Way back in 1995, Network World used the economic metaphor of inflation to report The Cost of Network Complexity. While 1995 might be considered the Paleozoic era of networking — Windows NT was barely two years old — and the technologies have since rapidly evolved, still the inflation metaphor holds up today.
“The cause of economic inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, diminishing the buying power of the dollar. In the case of network complexity inflation, we have too much network infrastructure being chased by too few network wizards. Net service quality (the currency provided by the support staff) declines because it is spread across too many service demands.
“When this occurs, there are two means of bringing service quality and service requirements back into balance: reduce the number of factors contributing to the complexity [NPD Editor's note: That's not going to happen.] … or increase the size of the support staff to handle the increased complexity. [Nope, that's not happening either]“
Flash forward to today and it’s clear that infrastructure tools have progressed over time, making enterprise networks more reliable in the process. However, increased reliability doesn’t necessarily mean better performance and it doesn’t necessarily mean a better experience for the end-user. Today users commonly expect a ubiquitous and instantaneous network. They want it now, anywhere at anytime.
Therefore, network engineers aren’t getting much sleep!
Here are three big trends that have increased the volume and complexity of wide area network traffic, made monitoring application performance a necessity and sleep for network engineers a luxury:
1. Data Center Consolidation
Enterprises and government agencies alike are migrating applications and data to central locations to save real estate, infrastructure, power and personnel costs, and improve manageability. As an example, see SearchDataCenter for analysis of HP’s move to reduce 85 worldwide data centers down to just six, saving an estimated $1 billion annually. And ComputerWorld reports that “77% of the states said they had either consolidated data centers or had projects in progress.”
2. Increased Number of Remote Users
Branch offices and telecommuters are proliferating as companies grow, merge, and expand globally, and the exponential growth of e-commerce transactions continues unabated. The idea of waking up and going into the office has greatly changed over the last several decades. At any given time, the office could be your car, your study, a hotel, or a boardroom at the Helsinki branch.
3. The Rise of Voice and Video Traffic
Voice and video traffic are increasing rapidly and both rely heavily on the quality and consistency of network delivery, and if VoIP is to become the future of telecom like so many believe, the consistency issue will have to be overcome:
“The sticking point is the lag time between the emergence of the new applications and the evolution of the networks on which they travel…Distributing IP traffic on networks that are not optimized for the protocol is a different task than if the network and the application speak the same language.” [Caller IP]
At NetQoS, we’re seeing that enterprises are increasingly turning to a performance first approach. NetQoS surveyed 150 network engineers at our last Customer Symposium and found that more than 80 percent, in order to manage these new complexities, are analyzing end-to-end response times, traffic flows and device performance in order to identify issues and quickly resolve them.
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