WAN Governance

Metro line 13 and enterprise networks: a common cause

I can't help but translate an extract of a recent article read in the French newspaper "Le Monde". This paper was about the Line 13, famous for being the toughest of the entire Paris metro network. The discussion is about planning capacity:

Filling pipes. The calculation would it be presumptuous? The pipes are filled faster than people ever imagine. In practice, whenever a transport line is installed or extended, traffic forecasts are revised upwards within six months. And it applies to highways, too. The director of the Line 13 is also well placed to know it: "the mayors of cities served by the line bring new enterprises; they announce 5,000 jobs over here, 10,000 there. Development of this policy, I 'm not sure it is a good thing" he laments. Because, incredible as it may seem, when creating new offices close to the line, the RATP(*) is neither informed nor consulted.

Doesn't it sound familiar?

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

* RATP is the organization in charge of designing and running the Paris metro.

Application delivery? Come on, this is not complicated…

 

In a recent paper published last week in Computer World, Johna Till Johnson (president and senior founding partner at Nemertes Research) talked about "getting a handle on chaos and complexity" applied to networking. Johna points out that "complexity translates directly to increased operation costs and decreased reliability" and raised an interesting question "is being complicated the same as being complex?"

Wikipedia proposes a simple answer: Complex is the opposite of independent, while complicated is the opposite of simple.

Transposed to networking, we can see that:

• IP networking is "complicated" (myriad connecting stovepipes). The simple text page that you currently read has probably crossed 100+ active devices (switches, routers, repeaters, modems, etc.) from the Typepad blog server to your desktop, each of them transforming locally the information envelop to pass it to the next hop in a reasonably efficient (and effective) way. But there are finally very few interactions between all of these components (to make each hop as independent as possible was actually the great idea that made IP networking so successful).
• Application delivery is "complex" (effective integrated solutions). Above the pure transport of information between servers and clients, many interactions affect the user experience. There is a fundamental reason for this: in most cases the user is a human being (and when it is not the case, there are – still – humans behind the machine behind the machine). And we care about "time" (life is short) and "quality" (we feed ourselves with harmony and satisfaction). We want information quickly, in a format (frames, sounds, images) that matches our rising level of expectations. This creates constraints that networks built of independent routers and switches are not prepared to handle.

Transport is about controlling space (which route will this information use?) while application delivery is about controlling time (when will this information be delivered?). And time is one of the key components of the interactions that are the essence of complex systems.

This is why classical network management solution, thinking at box level, are so efficient to manage complicated transport infrastructure (inventory, configuration, supervision, etc.) and so ineffective in guaranteeing proper delivery of applications. You can breakdown a puzzle representing a cat into small parts and make it simpler. Please remember your tries with beetles when you were 5 years old and don't do that to the house cat!

This is why I believe that WAN Governance and its top-down path is the right global approach for effective application delivery: far from carving up the cat, let's take globally care of it.

Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life down here…

Classical networking approaches are no more consistent with cloud computing (see for example "the slowly evolving WAN" by Jim Metzler and Steve Taylor). The lack of innovation during the last 10 years laggards the network: static, blind, unable to control application flows and to guarantee the availability of good application performance to end users. Designed with other purposes in mind nearly 20 years ago, no wonder old-fashioned MPLS cannot match the new situation.

With cloud computing, situations are complex and change too fast for legacy and static policy based management. A cloud-ready network must learn, decide and adapt dynamically to match the increasingly dynamic users' traffic. It must take into account all the business applications (private and public cloud based, peer-to-peer voice and video) as well as the recreational ones.

A cloud-ready network must leverage Internet ubiquity and cost effectiveness and combine it with more guaranteed and value priced MPLS networks. It must also embrace mobility and new access devices (tablets, smart-phones).

One can set-up servers in an unknown datacenter from a web interface in a few minutes; why should he wait weeks and months for the network to adapt to the new situation? A cloud-ready network must couple cloud datacenter with network behavior in a flexible orchestration manner.

Enterprise's silos are vanishing. With cloud computing BUs go beyond the corporate IT organization: repressive policies don't make the job anymore. Yet IT managers need to keep a reasonable control of the situation: know what's happening, decide about strategic topics, apply the decisions and check results, manage costs. A cloud-ready network must provide CIOs with global control in a simple manner.

Far from complex, rigid and inefficient policy-based schemes, a cloud-ready network must be Objective-based. Intelligent and fast, it should learn and adapt by itself in real time, serving high level enterprise's goals. Autonomic networking has already proved its ability to solve this tricky problem in many situations.

Application visibility, QoS, control of each user's flow, hybrid networks, mobility, WAN Optimization, application acceleration…: cloud-ready networks must embrace and tightly couple all these features in an all-in-one approach.

A WAN governance model, allowing CIOs to take the right decisions at corporate level rather than to react under the pressure of daily events would be a key characteristic of cloud-ready networks.

The IT revolution has started with cloud computing: it's time for the network to wake up and meet the challenge!

Who wants to be a Millionaire?

No one is really interested to save money. Your kids aren't. Neither is your boss. They're kidding when they told they are. They all want more power, more security, more options, more speed, more free time, more education, more space, more dreams, more friends, more love.

Explorers, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists are not moved by money. They need dollars, euros, rupees, yens or yuans to make dreams happen and visions crystallize. Money before dreams? Ego before vision? These are road signs to decline, indications of no more territory to explore, discovery to make, innovation to offer and original work to undertake.

When the CEO tells the CFO who tells the CIO who tells the IT Director (who tells his suppliers) that she wants to save on IT, she is just joking. What she (he, he or he) wants is faster decision process, shorter implementation, improved flexibility, better customer service, more accurate indicators, more time to think…

This is the key difference between IT or WAN governance approaches and blind cost-cutting programs. Like a good doctor who treats the disease and not (only) its symptoms, holistic approaches address root causes of problems and offer sustainable solutions. At the end of the day, providing pragmatic solutions to oversized resources, inefficient processes, slow applications or disorganized operations is the fastest path to efficiency: Concentrate on cost and quality decreases – focus on quality and costs decrease.

Actually, the truly limited resource is time. Its fundamental limitation shapes every aspect of our life, every decision we (consciously or unconsciously) take. The proverb is wrong: time is much more than money. Who wants to be a millionaire? May be the right question should have been "who need to be a millionaire?"

Illustrations: Louise Bourgeois (Paris 1911 - New-York 2010) – "Give or Take" and "Maman" in front of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She recently passed away – What a character!

Bandwidth usage by the numbers

In conjunction with WAN Governance initiative, an approach that synchronizes application performance management directly with business requirements, Ipanema sampled 50 among its largest enterprise customers to understand their current bandwidth usage (see here for more details).

The rationale behind WAN Governance is to better align network performance according to direct business objectives. And in order to do that, we must start with an understanding of current performance and usage. By understanding the nature of data traffic on the network, the infrastructure managers can optimize performance and availability based on actual business usage, thereby lowering infrastructure costs and improving end-user productivity.

This analysis showed that the most critical applications account for only a small share of network usage—a mere 3%, up to 9% if we sum the [top+high] criticality applications—whereas the lowest priority applications eat up more than half (54%) of network resources.

Network Applications by the Numbers
(based on survey by Ipanema of 50 customers -10,000 sites)
69	Differentiated applications per enterprise
15	Families of applications, with 7 to 33 app. Each
4	Business criticalities (TOP, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW)
3%	Traffic volume of TOP criticality applications
9%	Traffic volume of [TOP + HIGH] criticality apps
54%	Traffic volume of LOW criticality applications

The numbers tell an interesting story: the enterprises differentiate an average of 69 applications on their networks (even if some run a larger number of specific applications – the CIO of a international engineering company recently explained me that she identified 878 different applications across her global organization – birds of a same feather can easily be grouped, leading to a more manageable number). Enterprise applications were classified (and prioritized) according to four categories: top, high, medium and low. Top criticality applications require always-on availability with an immediate and direct impact on everyday business operations, such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, VoIP, video conferencing; low criticality applications were those with little impact on business performance, including non urgent file transfers and personal/recreational applications like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Usually emails are classified in the medium criticality level.

This makes clear that bandwidth is not the main criterion to manage application performance. WAN Governance should apply the same granularity for network performance monitoring and analysis for each application to enable organizations to fully understand their applications traffic, however complex, and guarantee the availability of applications with greatest impact on business performance.

By analyzing critical sites and applications – in addition to measuring other core requirements such as actual delivered performance against current SLAs, technical network variances such as jitter and server response time, and indicators such as Application Quality Score (AQS) for data applications and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for voice and video applications, enterprises have clear business priorities and a measurable set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for application performance over their WAN.

Automated management tools (such as the one based on Autonomic Networking) can then dynamically control the network and its traffic accordingly – driving to end-user performance guarantees and further savings at network and IT level.