic compression and acceleration – these vendors now must deliver multi-functional products that provide many capabilities in one box. The WAN is the pain point for application management, some say, but according to Forrester it’s part of a bigger problem that challenges IT managers across their networks from back-end systems to Web front-ends.
The former address LAN application concerns; the latter, WAN issues, which are both critical to any company’s business. But how can IT managers better optimize their applications – or the products they purchase to help them – to work well in both environments? In the next newsletter, I will further explore this issue.
