Recreational Network Traffic Madness Calendar, 2008

Here on Network Performance Daily, we’ve documented the effects of recreational traffic on the network. We’ve shown you a 3D visualization of the Slashdot effect on your network, and even created a Del.icio.us directory of recreational network use articles devoted to the problems associated with sporadic bursts of unauthorized network use triggered by events such as March Madness and Super Bowl Sunday.
As the results of a recent NetQoS survey on recreational use of network resources show, the network performance problems associated with non-business usage of network resources is only getting worse, especially with the growing popularity of social media sites such as YouTube and MySpace. So, after years of helping customers prepare for network traffic overload, NetQoS is now publishing a Calendar of Recreational Network Traffic Madness for 2008. And, to make it even more useful, we’re posting it as a Google Calendar.
This handy little 2008 calendar is a month-by-month timeline of key events that can generate enough traffic to push many enterprise networks to the limits and adversely affect business-critical application performance. Print a copy and keep it by your desk; add it to your personal organizer or Google Calendar, or view it here.
And because it’s a Google Calendar, you can take it back to your own preferred apps and create a mash-up with it.
There are some reports of the calendar not showing up in certain versions of IE7, but we’ve found that reloading the page usually takes care of the problem. We also have a year at a glance text version of the list.

While this calendar of upcoming network overload events won’t help you plan for the insane success of the next killer viral video, we hope that it will at least give you a timeline for planning or maybe prepare you to make the case to add network monitoring tools to your 2008 budget. As we wrote in The Cyber Monday Blues: How to Use NetFlow and Network Monitoring Tools to Ensure Online Shopping Doesn’t Impact Network Performance, a NetFlow monitoring product can help you avoid problems in 2008:

“By putting your network monitoring tools to good use now, you can examine exactly how your network performs when a large spike in traffic occurs – so that you know what to do to be ready for the next spike in traffic when it occurs. Specifically, we advise network engineers to take action now to:

• analyze network traffic flows to identify unauthorized network traffic
• quantify its impact on network performance
• and implement quality of service policies to ensure business-critical applications have priority access to network resources

Admittedly, this is not the trickiest of problems to solve. You just need the right tools. As we detail in this best practices white paper on NetFlow monitoring most of this online traffic is fairly easy to identify and measure if you are using NetFlow and a NetFlow monitoring product like NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to analyze traffic.”

Did we miss any key events? If so, let us know, and we can add it to the calendar!

• 1st: The Queen’s New Year’s Honours List announced
• 2nd: Gadgets received over the holidays as gifts start to hit the corporate network
• 14-24th: Australian Open Tennis

February:

• 2nd February–15th March: Six Nations Rugby Tournament
• 3rd: Super Bowl XLII (Phoenix, AZ)
• 5th: Super Tuesday (largest to date)
• 10th: British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) Ceremony
• 10th: Grammy Awards
• 14th: Valentine’s Day
• 14th: The Space Shuttle Endeavour lift off
• 17th: Daytona 500
• 21st: Total lunar eclipse (North and South America, Europe, Africa and Western Asia)
• 24th: Academy Awards

March:

• 16th: 2008 Formula 1 World Championship start
• 20-30th: NCAA March Madness Tournament
• 30th: Wrestlemania XXIV (Citrus Bowl, Orlando, Florida)

April:

• 4th-7th: NCAA Final Four
• 15th: Federal Income Tax Filing

May:

• 3rd–6th: Cannes International Film Festival
• 14th: UEFA Cup final
• 21st: UEFA Champions League final
• 24th: Eurovision Song Contest final
• 25th May – 8th June: Tennis French Open
• 25th: NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft will land on Mars
• 25th: Indianapolis 500

June:

• 7-29th: UEFA Euro 2008 Championship
• 17th-21st: Royal Ascot
• 23rd June-6th July: Wimbledon Tennis Championship
• 30th: Federal agency deadline for putting IPv6 on networks

July:

• 3rd – 6th: O2 Wireless Music Festival, UK
• 31st: Bill Gates will step down from daily duties at the Microsoft Corporation after over three decades
• August:
• 8th-24th: Summer Olympics, Beijing, China
• 8th – 31st: Edinburgh International Festival, UK
• 16th – 17th: Virgin (‘V’) Music Festival, UK
• 25th-28th: Democratic National Convention
• 24th – 26th: Reading and Leeds Music Festival, UK

September:

• 1st-4th: Republican National Convention

October:

• 25th October–22nd November: Rugby League World Cup

November:

• 2nd: 2008 Formula 1 World Championship ends
• 4th: General Election – all 50 states
• 8th: MTV Europe Music Awards 2008, Liverpool, UK
• 28th: Black Friday

December:

• 1st: Cyber Monday