WAN Governance

Effective WAN Governance contributes to meeting stakeholder needs

Effective enterprise IT systems enable innovation, collaboration, productivity, business processes and financial performance. But in real life, poor network performance hinders these functions — increasing business costs and forfeiting revenue opportunities. For example, let's consider how applications that are difficult to access or slow to respond hinder the objectives of an e-commerce website or a call center that handles thousands of customer service calls every day.

The ultimate goal of the IT function is to make business processes and workforces more efficient — to maximize their respective business value. WAN Governance creates the visibility and control of enterprise applications and usage to achieve this ultimate goal. Let's consider how all employees are stakeholders in improving business performance – and how effective WAN Governance contributes directly to meeting stakeholder needs:

• End Users expect applications to be up and running 24/7 and responsive — as if they were the only user on the network.

By guaranteeing applications availability and responsiveness, WAN Governance improves worker productivity, customer satisfaction and relationships with partners who depend on access to your network.

• Application managers want to be sure that applications under their personal responsibility will be allocated the necessary resources at all times for all circumstances.

WAN Governance ensures "rightsizing" of network bandwidth for applications to deliver intended performance objectives under any conditions.

• The CIO needs visibility into network traffic to understand how applications are actually used, their contributions to enterprise productivity and to plan projects for greatest business value.

WAN Governance monitors applications performance and usage and dynamically manages availability. A wide range of customizable analytics — from C-level dashboards to drilldowns into the underlying details of network performance at enterprise and site levels — guide decisions for creating greater value.

• The CFO, COO, CEO and Board of Directors need to understand the relationships and overall performance of business applications on networks to assess business value and how future IT investments will actually improve business results.

WAN Governance provides analytics on current network performance and projected benefits of new network projects to speed issue/solution understanding and decision making at the highest levels.

(This post is extracted from the recent Ipanema WAN Governance Executive Primer white paper)

A long way to New-Greenland

Professor Yves Coppens, the paleoanthropologist who co-discovered Lucy (a 3.2 million years old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974 at Hadar, Ethiopia), is a pretty good story teller. He once noticed that Greenland has a remarkable characteristic: it is the place where mankind finished its two or three million-year long trip around the globe.

"We" started our migration from our common African cradle up to Middle-east, Asia and Europe. Time, technology improvements (like mastering stone cutting and fire) as well as numerous climate changes recently allowed some of "us" to reach North America through the Bering land bridge. Some went south and populated the whole America down to Ushuaia; others followed reindeer herds up to the (now) frozen lands of north territories, Arctic islands and finally Greenland. It's only one thousand years ago that Icelanders and Norwegians closed the loop by colonizing Greenland, sharing it with the late Dorset culture inhabitants and the Thule culture arriving from the north.

IT people live in faster times than Lucy's: it took only 20 years to bring us from ENIAC computer to mainframes, another 20 years from mainframes to personal computers and still another 20 years to ubiquitous computing (from mobile phone and personal digital assistant to GPS receivers). It is still unclear where we will be in the next 20 years…

During the electronic (re)evolution, some moved toward developing applications: tired by machine-based language (believe it or not, many of us – including myself I'm afraid – started to work directly in Motorola, Zylog or Intel machine code…), they invented assembler and more sophisticated programming languages (all called by soft names such as Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, ADA, C…). They finally succeeded to make useful applications emerge out of their stacks of listing: Operating systems, spreadsheets, ERPs, databases, smartphones …

Others decided to invade telecommunication territories. After a preliminary excursion in telephony-land (where they eradicate all natives, respecting the tradition), they finally discovered their Eldorado: data networking (with all sorts of packet switching and transport protocols) and all its related usages – the Web and the Internet being the most emblematic ones.

And finally it is only now that new global management concepts like WAN Governance and Autonomic Networking which automatically align networks and applications, bridging cultures of these two tribes, allow us to join altogether in our own IT New-Greenland…

Illustration: the north of Kejser Franz Josef Fjord near Stensjö Bjerg – 2005 – Source: Uffe Wilken / Erik Christensen

J.S. Bach’s cancrizan canons and interwoven governance

Beyond being a sensitive and prolific musician, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was an exceptional engineer. Some of his engineering masterpieces are the "crab canons" or "canon cancrizans", part of the enigmatic "Musical Offering" he wrote in 1746 for Frederick the Great.

A crab canon is the musical equivalent of a palindrome (no melon, no lemon): a single score is played in the normal forward direction and simultaneously in the backward way, giving the appearance of two voices that are supposed to harmoniously combine together. More complex configurations are also possible, for example combining retrogression with inversion, and so on.

Like Bach's canons, complex organizations and processes are shaped by bidirectional forces: Top-Down and Bottom-Up, and the fact is that WAN Governance makes no exception to the rule. On the one hand, a clear Top-Down approach is mandatory to obtain IT alignment to the global enterprise business and organization: goals and expectations are to be clearly specified, although not in all tiny details:

• What are the business critical applications?
• What are the financial priorities (Opex vs Capex, maximize or optimize …)?
• What are the company knowledge and human resources management policy?
• What are the stakeholders and corresponding WAN governance steering rules?
• …

On the other hand (should we say on the other way?), Bottom-Up behavior guarantees a realistic approach sticking to the field: operation teams can think, propose and decide within their competency scope - they are the experts, after all:

• What are the most appropriate tools to support the WAN Governance processes?
• What are the day-to-day tasks to be achieved, and how?
• What are the best manners to interact with other organizations (IT and application specialists, technology vendors, Telcos, Hosting companies…)?
• What are the options that must be considered to support significant changes in application delivery?
• …

A perfect combination of both approaches, where Top-Down and Bottom-Up are perfectly interwoven without useless overlap will provide an efficient, smooth and motivating WAN Governance activity, just like the two Bach's voices perfectly combined in a single canon build a musical universe that flies us to Heavens.

Illustration: Young Johann Sebastian Bach. 1715 – by J. E. Rentsch, the Elder.

Would you be curious about the link between Bach's cancrizans and Moebius strip, just take three minutes looking at this (also available on http://strangepaths.com/canon-1-a-2/2009/01/18/en/):

Wan Governance White Paper

Only a short post this week, to bring to your attention a new white paper we wrote about Wan governance. Its access is free, so do not hesitate to download it here. French and German releases are also available (or will be soon). I'll be very interested by your comments and attentive to any feedback and suggestion you would accept to provide. Do not hesitate to enter in the discussion!

Cat has three sounds; none of them is “Meow”

Maryanne Wolf ⁽¹⁾ uses this image to illustrate the complex transformation from signs to letters to sounds to concept, that happen in the reading brain. C, A, T are three independent signs we hard-wired our brain with as the first step of learning to read, and unconsciously decode as 'letters'; each of them does not mean anything 'per se'. When we see them altogether (CAT), a decent English reader can associate the three sounds /k/, /a/, and /t/. Finally the coupling of these sounds gives birth to the conscious concept of in our mind (along with its corresponding vocalization).

Similarly, WAN governance is made of pieces that, taken separately, have totally different meaning. It starts from techniques like pattern matching, shaping, tcp ack anticipation, CIFS decoding, object caching, etc… They are the signs that, when properly decoded, become coherent 'technical features':

• Application traffic visibility
• Wan optimization
• Application acceleration
• Application performance management (APM)
• and so on.

In their turn, these 'technical features' are the 'letters' that, when linked together in the right manner (ideally by Autonomic networking) will be able to collectively deliver higher level users benefits like:

• Application SLAs
• Guarantee of user experience
• Acceleration of business applications
• Simplification of operations
• Cost reduction
• etc…

Finally, the association of these benefits within a coherent process and methodology will make appear the conscious Wan governance concept and the corresponding alignment of the network to the enterprise business and IT strategy.

Of course, one can say that all of this is far-fetched: after all, kids & cats understand each other well before being able to read, without any need of conscious steps and rational explanations that heart blinded adults need to understand their world…

(1) From Maryanne Wolf's "Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain" (again…)

RUDF?

In her quite fascinating book "Proust and the Squid", Maryanne Wolf talked about the story of a (English speaking) kid that, although too young to read or write more than the main letters of the alphabet, succeeded to interrupt his mother who was too busy to listen to him by writing her the four following letters "RUDF" – He actually meant "are you deaf?" in a very similar way that people write SMS or tweets. Although he cannot really read (nor write), he was able to switch from the sounds associated to each letter to a simple sentence.

Reading involves a lot of associations and transformations that are progressively 'hardwired' and 'softwired' in our brain through the intensive learning process we follow since our youngest time:

Meaning ßà Phonems ßà Sounds associated to letters ßà Letters ßà signs (RUDF?)

Meaning ßà Phonems ßà Syllabs ßà Combination of letters ßà signs (Are you deaf?)

While a novice reader shall struggle at each step, an expert reader will go from the sign to the meaning in an automated and nearly unconscious way, allowing her to concentrate on the information rather than on the transformation process from signs to letters to syllables to sounds to words to phrases to information (or the reverse for an expert writer…).

(Stretching a bit) we can find similarities with the enterprise IT department's main challenge: linking employees with tools and processes necessary to support the company mission (producing goods or delivering services to other organizations and individuals). This requires a pretty long and complex chain where each link can dim the performance and solidity of the whole chain, and (even worst) insidiously modify the sense of the entire construction:

Company mission ßà Products or services ßà Tools and processes ßà Employees ßà Applications ßà Servers ßà Network ßà Equipments (desktops, routers, PBX…).

Techniques like Wan optimization, Application acceleration and Application performance management can provide performances and guarantees required by the enterprise's remote users. While novice players will strive to manually decode and tune each piece of such complex technology, expert organizations will use Autonomic networking to bridge users to IT over the network in a fully automated manner and Wan Governance to align the value of their application delivery chain to their company's mission.

Are we deaf? May be not that much, finally…

(Lesendes Mädchen sitzt am Fenster mit Vogelbauer und Topfpflanzen, oil on canvas, 44 x 34 cm - Anonymous – XIX^th century)

People matter, finally

In 1774, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux started the erection of The Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans with goals not limited to build an efficient industrial complex to produce salt in large quantities. In top of a rational design to limit carriage and provide easy surveillance points, he installed comfortable houses and annexes for managers and administration officials, but also for workers and their families (including a chapel as well as private gardens to provide an appreciable complement to the usually limited and monotonous food).  

Technology and processes are not isolated from people that serve them; they need to take into account their motivation and their culture. In its turn, Application networking requires a global approach that embraces all the different aspects of networking, from performance to cost, as well as a way to improve the life of IT and network teams.

• When an end-user complains about application performance, IT teams usually lack visibility to understand properly the situation: is it a server, host or network issue? Is it the application itself that fails to deliver the right performance? Is the complaint justified or is the end-user in a bad mood because he has problems a bathroom that leaked during the night? Answers are then vague which adds to the frustration and facilitates the tendency to frequent unfair pin-pointing that make daily life difficult.
• When the CIO wants to clarify the impact of the network to the business, he gets approximate answers. Justifying the network strategy, performance and cost is painful. The network can easily be perceived as always too expensive while not performing enough. Deprived of high-level information, IT/network teams have hard time to convince about their choices; confidence is limited: it is difficult for them to become their management's trusted advisers.
• Being reactive to problems, support and troubleshooting is performed in urgent and critical situation, with stressed and angry users. Operations take most of the time of IT/network teams that have to run and put out fire at every place. This confines them to never-ending and quite demoralizing low-level tasks.

Enterprises that implement WAN governance processes and tools get a clear access to the performance impact of the different elements of the IT chain. KPIs and application SLAs enable their IT/network team to provide meaningful information to CIOs and other company executives. Associated to an Autonomic networking system, operations become proactive and most of performance brownouts are automatically solved.

Released from the 'quick and dirty' part of their job, IT and network teams can dedicate most of their time, talent and energy to higher level tasks, like long term planning, cost optimization, internal invoicing and application SLAs management. Providing high level information, working in the future and not only in the present time, they improve their value for the enterprise as well as their personal motivation.

People matter, finally. In one sense, modern Wan governance is to Application networking what Arc-et-Senans was to traditional saltworks, 250 years ago.

Once upon a time... (What are the key applications? 3/3)

Discussing how enterprises organize their applications, we previously saw in this study (Part 1 and Part 2) that on average:

• Enterprises differentiate 69 applications;
• They group these applications in 15 Classes;
• 3% of business critical traffic requires the same analysis accuracy than 54% of low critical traffic

We will now try to understand how the nature of the applications impacts the classification. We sorted the applications in three categories: Real-time (applications that are sensitive to delay variation); Transactional (application with a direct interaction between servers and people) and Background (applications that aim mainly to transfer large data between computers). Here are some typical examples of such applications:

• REAL-TIME: Voice, Videoconferencing, NTP…
• TRANSACTIONAL: SAP, CITRIX, RDP, Internet, Collaborative…
• BACKGROUND: FTP, Email, CIFS, Antivirus…

When we analyze how the type of these applications has been taken into account by enterprises, we found the following results:

• The number of User Class is balanced between Transactional and Background applications (6 to 7 Classes for each), while we get an average of only 2 classes for Real-time applications: the diversity of the application in an enterprise IT infrastructure comes from the data applications, not from the real-time one;
• The number of applications follows the same rule: 5 Real-time applications to be compared to 35 Transactional and 28 Background applications. This outcome is in sync with the former one: few real-time applications while transactional specialized applications blossom across the infrastructure…
• … This is also confirmed by the volume of traffic: 4% for Real-time, 50% for Transactional and 46% for Background. This result being more surprising, as I previoulsy thought that Background and Real-time applications would represent a volume much larger than the Transactional traffic.

Now, if we look at how business criticality and nature of application combine with the volume of the traffic across the enterprise's network we see that:

• Real-time applications have been assigned to the TOP criticality level. This is clearly due to the fact that they are not elastic applications. There is no gray zone: a phone call works or not, that's it. So when an enterprise deploys voice or videoconferencing across its data network, they have to work. Period.
• Transactional applications are spread across criticality levels and concentrate (in volume) on the LOW criticality level. Even with human to machine interactions, they are not all that important to the business: some can wait a bit in case of too large usage of the shared network;
• Background applications have only MEDIUM and LOW criticality. This was clearly expected. Even if a file or an email can carry very important data (and honestly this is not always the case…), to postpone them a few seconds will usually not make any harm to the business.

 

Will all of this be stable in the future?

I'm convinced that the need for thin-grain classification will remain or even amplify: the need for control and network governance is increasing fast. As for the volume breakdown, we can probably expect that Real-time traffic will grow significantly because of VoIP and Teleconferencing (you know, the saving on travels, etc…). On the other hand, we also see that Web applications use richer and richer contents, files size (thanks, Microsoft) and email attachments either. Imho, we must remain humble and accept that we do not know exactly what will happen; this is why we expect to run all of this in a yearly basis.

Once upon a time... (What are the key applications? 2/3)

We saw in part 1 of this study based on a panel of 48 networks representing an aggregated amount of more than 10 000 sites, that in average:

• Enterprises differentiate 69 key applications;
• They group these applications in 15 Classes;
• The number of applications and classes do not depend on the network size.

Let's see now how these enterprises manage their applications according to their criticality to the business. We classified them in four level of criticality: TOP, HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW. We voluntarily selected a relatively small number to get sure that the classification is really meaningful to enterprises: in a 64 value scale, how would you seriously compare level 43 with level 47?

Here are some examples of applications with their usual level of criticality (note that there are significant differences among enterprises, and we do not mean here that application A is always at criticality C):

• TOP criticality: SAP, ORACLE, CITRIX, AS400, Voice…
• HIGH criticality: LDAP, Video conferencing, SIEBEL, Intranet…
• MEDIUM criticality: NOTES, SHAREPOINT, Internet, Emails, File sharing…
• LOW criticality: File transfer, Antivirus, QUAKE, BITTORENT…

When studying how applications and User Classes are related together, it appeared that:

• The number of Classes is remarkably well balanced among criticality, with 3 to 4 User Classes per level;
• Application are also very regularly spread among business criticality, with an average of 15 to 20 applications per level;
• On the other hand, the volume of traffic over networks is not balanced: the higher is the importance of applications to the business, the lower is the % of network usage. TOP critical applications represent only a very small amount (3.3%) of the total of traffic, while LOW critical applications take more than half of this traffic (54%).

3% of business critical traffic requires the same analysis accuracy than 54% of low critical traffic: this means that the need for deep understanding of applications traffic and performance over the WAN is related to the importance of these applications for the enterprise activity, not to the amount of traffic over the network.

On a personal note to my colleague Nigel, who loves to ask CIOs if they know the portion of their network that is used for business applications, I can now provide him with the (average) answer: between 3% (TOP) and 9% (TOP + HIGH) of the traffic, for 15 to 30 critical applications.

In the next part of this study, we will see how applications can be split according to their technical characteristic (real-time, transactional, etc.).

Once upon a time… (what are the key applications ? 1/3)

In a previous post, we proposed a 12-point check-list for a WAN governance project. Let's discuss here the subject that begins our whole story: What are my key applications?

We recently made a survey (*) about implementation of Autonomic Networking and Objective-based management as configured by enterprises that use Ipanema solutions. I would like to share with you some results that I believe meaningful.

The study bears on a panel of 48 large enterprises, in all industry verticals across every continent. Aggregated, it represents more than 10,000 sites, and can be reasonably considered as a fairly representative sample.

 

• The first outcome is about the number applications discovered and/or declared: on average, we found 69 differentiated applications per enterprise. The classification system being practically unlimited, we can consider this figure as the current level of granularity that is required by an enterprise. I must recognize that we expected a smaller figure; it gives a sense of usage diversity in organizations.

 

• The second outcome is about the way applications are gathered by families (we call them "User Class" in the Ipanema jargon (**)). The average number of application groups is of 15 User Classes per enterprise, with a minimum of 7 and a maximum of 33 classes per network. 15 is then the "Magic Number" for WAN governance powered by Autonomic Networking. The graph beside shows the number of enterprises according to the number of User Classes they implement, with the classical 'long tail' in such type of statistics.

 

• The third outcome is that neither the number of applications nor the number of User Classes depends on the network size. This time, the result was expected as the principle of Objective-based management is to drive application performance from the enterprise's application portfolio and not from its network topology.

 

In further posts, we will continue our story and examine how business criticality has been managed as well as the nature of the declared applications.

 

(*) I would like to particularly thank the Ipanema Support and Consulting team that makes this study possible.

(**) A "User Class" gathers all applications with same Business Criticality (4 levels, from TOP down to LOW) and same Type of traffic (3 options among Real-time, Transactional and Background).