Editorial, by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily.
Volume 2 of our semi-annual magazine, Performance Edge Journal, is now available in print and downloadable online.
This issue is the first by our new, brilliant, editor-in-chief. He is highly respected by his peers, with lifetime accomplishments and a knack for getting hard interviews and writing in a way that changes minds. His academic and professional credentials speak for themselves.
In other words, I’m the editor-in-chief. But never mind that.
In it, you’ll find a number of in-depth articles on VoIP Performance Monitoring and WAN Optimization, as well as NetQoS CEO Joel Trammell‘s look at the future of network performance management, results from a survey on recreational network use, a look at Cisco IOS NetFlow vs. Cisco IP SLA, and more.
Here’s a quick excerpt from “The Future of Network Performance Management – A look into Joel Trammell’s Crystal Ball.”
Over the years, computer and communication networks have grown in size, scope, and complexity. Since the early days of DARP, the internet’s predecessor-almost 50 years ago!-as much research and development has gone into the network itself as into the research it supported, resulting in a technology that now spans the entire globe. We have become dependent on that technology in ways we couldn’t have imagined even a decade ago because of that dependency. The need to manage networks has become more and more important to everyday work and life.
The discipline of network performance management is much more critical today as more and more people rely on application services delivered across farflung networks. Industry Analyst Jim Metzler asserts that there are two main functions of IT: Application Development (which includes both work done by internal development teams or contractors, as well as licensed commercial applications and software as a service), and Application Delivery (how those applications are made accessible by end users, including customers, employees, and partners).
From this vantage point, network performance management must mature to encompass application delivery management, and move away from being as functionally compartmentalized (in terms of network management, server management, application management, and so forth), as it typically is today. IT organizations must evaluate the processes and tools they use today to understand if they are sufficient to ensure reliable delivery of applications, measure service and application response times that users experience, optimize the network for service delivery, troubleshoot performance issues, and so on, within large, increasingly complex IT infrastructures.
Not surprisingly, the job of network professionals is going to get more complicated over time as:
- network bandwidth continues to increase
- more services and applications use the network
- more varied types of traffic traverse the network
To read the rest of this article, you can pick subscribe at Performance-Edge-Journal.com
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