Network management

How do you manage network problem users?

When I first joined SearchNetworking.com I ran a survey asking you what the No. 1 security threat was in your industry. Your responses impressed me; even to this day I get haunted by the survey results: Across every vertical, a wild majority of networking professionals considered their own users to be their No. 1 network security threat.

Although these were findings from three years ago, the one thing that hasn’t changed on the network is that people are still on it. No matter how technology changes, your users will be there. They necessitate a network, yet break the security of it. Why? There are all sorts of reasons, some of which you can resolve.

How you ask? Our network user management guide explains. In it we highlight several problem user scenarios, from the make-it-so CEO to the Internet novice who doesn’t know the difference between the Internet and their website (yes, that was a The Website is Down reference). In these user profiles we determine their network threat level and how to mitigate their bad network behavior. But nothing could cover every user scenario. If you have a way of dealing with the 8th layer of the OSI model — people — let us know!

Hey network engineers, you’re not doing enough! Try facilities management too

It is ironic that right as Gartner released research showing engineers are managing 20% to 30% more network components than they were last year, networking pros are about to receive even more on their plates by way of facilities management … of all things.

This week the IP for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance announced a certification and compliance program to ensure vendors release IP-based smart objects that interoperate. You may be thinking, what the h&%ll do I care about smart objects? What is a smart object?

Believe me, you should care. Smart objects are sensors and actuators that run in a range of applications from smart grid management to building automation. The IPSO alliance is hoping to accelerate the use of IP in these devices. That means that enterprise lighting systems, for example, can be networked into the LAN. Among the many use scenarios, facilities management systems will communicate to network managers when a system is wasting power without actual use. It is feasible that these systems could save enterprises as much money as greening data centers.

On a larger scale, IP-based energy and building management means that utilities will implement smart meters in enterprises and homes that will warn home base of outages and waste. These smart meters will be part of larger IP networks laid over utility grids. In addition to enterprise and consumer savings, regional governments will spend less, enabling them to direct money to other crucial projects.

Cisco has already moved in on the action with its EnergyWise software initiative. EnergyWise is embedded into Catalyst switches and used to control not only power within the network, but also on PCs and building control systems. So it’s no surprise that Cisco is a member of the IPSO Alliance, along with Ericsson, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Google.

All of this innovation may be exciting, but for network engineers it means the need to gain more skills (possibly even certifications), more responsibility and assuming an even greater role in every enterprise. As this happens, they will have to demand the manpower and support necessary to expand in this new direction.

Interop: NetScout demos location-based wireless LAN troubleshooting

At Interop, NetScout announced the integration of its Sniffer Global network analyzer product with Cisco’s Mobility Services Engine. This integration gives network managers the ability to do location-based troubleshooting of wireless LAN networks. A user can find the location of a client device that is experiencing performance issues, determine what access point that device is using and discover all other proximal network activity that could be affecting performance.

In this video, Netscout’s director of systems engineering Eric Gray demonstrates the integration.

SolarWinds will go public this month, says WSJ

In March I noted that network management software vendor SolarWinds had filed an updated S-1 form with the SEC, a bureaucratic step towards making an initial public offering (IPO).

Today the Wall Street Journal reports that SolarWinds has set the terms of its IPO today. It will ask for a share price of $9.50 to $11.50 and it will make 12.1 million shares available to the market. SolarWinds hasn’t announced the date that it will go on the market, but the Journal article noted that companies usually time their IPOs to occur about two weeks after they set their terms.

IDC has identified SolarWinds as having the eighth highest revenue share in the network management market, just behind such industry heavies as IBM, CA, HP and EMC.

SolarWinds getting ready to go public, someday

I’ve always thought that SolarWinds was a great target for acquisition.  When I ask network administrators what they use to manage and monitor their infrastructure, one of the most common responses I get is SolarWinds’ flagship product, Orion.  There are plenty of good products on the market, but SolarWinds definitely comes up in conversations more than anyone else.

I think part of SolarWinds’ popularity can be traced to its distribution model. Rank and file IT pros can download affordable products directly from the company’s website. Many of the network managers I talk to also say Orion is just easy to use and it does what they need it to do.

While I’ve been waiting for a network equipment vendor to come along an snap up the company, SolarWinds has been making some moves of its own. It recently filed an S-1 form with the SEC, an early step towards an initial public offering (IPO) .

According to its filing, SolarWinds has experienced strong growth over the last few years - revenue of $38.2 million in 2006, $61.7 million in 2007 and $93.1 million in 2008. The company has more than 80,000 customers, including 400 of the Fortune 500 companies.

This isn’t exactly the best time to go pubilc, but based on the financials it provided to the SEC, the company is performing well. It will be interesting to see how the market treats the IPO.

UPDATE: Got an email from SolarWinds PR folks. This S-1 filing is an update of a filing the company made with the SEC last year. So I jumped that gun in saying the company is moving towards an IPO. Looks like it’s simply keeping things in place for an IPO for if and when I decides to move forward… which would probably be when this bear market ends. That could be a long time from now.

Google can hear you now

A college professor once warned me never to put things in writing — which was funny given that he was a writing professor. What he meant was that to ensure confidentiality between people I communicated with remotely, I should speak with them over the phone. That way, he said, it would be much harder for a person to publicize or look back on anything said. Arguably, phone call privacy isn’t guaranteed, but between a hand-written note, an email, an IM conversation or a phone call, the audible record was the most anonymous. Google’s recent acquisition of GrandCentral Communications, however, makes phone call privacy much less likely.

As consumer-centric as Google initially set out to be, they just keep either building new useful enterprise applications or acquiring companies that do. This acquisition is a prime example; GrandCentral Communications “provides services for managing your voice communications,” according to Google’s blog entry.

GrandCentral’s pitch is this: “No matter how often you move, change jobs or phone providers, everyone can still reach you through the same phone number.” And the business advantage can be seen in that this technology would give enterprise workers more flexibility: If you miss a meeting or a call, you can listen to it through someone’s forwarded email. When you discuss ideas with your boss you’ll never have to take notes again or run the risk of forgetting an assignment.

But this advantage also comes at the price of having to pay much more attention to the words coming out of your mouth. Editing what you say can only happen inside your head. Once it’s out, it’s there to be heard — and recorded, and posted to a blog and turned into a techno song by Indaba Music users.

Yes, with GrandCentral.com a conversation can go from phone to public forum within clicks. They keep your phone call records in their database and you can forward them to your colleagues, post them to a blog and more. So unless you’re talking to someone in person, any mode of communication through a device may as well be a record of your intercourse.

Let’s not get forget the impact this has on server space and network bandwidth. As the network remains the central core that enables connections and communications, the converged network which carries voice and video traffic across IP networks, is all the more demanding. Some months ago, Cisco’s push for network convergence was said to broaden the role of network pros. But with corporate kings like Google vying for more enterprise voice and video, this is only the beginning of what networking professionals will have to deal with.

Now that workers can easily manage their voice accounts, you may be wondering who is helping network pros manage the voice data on their network. SearchNetworking.com created a workshop on how to manage voice performance on your network, dedicated to this very cause. And if there are any other management tools you’re looking for, let us help you find them and get organized.

On a side note about getting organized, GrandCentral’s FAQ section says “Google acquired GrandCentral because its communications services fit into Google’s mission to organize the world’s information.” That was “to organize the world’s information.” At least you don’t have that responsibility.

And for Google, who does have that mission, thank you for helping me find, through your search engine, these articles on ways you frighten the general public:

• From ABC News: Is Google Turning Into Big Brother?
• From Bill Snyder’s “Tech’s Bottom Line” blog: Google plays Big Brother
• From CSMonitor.com: Big brother isn’t watching - Google is

And believe it or not, there’s an entire website devoted to the topic: Google as Big Brother.

Thanks for reading, watching, and hearing…

Aruba courts Nortel customers with multivendor WLAN management suite

Aruba Networks has joined the growing ring of vultures circling above Nortel Networks’ Toronto headquarters, where executives are busily trying to restructure Nortel while under the cover of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Aruba announced an “investment protection” program for customers of Nortel wireless LAN (WLAN) technology. The vendor is offering Nortel customers a discount on Aruba’s AirWave Wireless Management Suite, a WLAN management technology that can work in multi-vendor environments.

Nervous Nortel customers, who are worried that Nortel might not be around a year or two from now to support their wireless infrastructure, might find this offer from Aruba appealing. It gives them a a way of managing legacy Nortel infrastructure.

And Aruba no doubt sees this as a potential foot in the door with Nortel customers who will likely give new WLAN vendors a good luck when it comes time to refresh or expand their infrastructure. Today, Aruba can sell them AirWave. Next year, Aruba will have a better chance of selling them access points. Now if only Aruba had a wired networking division as well, they could attack Nortel on multiple fronts.

How network engineers can avoid the data center move blues

Just because we’re surrounded by bad news doesn’t mean we can’t turn our lemons into lemonade. That’s at least what network management software solution company Advanced Systems Group (ASG) has done (not to be confused with the ASG band). They found a way to help enterprise IT/network administrator’s avoid datacenter move blunders in a way more compelling than a white paper — they sang about it in their YouTube video: The Data Center Move Blues.

Because we all know, when a data center moves, the network can’t go down. “Oh you know it can’t go down,” wails ASG founder and band front man John Murphy on what appears to be a Martin Backpacker Guitar.

When relocation, deduplication and virtualization complicate the network enough to make IT engineers sing the blues, it’s good to know what not to do during the data center move process.

ASG suggests avoiding these bad boys:

• Bad move #1: The so-called professional help
• Bad move #2: The every-man-for-himself move
• Bad move #3: The do-it-yourself move

More importantly, don’t forget to plan a great deal with your data center team and reach across to the right people. Before making a move, you can’t afford not to plan for every risk, and disaster preparedness will help you stay up while everything else is down.

Forget cutting to the bone. Can you cut through the bone, too?

Hey, have you heard that the economy is in bad shape? It’s bad out there. Just ask the newest Nobel Laureate for economics, Paul Krugman:

Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.

Well you should know that analysts and vendors are lining up to give networking pros advice on how to save money in 2009.

Today I received an invitation from Enterprise Management Associates for a January webinar entitled How to Reduce Network Management Expenses in 2009. EMA vice president Dennis Drogseth will examine how automation and an integrated life cycle approach to network management can reduce costs.

Network Instruments sent us a list of the “Top five ways you can be network hero in 2009.

• Harness the information you have. Network devices have tons of metrics that can provide cheap visibility into your infrastructure. For instance, if you aren’t doing this already, start collecting NetFlow data and aggregate it into some kind of analyzer to get real time stats on you applications.

• Test, test, test. It’s easier to identify and budget for changes to applications before you launch them rather than after. Understand how your apps will run on the systems provided and the network provided before you allow the application team to launch them.

• Prioritizing critical traffic. Instead of spending money to boost bandwidth, set quality of service thresholds for critical apps and allow bandwidth-hogging apps that aren’t as critical wait a little longer.

• Stop throwing bandwidth. Slow application performance isn’t always a network issue. Bring some donuts over to the systems guys and ask them to check on how their servers are performing. Maybe they aren’t configured properly for the applications they are running.

• Anticipate rather than react. Network managers are often in reaction mode, using analysis tools after the network has a problem. Too often they’re waiting for the problem to recur. If you run your tools continuously you can spot network issues before the user experiences them. You’ll spend less time trying to diagnose and fix them. And you’ll have more time to get everything else done.

Info-Tech Research Group has also published a list of Eight Ways to Slash Network and Telecom Costs by Half. I won’t publish them in full since Info-Tech would rather that you spend $195 to get the list from them, but here are a few brief examples of things you can do:

• Buy used networking gear. This market has grown quite a bit over the last few years. Your vendors might not be happy with you for doing this, but they don’t need to know. I plan to write about this next month on SearchNetworking.com.
• Renegotiate telecom and mobile service contracts. If you are in a position to do it, now is a good time to get a better deal from your providers. They’ll be wiling to lower their charges in order to keep your business in these dark times.
• Get rid of T1 lines on your WAN. There are lots of cheaper alternatives out there. See if you can find something that meets your requirements at a lower price.

Five things network administrators do to mess up their enterprises’ virtualization

Network monitoring authority Paessler PRTG has seen the good, bad and ugly of network designs that prevent monitoring a system, which is why their product line solutions cover everything from network management to server performance.

To get an idea of what they’ve seen, PR rep Michael Krems got the company talking about the top five most common mistakes network administrators and IT systems managers make that cause their virtualization deployment to fail.

Here’s what Paessler says will mess up your enterprise’s virtualization:

1. Virtualizing systems without knowing their usual CPU/memory load, disk usage and network usage: You must monitor a system prior to virtualization in order to know how much load it will put on your VM host servers. System with high load may also be not suitable for virtualization at all.
2. Running too many VMs on a host: causing overloads: All virtualized systems suffer in performance.
3. Running too few VMs on a host: spending too much money buying too many host server[s]
4. Compare mid/long-term monitoring results before and after virtualization to ensure quality of service doesn’t suffer.
5. The performance of all virtual systems on a host usually suffers from one virtual system going amok or running into a performance/load peak. Without monitoring, such events often happen undiscovered.

It seems like applying common sense would fix a lot of the issues surrounding virtualization. I wouldn’t place a lot of blame on the network manager though. Much of what goes wrong with a virtual deployment just has to do with the capabilities of the technology. Take these issues for instance:

• Server virtualization impacts network latency.
• Server virtualization creates a network configuration burden.
• Virtual machines present dynamic environment issues for network pros.

As with any new technology, most of the struggle too, is not having the right information. In the end, do you feel like enough conversation surrounds the impact virtualization has on your network?