* Shunra tools help developers match applications to WAN
While the term “application lifecycle management” is not new, it’s usually associated with large vendors that have a portfolio of separate products sold to separate IT constituencies. And while it would be, in all fairness, a stretch to claim that a little company called Shunra Software is providing application lifecycle management with only two products, Shunra has tackled a very significant problem from a lifecycle perspective: distributed application performance over WANs.
Moreover, Shunra has brought a simplicity of deployment to this challenge that in some organizations is causing, say, network operations teams to actually create “road shows” proselytizing the advantages of Shunra’s products to application developers, testers and quality assurance groups. Of course, they’re not doing this out of a sense of civic duty; they’re doing it because they’re tired of paying a price for failed expectations in service levels and expensive adjustments to bandwidth-hungry applications that really never were designed to work on their networks in the first place.
Shunra’s product suite includes Virtual Enterprise, aimed at operations pre-deployment with some support for post-deployment, QA and testing; and Virtual Network Desktop Edition, aimed at application developers. The suite enables what Shunra calls “the WAN on your LAN” and takes a unique approach to packet analytics to capture real parameters reflecting jitter, latency and bandwidth throttling where packets can be delayed, dropped, fragmented, duplicated and congested. It does this between targeted end-user desktops in remote, distributed locations and targeted application servers. Shunra’s approach is to replicate this dynamic to enable evaluation under various scenarios, such as best-case or worst-case parameters in a WAN-emulation appliance. It can also provide ongoing monitoring of WAN behavior to see how applications will continue to perform, to verify if fixes are actually effective, and to gain insight when network changes may affect current application designs.
This is an agentless approach in which decisions can be made to, for instance, modify the WAN to accommodate application performance, to “right-size” the wide area if it is over-provisioned, to perform “what-if” scenarios to more proactively evaluate application performance, or to seek opportunities for cost savings. Needless to say, these values – particularly the “what-if” capabilities – can provide clear benefits for QA and testing.
Desktop Edition is designed specifically for the application developer, to recreate WAN conditions at the developer’s desktop. In some deployments, Desktop Edition is used to share common test scenarios with app developers, testers, QA and operations staging.
Many of Shunra’s IT customers are motivated to buy Virtual Enterprise when ineffective application deployments approach becoming disasters. And project-driven requirements – such as data-center consolidations or application rollouts – are also natural, if momentary, incentives. More sophisticated customers see more ongoing value in using Shunra to ensure that service commitments with customers are viable and that expectations are appropriate.
It is worth mentioning that a growing number of network equipment manufacturers and enterprise application vendors also use Shunra products for testing out the performance of their devices or applications before they go on the market.
Shunra – the word is Aramaic for “wildcat” – is an Israeli company that has been on a steady growth path since it was founded in 1997 but is still relatively small. Its products are evolving in their visualization and reporting capabilities and overall functionality, but Shunra’s Virtual Enterprise is well beyond early-adopter-stage tools. Enterprise Management Associates has seen fast and successful deployments, with price ranges from $10,000 to $250,000 for desktop through enterprise.
