Business Needs vs. Network Performance- Critical Challenges Facing Network Managers

							?By Amichai Lesser

Networking is getting tougher. Networks must deliver a growing range of services,
from ERP, CRM and email to VoIP and web services applications, each of which has
its own idiosyncrasies and requirements. Each new service introduced onto the
network contends for available resources with every other service, impacting the
network's ability to support the business.

Meanwhile, the network itself is constantly changing. New locations are added some
of which may be in another country or on another continent. Equipment is upgraded
and/or re-configured. New management and/or security tools may themselves impact
service performance. Decisions about data center consolidation and business
re-organization also affect the network in different ways. All of this makes the
network a highly dynamic environment where even subtle changes can have a major,
unforeseen impact on application performance and availability.

Yet business users expect this complex environment to be as reliable as electricity
despite the fact that networking budgets are not being increased in proportion to these
growing challenges. So network managers can't simply over-provision network
infrastructure to make sure every service has all the bandwidth it needs. Moreover,
over provisioning may not even solve the problem and/or ensure the required level of
performance.

That's why network managers are facing many challenges, including:

1) Pinpointing potential network performance issues early in the development
lifecycle

Ideally, the impact of the network on a new application or service should be dealt with
from the very beginning of the development process when potential problems are
much easier and less expensive to fix. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Problems
with an application's "networkability" are typically discovered only after its roll-out
into the production environment is initiated. At that point, it's usually too late to make
any significant changes in the application's design. So the problem gets pushed onto
the shoulders of the networking team. That's why, in '05, smart network managers will
focus on nipping these problems in the bud.

2) Validating new or modified applications and infrastructure before they are
deployed in production

As the network becomes more complex and more critical to the day-to-day-operation
of the business, network performance related risks associated with application and
infrastructure change are continuing to rise. In fact, some of the worst business
interruptions that companies have historically experienced have not been the result of
unexpected equipment failure. They've been the unexpected consequence of a planned
modification. Networking teams must therefore implement change management best
practices in '05 that prevent them from having to put out fires that they accidentally
started themselves.

3) Improved troubleshooting of intermittent/transient network problems

One of the most frustrating things for a network manager is dealing with a problem
that keeps disappearing before it can be adequately understood and remedied.
However, as the business's tolerance for network interruptions continues to drop, these
intermittent problems will become a bigger management issue. So this year, network
management teams need to develop more effective methods for capturing transient
network conditions and discovering the root causes of these problems.

4) Accelerated time-to-benefit for new and/or upgraded applications

When C-level executives decide to make investments in new applications and services,
they want to see those investments pay off quickly. That's why the slow, staged
production roll-outs of the past won't cut it anymore. Instead, networking teams need
to be able to quickly deploy new applications across the enterprise. This can only
happen if caution and uncertainty about the actual behavior of these applications in
the production environment is replaced by confidence and certainty in '05.

5) More intelligent planning for and support of business growth

Network managers constantly have to cope with change. They have to determine how
increases in network utilization will affect application performance. They have to
decide how to best engineer the network to support business expansion,
re-organization or mergers and acquisitions. However, they can only do so if they
have an effective means of performing capacity planning tasks and assessing a full
range of "what-if" scenarios. Such scenarios are also critical for formulating realistic
contingency plans that can ensure business continuity under a variety of possible
conditions.

Looking at these challenges, it quickly becomes evident that conventional production
network management tools alone are no longer sufficient for today's networking
teams. These tools are great for monitoring the production network and discovering
certain types of problems but they don't enable network managers to validate new
technologies and applications before they're deployed on the production network.
They also force network managers to solve problems that should have been addressed
in application design.

Conventional tools aren't very helpful for troubleshooting intermittent and/or transient
network problems either, since they don't provide a means of reconstructing and
analyzing such intermittent conditions. Nor do they help accelerate production
roll-outs, facilitate experimentation with "what-if" scenarios, or support formulation
of network contingency plans.

So what's an overworked, under-resourced network manager to do? The answer is to
look at network modeling technologies. These technologies provide an environment
in which new applications, technologies and problem-solving strategies can be safely
and thoroughly evaluated. Because they allow an application's network behavior to be
fully validated before it's deployed in the production environment, these technologies
also empower network managers to perform more rapid, glitch-free roll-outs. Plus,
modeling technologies are uniquely able to provide insight into any number of
"what-if" scenarios so network managers can make plans for growth, corporate
re-structuring and/or disaster recovery.

"Empirical" modeling solutions offer today's network management teams particularly
excellent business value, because of their accuracy and relative ease of
implementation. This accuracy and ease is achieved by running the actual applications
against a model that uses captured conditions from the production environment. The
result is a clear understanding of the user experience well ahead of deployment.

To learn more, visit . Shunra empowers enterprise organizations and technology
vendors to eliminate the risks associated with rolling out complex, distributed,
applications and services. The Shunra Virtual Enterprise (Shunra VE) solution
provides accurate, highly granular insight into how networked applications will
function, perform and scale for remote end-users. It creates an exact replica of the
production network environment, allowing users to safely develop, test and
experiment with applications and infrastructure in a lab environment before
deployment in production.