WAN Governance

Big data is not about size, it’s about velocity

"Data-driven decisions are better decisions – it's as simple as that. Using big data enables managers to decide on the basis of evidence rather than intuition. For that reason, it has the potential to revolutionize management" said Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in an inspirational article on HBR, October 2012. Combining data like weather and feeds from radar stations allows the aviation business intelligence company PASSUR to eliminates gaps between estimated and actual arrival times, a value of several millions dollars a year for each airport. Setting up a Hadoop cluster enabled Sears Holdings to contract its promotion lead-time from eight weeks down to less than one. Macy's was able to anticipate Black Friday sales even before they were recorded by using location data from mobile phones.

Big data is not about size, it is about velocity.

WAN Governance relies on the same principles:

• Managers decide about the goals (is it better to improve current performance or to reduce expenses for the same level of performance? What are the key business applications that must be protected whatever the situation? How to secure the deployment of the ERP's next major release? Should we let employees activate desktop video or use Facebook? Etc.);
• Autonomic networking handles the "big volume of data" that describe the ever changing users' traffic across the corporate WAN (source and destination, applications, users' activity, delivered performance, etc.) and use them to compute and apply in real-time the policies that are necessary to guarantee the application performance for each user;
• Feeding the need for vision and human insight, application visibility reports to the managers the actual results and the information they need to make appropriate decisions, overriding their intuition by facts.

Because of its ability to use a large amount of changing data in a very short time, WAN Governance powered by Autonomic Networking automatically reduces the time to tuning your traffic down to a few seconds, ensuring business applications SLAs over your corporate network and smashing down network and operation costs. Over small and big networks.

Béatrice

Autonomic Networking is Unified Communications’ best friend

UC (Unified Communications) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging, presence information, telephony, video conferencing and data sharing (like Interactive White Boards) with non-real-time communication services like unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax). It provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.

Benefits - Unified Communications offers huge opportunities for the enterprise including efficient teamwork and easy access to the information bring a true competitive advantage and accelerate product development, marketing launch, sales closing and finally invoicing. UC system cut traditional telephony costs. Expensive legacy voice systems can be de-commissioned while least-cost routing enables low cost site-to-site calls over the corporate data network. Furthermore, UC helps with travel expenses and office space reduction.

Complexity - Unified Communications introduces significant complexity at network level. Of course, the traffic depends on users' activity (who calls whom) and on the type of communication (peer-to-peer or conferencing, voice only or video, etc.). Even inside a communication, the traffic can be dynamic: for example, audio traffic is send only when the speaker is active, video codecs dynamically change the bandwidth they use and the traffic can move from peer-to-peer to hub-and-spoke when a third people joins the discussion. Moreover, UC requires a large number of protocols for management, signaling, gateways, integration in the enterprise's IT architecture, screen sharing, voice and video. All these applications have different patterns and requirements that must be satisfied, while coexisting with all the other applications of the enterprise.

Solution - With the Objective-based management paradigm of Autonomic Networking, the only thing you have to do is to define which applications really matter. As UC is not "one" application but a suite of applications, we suggest splitting it in four categories: from the most critical to the least critical one:

• voice, that does not support any defect;
• then video that must be well protected but tolerates temporary impairments;
• signaling – an important but not bandwidth aggressive group of flows;
• finally sharing that easily support some extra delays as long as it can use enough bandwidth.

Each individual UC flow will then dynamically be classified and controlled to guarantee the performance delivered to the end-users – even in the most complicated traffic mesh and application mix. There is no need to predict the traffic matrix, to define the number and level of activity of users, to reserve resources, etc… Autonomic Networking's self-learning and self-managing capabilities takes control on your behalf and guarantee a perfect performance for each of the UC services as well as for all the other enterprise's key applications.

Results - Protected by Autonomic Networking, Unified Communications delivers a constant and perfect quality that encourages users and accelerates UC adoption across the company. The fluid and peaceful coexistence with the other business application relieves the service desk from endless troubleshooting. Clear dashboards provide IT managers with all the necessary information to govern and communicate with the line of business. Last but not least, you save on network costs by preventing useless bandwidth upgrades.

Béatrice

Autonomic Networking is IT staff’s best friend!

In a recent Network World interview (« Why consumerization won't kill corporate IT"), Forrester analyst Matthew Brown said: "Some people are claiming that as technology is easier to consume and provision in a self-service manner, then the role of IT goes away. That is based on a principle that all IT does is perform low-value activities around maintaining the store. In fact if you look at IT you can see that what they should be doing is more value-added activities such as building new applications and services."

We couldn't agree more, if… Oh, actually there is one "if"... Consumerization trends, such as cloud platforms, bring more complexity to network management – not less. As part of the transition to cloud computing, companies are moving to a hybrid model where some IT needs are best served by cloud platforms and others simply are not. And as IT professionals are figuring out where the cloud can be rewarding and improve IT operations, application delivery still remains their primary focus. Anything and everything go over the network, sharing the very same access to the branch where users work. It's not rare to see recreational traffic using 80% of the line. And non-MPLS usage is doubling every 12 months, for business as well as for personal usage. Local Internet breakouts and hybrid networks that are necessary to maintain the network cost at an acceptable level despite the traffic inflation, participate also to the confusion.

In such a shaky and dynamic environment, to guarantee users' experience is becoming a nightmare that will occupy a huge amount of time and energy (for poor and uncertain results) - and finally prevent IT to move up in the added-value activities Brown was speaking about… Unless enterprises use automated and dynamic tools that are intelligent enough to differentiate each app flows and individually control them – providing application performance continuity whatever the end-users' activity.

With Autonomic Networking - now available on very affordable platform like Ipanema's nano - IT gains full control and optimization of application performance for each of their branch offices, whatever the IT architecture. Hand free, automated, self-adapting… it couldn't be easier. Mission-critical operational and financial applications can now compete with bandwidth-hungry social media and video applications – without impacting users' satisfaction and business efficiency.

And IT people can finally stop running behind problems and act proactively, implementing more strategic tasks like WAN governance – in a word: more aligned to the business.

Autonomic networking: IT staff's best friend!

Béatrice

Illustration: Yan Marcziewski (2007 - no title)

What to do when you know that you don’t know?

 1- Hold your breath and expect situation to resolve by itself?  2- Guess what the reality is - and take the risk? 3- Accept that you can't know and adapt as fast as possible to what happen.

IT and network teams know well what will be the average traffic next week at peak time: more or less the same as last week, same day, same time… Long term variations are (quite) slow.

But how anticipate what will happen in the next second? Will someone set-up a phone call, download a video stream, start a transaction, synchronize her mail box, update his antivirus, update his Facebook account…?

This is what Autonomic Networking (with its real-time control plane) is about: learn fast, think fast and adapt before people will even notice.

Illustration: Chuck Jones' lovely Wile E. Coyote…

Secret sauces are not all equal

We publish here a post from Béatrice Piquer-Durand, Marketing Director at Ipanema Technologies, who talks about completeness and automation of WAN optimization controllers.

With companies expanding their use of cloud computing and users more and more dependent on access to business applications from mobile devices, enterprise networks are becoming more complex at the same time that their direct impact on business performance soars. Ipanema ANS fully automates Application Visibility, QoS and Control, Dynamic WAN Selection --- in addition to WAN Optimization with an integrated design from the outset. Other vendors started out solving a singular problem, e.g., application acceleration, and have had to re-engineer their systems or acquire additional products in order to keep up with this growing WAN complexity.

The "secret sauce" that makes the difference is the Autonomic Networking capability that Ipanema engineered from the start. Vendors can implement a reasonably granular visibility and queuing mechanism, but this is still insufficient to guarantee reliable performance to the endpoints of global networks. These can only be achieved by adding a control layer (Ipanema's Autonomic layer) for true real-time governance over the network and automated applications alignment with business objectives.

This control layer enables:

• An end-to-end approach that takes into account not only the local end, but also the far end of each application connection, including applications in the most complex, unplanned and uncertain traffic mesh situations, like those found in cloud computing environments, thereby solving the famous "last mile" issue;
• Per-user connection control, based on both the business priority and technical requirements of every application (e.g., mixing voice, telepresence, SAP and YouTube at the same time) and taking into account the user behavior at each moment (e.g. when she is more or less active over the network, which amount of data is being transferred, etc.);
• Instantaneous response to new traffic situations (user activity occurs in sub-second periods, and so must the control layer's response whatever the network size and the nature and number of application connections);
• Configuration and management at performance objective level. The old legacy policy-based approach is too low level, static and cumbersome to fit the requirements of today's dynamic and more complex business and network environments. In order to ensure compliance with application SLAs, the application performance itself must be at the very root of system management.

These factors are at the design core of Ipanema's ANS. They are what make the system:

Holistic, delivering a global, end-to-end traffic approach, including deep application classification and performance guarantee from over the entire network;

Self-managing, with collaborative decision making between end points for flow control of each application, taking into account the real-time, network-wide situation and managing hybrids with MPLS, Internet and cloud components as one network;

Objective-based, meaning ANS is directly driven from application SLAs. This allows a very simple and stable management process for IT staff, while the Autonomic layer takes care of managing the dynamics and complexity of actual application traffic flows;

A business enabler, from network administrators to C-level management to view, understand and control the relationships between applications and business performance, both at real-time over long term period.

While all cookers share same ingredients, their sauces are not all equal. Collecting application performance management features does not guarantee a great system: they must combine harmoniously and be intelligent enough to follow the dynamics of the enterprise's users.

Illustration: "le secret" by Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917)