It has been clear for quite some time that the network has become the lifeblood of nearly all enterprises. This is not just true for obvious network-centric enterprises such as retail sites or content distributors, but also for enterprises that utilize distributed applications such as SAP, Oracle, or any number of other network-centric applications.
Over the past few years, a number of new enterprise technologies have emerged that are critically reliant on network performance, but where this reliance is not necessarily obvious. These technologies include enterprise-class Voice over IP (VOIP) telephony solutions, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions, and enterprise collaboration tools.
While the vulnerability of "classical" distributed applications to network performance issues are well-understood, it is quite a different matter for a VDI session to momentarily "freeze", or for the CEO's VOIP call to get disrupted due to network issues. In short, these issues are far more visible than those associated with classical distributed applications, and as technologies such as software-defined networks (SDN) and hybrid private-public enterprise clouds become more prevalent, these issues are likely to become more rather than less pronounced.
So what do IT departments need to ensure that they can provide the levels of performance from these new technologies that users expect?
The most obvious answer is that they need to know what is really going on in their networks. While this sounds trite, it is far more difficult than one might expect. Causative factors such as microbursts, timeouts, and protocol errors can be difficult to detect with conventional application performance tools, and tying these causative events to the specific "new technology" outages can be even harder.
Given that many of these causative factors can be intermittent in nature certainly doesn't help. This is one of the primary reasons that many enterprises have introduced dedicated "network visibility fabrics" that provide instrumentation at key points in the network, exposing the full set of network packets and flow data that underlie these causative issues. While network visibility fabrics do not prevent these issues from occurring, they do speed the ability to resolve issues, which helps to avoid "outages" of network-centric technologies such as VDI, VoIP, network collaboration tools, and SDN frameworks.
As with most human endeavors, one of the best practices for making good decisions is to have the right data. Even the best decision-making processes can lead to wrong decisions by not having the right data. As networks (and the applications that depend on them) become more complex and carry more types of data, it becomes imperative to have the right data to avoid making guesses as to what is causing network issues. Look to see more enterprises implementing network visibility fabrics as dense 10Gb Ethernet networks become more prevalent, and more enterprises start to deploy these new technologies.
Mike Heumann is Sr. Director, Marketing (Endace) for Emulex.
Related Links:
The Latest
In the heat of the holiday online shopping rush, retailers face persistent challenges such as increased web traffic or cyber threats that can lead to high-impact outages. With profit margins under high pressure, retailers are prioritizing strategic investments to help drive business value while improving the customer experience ...
In a fast-paced industry where customer service is a priority, the opportunity to use AI to personalize products and services, revolutionize delivery channels, and effectively manage peaks in demand such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are vast. By leveraging AI to streamline demand forecasting, optimize inventory, personalize customer interactions, and adjust pricing, retailers can have a better handle on these stress points, and deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...
New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...
Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...
SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...
Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...
AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...
If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...
