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From Network Computing Vol 18 No 04- July/August 2009

… GOING BEYOND TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCT. THE NETWORK PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT MASTERCLASS SERIES -IN ASSOCIATION WITH NETSCOUT SYSTEMS LOOKS AT MAXIMISING THE VALUE OF YOUR EXISTING IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Opportunity: Optimise your existing infrastructure to maximise investment Challenge: Gaining the visibility you need to do more with what you have

Annual budgeting and planning is one of the most difficult activities in any business calendar, and that is no exception for the IT organisation. In fact, in tight economic times, understanding how much of a burden business services place on the network infrastructure, takes on an ever more important role in that planning process. Requests for new equipment, infrastructure upgrades, data centre build outs, or bandwidth increases are typically met with quick rejection. Without hard core facts, figures, metrics and evidence - in short compelling, business aligned proposals - gaining access to scarcebudget is next to impossible.

MORE THAN CAPACITY PLANNING

Companies depend on managers and executives in IT to evaluate the network's capability to handle the inevitable, business driven, ebbs and flows in traffic demands. Historically, numerous capacity planning techniques have been used to collect, evaluate, and report on general bandwidth consumption and overall traffic volume. The operative phrase being "report on", because often times, capacity planning and infrastructure management has been synonymous to reporting. However, over time, as the complexity of business services and applications has increased, infrastructure elements exploded, and high speed network transports became commonplace. The need to know exactly what was being transported across sprawling, global networks has moved from optional to essential. There is much more to optimising the service delivery infrastructure than capacity planning andreporting.

THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE OPTIMISATION OPPORTUNITY As IT organisations have been tasked with doing more with the IT infrastructure on the same budgets and staff as last year (if they are lucky!), some identifiable capabilities in unified service delivery management solutions, have become increasingly more valuable, such as:

• Ability to identify and track applications - to ensure only current business applications are active in the network. Removing retired and recreational applications provides headroom in previously saturated segments, thus avoiding costly bandwidth upgrade

• Real-time monitoring with alarms for response time degradations - to predict potential troubles, prevents end-user impact, and accelerates problem resolution. A U.S. insurance organisation indefinitely delayed purchasing new load balancers in front of their server farm when the response time and utilisation data highlighted an imbalance in how the existing load balancers were handling the traffic. Once the legacy load balancers were re-configured, performance to the end-users improved without the anticipatedadditional expenditure

• Support for the varied network topologies conecting end users worldwide - to gain an enterprise-wide analysis of utilisation, response times and end-user experience. A European manufacturer avoided increased expenses for bandwidth to remote offices, by discovering the root cause of slow response time experienced by employees in distant locations; it was due to a poorly written application, not bandwidth congestion. Third party application developers used the evidence to fix the application, resulting in dramatically improved response times and no change inexpenses.

• Historical trending and reporting - to construct accurate, evidence based IT capacity and infrastructure plans. A healthcare organisation created a thorough plan for a 10 Gigabit Ethernet upgrade when the application performance management analysis showed ways to reroute traffic for several months. The customisable historical reports helped to target an acceptable upgrade time, a low peak traffic period, otherwise difficult to pinpoint in a 24 X 7 lifesaving network environment.

The case is building fast to optimise complex, valuable and business aligned IT infrastructures. This can be achieved with a unified service delivery management solution, strategically deployed, with packet flow-based monitoring, and continuous capture appliances. When operating in combination with centralised, scalable, and resilient service delivery management analysis, it will form the keystone ofachieving this next network challenge.NC

In the next issue of Network Computing, NetScout will continue this Masterclass series with its in depth look at ServiceDelivery Management.

Network Computing and NetScout invite reader comments and questions relating to items discussed in this series. Mail:Ray.Smyth@BTC.co.uk

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