That means a huge increase in the numbers and types of mobile devices that your network must support. And, as network engineers already know, an iPad or a BlackBerry can suck up just as much network bandwidth as a laptop.

The most recent Allot MobileTrends Report shows an 83% increase in mobile broadband traffic in the second half of 2011 alone. Video streaming, which is notoriously sensitive to fluctuations in network performance, accounts for a whopping 42% of total bandwidth usage.

If employees were simply doing the same work-related activities (creating and saving documents, writing emails, etc.) with their mobile devices that they tend to do with their laptops, BYOD might not be such a big deal. But that’s not what’s likely to happen.

As you might expect, users often use their personal devices for things other than work.

If too many employees are using web-based rich media on their personal mobile devices, they can completely consume your organization’s available Internet bandwidth – resulting in sluggish SaaS applications, poor VoIP call quality, slow virtual desktops, and a general inability to perform useful work. Without an effective way to pinpoint and limit unauthorized activities, it can be next to impossible to deliver consistent network performance.

Here are three sources that demand heavy additional bandwidth utilization. You should aware of and continuously monitoring your network so that you can manage the increase resulting from your employees and their network usage behavior!  

#1: Multimedia Streaming
Just like they do at home, you can expect employees to access multimedia and video applications like YouTube Mobile, iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, ESPN and AOL Video on their personal devices at work. These bandwidth-intensive applications can significantly impact the performance of IP-based business services that must now compete for “clean” network capacity. Check out this recent blog post where AppNeta experienced a major slowdown in network performance because an employee was downloading hours of iTunes videos!

#2:  Listening to Internet radio

Your employees are accustomed to enjoying Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark and other Internet radio services at home, and will listen at work without giving a thought to the network performance consequences. It’s only music, right? The truth is that streaming audio is basically equivalent to downloading an infinitely large file. So, when the network slows down or end users start complaining, you need to know exactly which employees are hogging the bandwidth and impacting business productivity.

#3 Gaming (yes, at work!)

Many of your employees are hopelessly obsessed with smart phone-based games like Out of the Park Baseball, Asteroids GUNNER and Ninja Chicken Ooga Booga – of course they’re going to play them at work as well as at home. The question is not whether this will happen, but how you can prevent it from degrading network performance. Since you probably can’t stop them from playing, you need to understand available and utilized bandwidth capacity to assure that this won’t impact your business needs.

There’s no way you can effectively ban mobile devices or rich media access from your network – employees increasingly need these tools to do their jobs. The solution is to give your organization the benefits of BYOD without negative productivity impacts. To do that, you need a way to monitor the bandwidth-intensive connections. But that can be difficult with traditional network tools, because the connections originate inside your firewall.

AppNeta’s PathView Cloud with FlowView service offers an easy-to-use, cost-effective netflow analysis solution that is simpler and faster to deploy and manage than any other network performance management tool available. PathView Cloud with FlowView is the first cloud-based solution that enables you to analyze network activity at both the home office and remote location, and easily view netflow analysis data either within PathView Cloud or with your favorite flow analysis tool.

To learn more about how PathView Cloud can help your organization address evolving network performance challenges, visit http://www.AppNeta.com or phone 1-800-508-5233.

Last year we met up with our existing HTG Partners including Blue Jean Networks, Lamm Technologies and K&R Network Solutions. We are looking forward to seeing them again and talking about how they are deploying PathView Cloud as a managed network performance management service!

We hope to meet new HTG members and future PathView Cloud partners! Please stop by our booth 107 in the exhibitor hall to say hello and check out the live network performance monitoring demo, talk more  about the benefits of a cloud-based network performance management service and how to drive monthly recurring!

And don’t forget to enter the raffle to win an Apple TV!

‘How much bandwidth are we getting?’

‘Why is my app so slow?’

‘What are we paying our ISP monthly again??’

‘How are my end users using our bandwidth?’

The first day I used PathView Cloud these questions were running through my head and PathView Cloud’s integrated capabilities helped me easily find the answers.

PathView Cloud provides a continuous, minute-by-minute representation of the available capacity versus utilized capacity. This information is supplied in a cleanly formatted graph with highlighted points of interest.  As shown in the screenshot above, you see the provisioned capacity to validate whether you are getting the bandwidth that you are paying for.  Notifications can be generated for high utilization, low bandwidth and many things in between.

This was particularly helpful for the VoIP system I had been expanding to some of our remote sites. I used PathView Cloud with AppView Voice to load the network with voice traffic for an extended period of time and used  voice ramping to get an overall analysis of voice performance. I used AppView Voice to run a few individual voice load tests to get a capacity reading for a single point in time. PathView Cloud actively monitors bandwidth and network performance 24/7 but you also have the ability to run periodic live application loads on the network.

When I first saw that I was only getting 300Mbps on a Gigabit WAN link across my state, I challenged the results with an AppNeta systems engineer.  It seems AppNeta had anticipated my curiosity about how the solution can so accurately determine the size of my WAN circuit without actually flooding it. For comparison purposes, AppNeta developed its own (FREE) perfect flooding tool called PathTest so users can see how solid its non-invasive, non-flooding PathView capacity analysis is. The engineer enabled the PathTest utility on my PathView microAppliances. PathTest pushes your network to its absolute limits using precision packet-flooding techniques to completely fill the network path for a user-defined duration. However, if you run the test during production hours you risk impacting other users since the tool will flood the pipe to its maximum capacity, making it nearly impossible for normal network activity to continue.

The thing I found interesting about PathTest, which is better than other flooders like iPerf, is that you can specify everything from, duration, packet size, Quality of Service (QoS), Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) and even protocol.

I ran PathTest after business hours, so as to not affect production. I pay for a 1Gbps link between my Headquarters and my Datacenter.  So, I was expecting something around 900 Mbps.  With the PathTest tool, we were able to flood my pipes in both directions simultaneously with different protocols.  This is to see if there was an issue with a specific type of traffic or a specific direction.  The graph below shows all of our results broken up by direction and traffic type.  “Bidi” means a bi-directional test where inbound and outbound links are flooded at the same time.

I ran a UDP test in both directions to see how much traffic was generated and how much was received on the other side.

I also ran a test with ICMP and as ICMP includes the echo response, you can see the outbound and inbound traffic.

The verdict?  PathView Cloud’s built-in non-invasive capacity analysis was dead on with the results of the PathTest flooding tool; yet I only gave up around 2kbps of monitoring overhead.  I have a six figure WAN bill so I have to know I am getting the bandwidth I am paying for. Being in the network monitoring world for a while, I am very comfortable with network traffic generators. But, the ability to get non-invasive accurate bandwidth readings 24/7 is game-changing for me and my IT team. However, to put my mind at ease, I felt I needed two sources to verify the metrics I was seeing. By using PathTest to flood my network to its full capacity I confirmed the same results as PathView Cloud and verified that I was paying for WAY more than I was getting

Have a question? Email our systems engineers at PathViewSE@appneta.com or sign up for a free trial!

• Remote, hassle free upgrades and maintenance, shorter deployment time and no configurations (minutes vs. months for a phased implementation)
• Cost savings in infrastructure and human resource requirements
• Reduced business risk due to lower upfront costs and faster implementation

But even beyond these awesome benefits of cloud computing, there are three specific reasons why a cloud-delivered network performance management solution yields greater return on investment and shorter time-to-value than competing alternatives:

1.  Anytime/anywhere, uncompromised access to performance data via any device

SaaS offers one benefit that could outweigh all others when it comes to meeting the challenges of managing today’s mega distributed networks: global accessibility. Because they are cloud-based, SaaS applications are ubiquitously available via the Internet – natively, just like at the office, on any device that can run on a web browser.

That’s great for executives who need the flexibility to work from mobile devices while on the move. And, it’s great for IT teams who need access to performance data from the perspective of a remote site end user. Cloud-delivered network and application performance is becoming more and more critical for network engineers who need to monitor and troubleshoot the performance of today’s sprawling WANs, serving ever-more remote users in fast-growing numbers of remote offices.

2.  Centralized management

Centralization of IT resources away from remote sites is a driver for both cost and efficiency, making it one of the key trends in the modern datacenter. A network performance management solution needs to be fully functional in the central datacenter where the applications are hosted as well as monitor the performance of those applications from the perspective of the remote sites.

Today’s network engineers want to manage the network from a central console – and take that console with them wherever they go! What could be better than to enjoy complete network visibility across all the network paths, both within and beyond your network, on your iPad?!

A cloud-based network performance management solution can deliver that experience seamlessly, with no extra costs or resource requirements.  You can immediately start to save valuable time and stop running around chasing down performance problems!

3: Cost-effective, on-demand scalability

The costs and challenges of managing the performance of distributed networks become prohibitive with traditional technologies that don’t scale up to meet today’s business requirements. Today, networks infrastructures are being developed rapidly to handle volumes of data that never existed years ago when the networks were designed a few years ago. And while capacity and performance are business-critical, cost considerations are often paramount.

In a global business environment where tight budgets and multi-tasking IT administrators are the norm, network management tools that require installation, upgrades, configuration or expensive hardware don’t fit the bill. What defines scalability in a network performance management solution is instant deployment and minimal administration going forward – no matter how big the rollout gets. A cloud-based service is ideal for delivering those benefits.

PathView Cloud from AppNeta is the leading cloud-based network performance management solution. Delivering end-to-end visibility, on-demand scalability and seamless manageability with a zero administration, cost-effective SaaS model, PathView Cloud meets the network performance management needs of organizations from global enterprises to SMBs.

For more information or to sign up for a free trial, visit www.appneta.com.

Cloud users and providers from across industries stopped by the AppNeta booth to discuss strategies for assuring the performance of cloud services. Unlimited visibility into third party networks is absolutely critical to cloud service providers as well as users. Key performance metrics such as latency, loss, jitter and bandwidth utilization, paired with the ability to pinpoint the issues in highly distributed networks, gives users and providers the data necessary to assure performance. Hosted cloud providers, like Terremark, SunGard Availability Services or Amazon Web Services, can automatically generate reports to present to customers to show SLA compliance. Cloud users need to proactively monitor their cloud services to make sure their critical applications are being delivered as promised.

If you’re considering moving to the cloud, make sure you can assure performance! Sign up for a free trial of PathView Cloud today or take a look at this recent white paper “ Moving to the Cloud – Why Hope is not a Strategy”

But these compelling value propositions are compromised if the network environment and available bandwidth cannot support the demands of videoconferencing. Time and money devoted to video equipment, conference room modifications, training for users, etc. will not yield expected business returns if the network cannot handle the demands placed on it by video traffic!

All video conferencing traffic is real-time traffic and demands adequate QoS support across both LANs and WANs. And, we have all learned the hard way that video applications are unforgiving in terms of network quality. Each link in the network must have adequate “clean bandwidth” (that is, bandwidth plus high performance on the upload and the download) to handle not only the expected voice and video traffic, but also the myriad other IP-based applications running on it – everything from SaaS applications to IP storage to virtual desktop infrastructure.

In terms of performance metrics, even the most forgiving videoconferencing applications can handle only minimal latency, jitter and packet loss:

• Excessive latency threatens to de-synchronize the audio and video portions of the conference. Where round-trip latency between endpoints exceeds 200-300 milliseconds, participants start to notice delays between the movement of speakers’ lips and the corresponding audio.
• Packet loss greater than 0.1% to 2% causes the video presentation to be “blocky” or jerky, and causes the audio to drop out.
• Jitter exceeding 15-30 milliseconds can give the video a frozen or stuttering appearance.

Maintaining end-to-end network performance for all videoconference participants within these narrow parameters is vital to successful remote interactions, and ultimately essential to realizing the expected ROI for videoconferencing deployments. The accelerating shift from traditional, room-based videoconferencing systems to desktop/mobile solutions will greatly increase not only the number of endpoints but also the magnitude of the network management challenge.

Another growing challenge with providing network QoS for videoconferencing involves ensuring acceptable experience when interfacing with partners, customers and others outside the enterprise network. Anytime videoconference data travels across network boundaries, service quality can fluctuate.

To assure successful video conferences, you need to know how much bandwidth you have available and how the network is performing – not just on your LAN but end-to-end across all the networks supporting the video conference. Simply tracking total, available and utilized capacity over networks you own isn’t insufficient, because it leaves you “hoping for success” across a web of service providers and best-effort public networks. You need visibility across these networks as well, both to pinpoint where problems are occurring and to know if service providers are meeting their SLAs.

AppNeta’s PathView Cloud with AppView Video offers the end-to-end visibility required to assure network performance quality for videoconferencing – and maximize the value of these investments. Both enterprises and videoconferencing service providers rely on PathView Cloud to manage QoS and pinpoint problems quickly.

To find out how AppNeta technology and the new AppView Video module can help your organization gain the end-to-end visibility required to meet the network performance demands of videoconferencing, visit www.appneta.com or sign up today for a free trial.

Gartner analyst Jeff Snyder has warned, 85 percent of networks are not ready for VoIP. And, starting the transition to convergence by assessing your network’s ability to handle VoIP is the only way to gain a complete understanding of the scope of the project. All pre-deployment assessments should be done prior to the purchase of any hardware and the assessment must include VoIP traffic simulation in order to gauge an accurate understanding of network readiness.

An Effective VoIP Assessment will:

• Measure the call load capability of the network

• Identify the faults and shortcomings of the network

• Provide a holistic view of the network’s ability to handle data and voice traffic

• Lower the project’s cost estimates

• Verify service level agreements (SLAs)

• Eliminate the network as a gating factor in the VoIP project

A complete end-to-end performance analysis should report on key performance indicators such as latency, loss, jitter, QoS, MOS, throughput and utilization to show how your network measures up!

For a step-by-step guide to assessing the network, troubleshooting tough performance problems and continuously monitoring for ongoing success, download the Best Practices for Assuring VoIP Performance whitepaper and guarantee a successful VoIP network deployment!

In an ideal world, a thorough network assessment pinpoints performance issues prior to an application implementation.  However, not every organization has the time or the right tools to effectively assess the network prior to a VDI roll out.

A noteworthy example of this situation is PathView Cloud and VMware’s work with a global medical devices provider that outsourced its help desk services to India. VMware View was designed to reduce IT costs and deliver IT services to employees around the world. The global medical devices company hosted its VMware View infrastructure in its St. Paul, MN datacenter and was delivering the service over WAN links to the outsourcer’s contact center in India.

Unfortunately, once the VDI roll out began, poor performance complaints rose quickly in India. Slow Windows performance, stalled web applications, decreased support and eventually lower customer satisfaction meant the IT team could not continue to deploy VMware View, a project critical to the global developer’s growth.

Shows the performance SLA defined for the View WAN link. It is based on best practices recommended by VMware and Teradici, the OEM provider of View’s PCoIP

The IT team was stuck. Once the network and application traffic left their facility they lost complete visibility. The team had suspicions the issues were in the carrier’s network but could not prove it.

VMware engineers deployed the PathView Cloud network performance management service to gain end-to-end visibility they didn’t have to pinpoint the source of the hard-to-find failures.

Check out the full VDI performance case study to learn more about this story and how PathView Cloud’s advanced diagnostics quickly found the cause of poor performance.  Or test it in your own environment and sign up for a free trial of PathView Cloud today!

I was recently working with one of our customers, a large global technology provider that was doing large replications across an MPLS network.  To consolidate servers, they were delivering this service from an ESX 4.0 host running Server 2008.  They had allocated more than adequate processing, memory and storage to the various systems on the ESX.  Additionally, the VNIC and internal network was rated for GigE.  This GigE LAN was close to the edge of the datacenter (DC) therefore it was only a single layer two switch to the MPLS service.  Once the MPLS service was reached, an OC3 (155mbps minus network overhead) pipe was provisioned from AT&T.

With all the above in place, it appeared to be a fairly robust and healthy infrastructure. However, when the project went into beta a major problem occurred.  Replicating small amounts of data would take ages! With hours upon hours dedicated to small replications, the customer deemed it impossible to scale the project to what it should be.

Until they started using PathView Cloud.

Working with the network engineering team we quickly established two rackAppliances in their two datacenters.  These datacenters were bicoastal connected via an OC3 pipe. The appliances were up and running within minutes, with three core paths that we wanted to monitor and better understand.

The first two were the internal connections from the rackAppliance to the servers in question. From the screen shot below, you can see that GigE was achieved on the LAN to each server.  However, the last path we wanted to analyze was from DC1 to DC2 over the OC3 link.  This is where things became interesting.

Monitoring the path, bi-directionally utilizing UDP (we confirmed there were no policing of our packets), between datacenters showed that the WAN pipe was only able to achieve ~50-60mbps. Now I’ve dealt with carriers when I was only achieving 2.5mbps on a 2xT1 link, and they blamed it on “network overhead.” So forgive me for being skeptical when I initially blamed the readings on the inability of the carrier.

Upon further inspection, the carrier was going to be vindicated.

PathView Cloud quickly showed us that the faulty firewall was implemented in datacenter number 1. PathView’s hop-by-hop analysis showed us that this was severely limiting the capacity to that 50mbps before it even hit the OC3 link!

Therefore, the bottleneck was on their side of the firewall. This may be the only time I say this, I’m sorry AT&T for blaming my bandwidth problems on you.

Deployment also encompasses not just what it takes to roll out the tool and begin using it, but also its impact on the network. With more and more performance-sensitive, IP-based applications throwing traffic onto the network every day, plus more remote users and more mobile devices, it’s not acceptable for a network performance management tool to bog down the network with packets of its own.

Next, is it possible to deploy the solution end-to-end so you have visibility and insight along the entire network path from cloud/SaaS providers or remote data centers to your widely distributed users, even over networks you don’t own? Many solutions that claim to offer network performance management will stop short, leaving you groping in the dark over a wide range of commonplace problems that happen beyond your firewall. Many network engineers lack visibility and control over solutions implemented at remote offices which results in on-site visits.

Finally, deployment is also about usability. How much work does it take to actually troubleshoot, pinpoint solve network issues with solution? For example, there are lots of “free” tools out there these days that can “monitor” various aspects of network performance. Often there is considerable effort involved in sifting through multiple raw data feeds from freeware tools, versus a well-designed, configurable and vendor supported dashboard that gives network engineers exactly what they’re looking for at a glance.

SNMP-based solutions are a good example of a traditional technology that does a great job in some respects but doesn’t fit how companies work today. SNMP requires you to collect and analyze data from all devices to find a problem and, if the problem is outside of your infrastructure, you’re blind. There are many excellent dashboards for viewing SNMP data, but the SNMP protocol itself is designed to measure device health, not key performance indicators for an IP-based network, like bandwidth, jitter, packet loss, latency and retransmissions.

Similarly, netflow analysis tools have been available for many years now. These tools work well, but require the correct expensive hardware to generate the netflow data and then a separate server to collect and analyze it. These days few companies can afford to over-provision their network infrastructure to accommodate netflow traffic, especially at the remote sites where an ever-greater percentage of users work. And once you have the hardware in place to handle netflow analysis, you still need to purchase, install and configure a complex software solution to collect, analyze and display the data. Even then, you know who is doing what on the network, but you don’t know the impact on critical business services.

Even some network performance management solutions that tout “ease of deployment” in their marketing copy are only easy-to-deploy compared to traditional scenarios. Do you need to download, distribute, install and configure devices or physical/virtual servers? And then manage all that as your network changes? Do you need to worry about the topology of your network performance management solution and how different components of it communicate? That’s not “ease of deployment”… that’s a royal pain.

In contrast to the above, the cloud-based PathView Cloud service from AppNeta has the simplest deployment scenario imaginable: plug PathView microAppliances into your network, and you’re done. Any site anywhere can be up-and-running within minutes – with no configuration hassles, no hardware requirements and no software installation.

Zero administration, zero upgrades, a rich interface accessible from anywhere, end-to-end visibility, on-demand scalability… That’s what “ease of deployment” is really all about.

To learn more about how fast and easy it can truly be to roll out PathView Cloud technology across your organization, visit www.appneta.com or try the PathView Cloud service for free on your own network today!