* Application management and application acceleration
IT managers’ nightmares are all about maintaining consistent application performance and IT service delivery, as well as WAN performance. Application management technologies try to lessen the worries for IT managers monitoring LANs, and application acceleration products try to make the performance of WAN applications just as though users were on a LAN.
Application management includes the many technologies available to help IT managers ensure peak performance of critical business applications and deliver services to end users. Application acceleration includes another set of capabilities that take application traffic and better package it to traverse across corporate WANs.
The two areas in many IT shops remain mutually exclusive, with systems administrators making sure their servers work well with applications by testing and tuning configurations, and WAN managers measuring bandwidth consumption and shrinking the load across wide area links. The technologies are different, but they also work toward the same goal: happy end users.
The first step toward lessening application management headaches on a LAN, according to Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president at Forrester Research, is to test, test some more and then test again – test applications, that is, in a quality-assurance network prior to rolling them out live on the production network. In today’s fast-paced IT shops, testing may fall by the wayside, but it’s critical, Garbani says, that testing take priority to ensure application performance in the long term.
“Testing is often considered too expensive an investment: All of the budget goes to buying development tools and production platforms. More, when projects are late – and they always are – testing is shortened to a bare minimum,” he writes in the Forrester report, “Performance Management and the Application Life Cycle.”
Fellow Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel suggests in a separate report that IT shops should develop an IT service catalog for their users and then implement service-level management (SLM) or business service management (BSM) tools. SLM and BSM are extensions of many management vendors’ application management products that also bring business-specific metrics into play, such as revenue-generating applications perhaps prioritized as more critical to the business.
To get on top of WAN concerns, Mendel suggests IT shops implement WAN bandwidth management tools as well as WAN traffic compression tools. He says vendors such as Packeteer, Peribit and Network Physics could address bandwidth concerns, depending on the customer network – and Riverbed Technology, among others, can help compress traffic and speed it to remote and branch offices.
“Forward-looking companies are already addressing the most important challenges with a mix of ITIL process implementations for service delivery and new tools like service catalogs, SLM/BSM, auto-discovery technologies, network configuration management, WAN traffic compression and bandwidth management,” Mendel writes in the Forrester report, “Top Five Challenges for Enterprise IT Infrastructure Managers – And How to Resolve Them.”
So, to get an application to perform on the LAN, first test, then catalog its services and monitor and measure how it stacks up. When it hits the Web tier, the application will be analyzed for patterns, compressed, and cached into a WAN-digestible package that ensures remote users can be as happy as local ones. The two disciplines remain separate, but a well-tested and fine-tuned app on the LAN will most likely perform better over the WAN when configured for optimization.
