Solution Centre Blog

Presence Networks Throws Reuters Instant Messaging Users a Free Lifeline

Good news for those affected by the US court�s decision to ban Reuters using some security technology (FaceTime) in their IM service. This seemingly left Reuters with the option of providing no service or a service without the security features. According to a FaceTime press release of July 29, 2008: �Many financial institutions rely on the Reuters Messaging Compliance Manager to ensure compliance with SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations for logging, archiving and retrieval of electronic communications regarding financial transactions.�

Apparently in court Eran Barak, the head of Thomson Reuters' strategy and collaboration services, said �If Thomson Reuters were suddenly unable to make use of the Reuters Messaging compliance product, Thomson Reuters' customers would be crippled in their day-to-day business operations.�� and �There is no practical immediate substitute for the Reuters Messaging compliance product in the event of any disruption. Any development of a suitable replacement (and complete transition of existing customers to the new product) would take several months (and would involve tremendous expenditure of money and labor) for Thomson Reuters to convert to an alternative product �" (Decl.of Eran Barak, pp. 6-7; 1:08-cv-4730-CM Document 19)

Presence Networks is offering any Financial Services organisations not currently able to use Reuters Instant Messaging, or concerned about the security implications or disruption to service, an immediate solution of free transfer and network setup, plus the first 100 seats per company free for 90 days on its secure LiveWorker(TM) Software as a Service IM.

Presence Networks specialise in presence and IM, providing Software as a Service designed to meet security requirements and recording for compliance. They can extend and link individual networks to cover as many people as required both inside and outside corporate firewalls and as all users get their secure managed service with unlimited access from PCs, Blackberrys and Mobiles from around GBP 5.99 ($12.00) a month, we believe they will find it incredible value.

To address the fears many IT Professionals have about the security of Instant Messaging, LiveWorker(TM) is fully encrypted and records all chat and transactions. The service offer incorporates the latest real-time communications technology including encrypted file transfer between users. Secure, recorded Public IM gateways can be switched on at the discretion of the Administrators enabling users to see and communicate with contacts on different systems through a single interface.

Contact us if you want to know more.

Free Secure, Business Class Instant Messaging

Presence Networks is offering up to 5,000 seats free for a year on its new global LiveWorker� Service to help businesses with limited IT resources start using secure Instant Messaging and online collaboration tools.

They say that British Companies are falling some way behind others in using technology to collaborate online, despite research showing there significant business gains to be made including increasing productivity, cutting costs and extending market reach. Their offer will enable even the smallest company to harness the power of this technology in just a few minutes. They hope to encourage others to join them and jointly create inter-connected, business quality secure live networks with their customers, suppliers and partners. �

To address the fears many IT Professionals have about the security of Instant Messaging, LiveWorker� is fully encrypted and records all chat and transactions. The service offer incorporates the latest real-time communications technology with Chat, Web Meetings and encrypted file transfer between users included in the free package, with SMS on a pay per use basis and low cost teleconferencing charged on phone bill by User�s existing Service Provider.

For companies seeking to enhance security or to build larger communities, Presence Networks provides enhanced services or large-scale deployed system with sophisticated user admin management and security tools, Anti Virus and integration with Active Directory and other voice and data services.
Business Instant Messaging use is predicted to explode over the next 24 months as Companies seek ways to reduce their costs and improve their productivity and gain competitive edge. Some Analysts even claim that IM use will exceed e-mail by 2010 as email is overwhelmed by SPAM.

Companies can sign-up for free seats. The free offer is limited to 10 seats per company for the first 500 to register and on a first come basis*

Request your FREE ONE YEAR*, 10 User trial and start liveworking today, using the "Contact Me" link

Netuitive�s BSM now runs across virtual and physical infrastructures

Netuitive have a great business service management (BSM) product, which now supports both physical and virtual environments. Its Netuitive Service Analyser product is a self-learning correlation software for managing performance of enterprise applications across mixed physical and virtual environments.

Netuitive Service Analyser has already earned acclaim for providing the only self-learning and continuously adaptive software for automating BSM. With new capabilities, customers can manage the performance of enterprise applications end-to-end, across distributed servers, databases and network systems � that are both physical and virtual.

One of the problems with IT environments is that it ends up being a bunch of silos � storage, servers, network, desktops, etc, usually with different people managing. The push to virtualisation is in danger of creating yet another silo. Mission critical, enterprise applications run across the whole environment, so that end to end performance measurement is fundamental. Being able to get a single pane visibility across both physical and virtual environments is now a necessity.

There are lots of monitoring products on the market, but they tend to look at each variable as an entity, rather that in relation to any other. This becomes even more significant in virtualised environments when the ability to monitor the huge range of variables is well beyond most of us humans. The outcome is that people turn off monitors so they don�t get annoyed by false alarms. The problem with that is you then lose visibility of what is really happening in the environment and without visibility, the system becomes a free-for-all and management largely becomes reactive responses to end user complaints, rather than pro-active management before the event.

Netuitive�s platform is completely self-learning and continuously adaptive, performing sophisticated statistical trends analysis and multi-variable correlation to automatically determine normal system behaviour, measure and forecast deviations from the norm, and interpret symptoms for proper alerting and diagnosis. When the software detects or forecasts behaviour outside that range, Trusted Alarms� are issued�up to 2 hours ahead of the deviation becoming a problem, giving time for pro-active action, rather than scrabbling after the event.

AutoCAD 2007/8 new .dwg file format and WAN optimisation

There has been a lot in the press recently about the problems (particularly) Riverbed has been having with the new AutoCAD file formats for 2007 and 2008 http://esgblogs.typepad.com/brians_blog ... ns-co.html is an example of what�s out there.

The problem manifests itself when you save files, where the new file format means there is negligible acceleration achieved (Riverbed quote 1.3x) and users make references to bricks. Riverbed claim 7.64x improvement with AutoCAD 2004 using the old file format.

Packeteer have been doing some work to look at the performance of their iShared and iShaper WAFS system and say the remote user will see no difference with their system whichever file format they use.

�With Packeteer�s iShaper and iShared solution the transition from earlier versions of AutoCAD to AutoCAD 2008 was seamless and trouble-free,� said Vaughn Silar, president & CEO of Paragon Engineering Services, Inc. �In optimizing our AutoCAD 2008 files across the WAN between multiple offices, Packeteer was able to deliver the same high performance application visibility, acceleration and intelligent service assurance for which we have come to depend on them.�

In tests using 80ms round trip latency over T1 lines, Packeteer found that an 8MB AutoCAD 2008 file took 140 seconds to save across the native WAN while that same file took only seven seconds to save with the iShaper solution, a performance improvement of 20x. Packeteer�s iShaper solution performance was also not affected by ISP (Increment Save Percentage) changes that Autodesk 2008 utilises to optimise the size of the AutoCAD files upon file saves and which negatively impact the performance of other WAN Optimisation solutions.

These results can be attributed to Packeteer�s CIFS acceleration which employs a superior WAFS architecture that ensures local file server-like performance and is future-proofed against any protocol or file format changes for CIFS applications. With a combination of streaming, file object caching and byte data reduction technologies, the WAFS technology built into Packeteer�s iShared and iShaper solutions always deliver the fastest user response times on file opens and saves.

By way of confirmation of the performance of the Packeteer solution, in an April 3, 2008 review by InfoWorld Magazine�s Test Center, reviewer Keith Schultz said, �Packeteer�s iShaper is at its best optimizing CIFS traffic and shaping traffic on the WAN. Its overall optimization and acceleration is right there with the best of them; its CIFS performance is the best I�ve tested. Reporting too is top notch, and the single point of administration makes it easy to manage the appliance.�

InMage 4.1 Released

InMage have released the latest version of their DR-Scout, business protection software, which provides CDP (Continuous Data Protection), replication and automated application failover.

A host of new features and configuration options are included in the new release, with application support now including:

BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)
Oracle
SAP
SharePoint
Exchange
SQL
Virtual Servers

VMware
Virtual Server
Oracle VM

...Read more - Product Information

Real world network analysis and troubleshooting

As people get in to real life uses of Mazu Profiler you can see the lights starting to turn on.

It�s interesting because it is one of those products where people always say �we have something which will do that�. Then they see it running and the realisation dawns.

A simple example came up today at a customer. The CEO had had a laptop a remote office where he was due to do a presentation to some new starters. Users at the remote site started complaining about poor performance of the network. Looking at the Mazu dashboard it was clear that the laptop was set to synchronise and was pulling 1.5GB of private files across the WAN.

Historically they would have used a sniffer or similar network analysis tool to look at this kind of problem, the difficulty with that approach is that the activity has often completed by the time the sniffer is in place, coupled with the difficulty some people have driving the snaiffer and understanding what it is telling you in the first place.

Having realised this was happening here they wondered if it was happening elsewhere and found similar instances, including one where someone had synchronised 4GB across a 2Mbps link.

Being able to look back and see what happened last minute, 30 minutes ago, 15 hours ago, 3 weeks ago, 4 months ago, is just so powerful. What is different, what has changed, does this happen elsewhere, all these are very simple to answer with Mazu.

Happily the customer was as impressed as we are.

Mazu product data...

Power management, hardware failure and MTBF with Cassatt Collage.

There has been a lot of "chatter" lately about power management, hardware failure and MTBF numbers. James , Aloof, Vinay and others have been discussing it and it's been an interesting topic to follow.

Data centres are eating more and more power, both in terms of power to the servers themselves and to the air conditioning units cooling them.
We've talked about power savings from implementing virtualisation before, here , here and here for example.

But, IT people don't like power cycling servers, partly for the reasons that James & co. have suggested. That reason being that historically the extra load put on a computer at power up has caused many a server to die. However modern computers are better engineered and the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is pretty respectable.

HOWEVER....

We in IT know the fundamental law of computing... Murphy's Law.
It's not the average that gets you, it's the exception to the rule, the machine that fails or the set of machines that fail destroying the MTBF number in your data centre in a moment. It's that one server that had that one application that you didn't realise was not being backed up properly, that you didn't realise the other applications needed, that you didn't realise the CEO looked at hourly!
That server is the one that will have dual power supplies fail when you turn it off and on again, Murphy's law pretty much guarantees it.

There are two ways that Cassatt can help you deal with this.
One is balancing risk against power savings. By powering down all the servers that are not needed, you can save a large amount in utility bills. If the saving is larger than the risk of having to buy a new piece of hardware to get that one server back from the grave, then you win.

This saving can also be tracked and the saving added say to a new hardware budget instead. So you can have spare hardware ready, or better yet used to start putting the more advanced features of Cassatt into play.

Cassatt's Collage software offers the automated power control, the power savings come from there as discussed above.
Collage also allows you to automate the power, operating system and applications on a large number of hardware servers. With Collage's advanced features, you can push to bare metal an entire application server, operating system, application and even reconfigure the network switches to enable the port the hardware you have just provisioned is plugged into.

With Collage, all your servers become nodes, that all your applications could potentially run on if required.

Collage will shutdown that server we were talking about earlier at say 7pm, then try and turn it back on at say 7am (saving you all that money on power and cooling). Should the hardware fail for some reason, Collage will select a new server with appropriate CPU, RAM, DISK, etc. and push the operating system and application onto it, it'll re configure the network so that the new hardware is on the right vLAN and as far as the rest of the world is concerned it will be the exact same server as before.

So getting back to the discussion around MTBF numbers and Mr. Murphy's law. What Cassatt can do is accept that Murphy's Law is in operation, that despite advances in technology hardware will fail, that it will fail at inconvenient moments (like when you are asleep, or on holiday) and it can cope with that situation to ensure that the service levels you have configured are maintained. This is above and beyond the mission to be "green" and save energy.

So... if you believe in MTBF numbers or in Murphy's law, Collage is able to do its thing. It'll save power by shutting machines down for you and if you go whole hog, it'll handle all the rest, so you can enjoy that Martini on the beach during your holiday (or should that be Eggnog by the fireside at this time of year?).

Links:
Cassatt Page
Creating Agile Data Centre Server Environment

Optimising WAN for Application Acceleration.

In a survey of 235 organisations by Aberdeen Group, 93% of respondents said they increased their bandwidth over the last two years, but only 52% saw an improvement in application response times, only 36% saw WAN latency decrease and only 18% saw a 50% improvement in performance.

This is really no surprise. Bandwidth is rarely the problem, if only it were that easy!!

Aberdeen identifies �Best in Class� companies who exhibited common characteristics:

� Likely to have polices for prioritisation of WAN traffic.

� Centrally manage WAN optimisation appliances

� Application specific compression tools

They also identify actions to get to become �Best in Class�:

� Develop capabilities for monitoring and analysing performance of applications running on the WAN.

� Use historical data to plan chances of bandwidth capacity

� Deploy technology solutions for shaping WAN traffic

� Develop controls to limit the use of bandwidth for applications

Our view is a lot of this makes sense. Many things seem to cause confusion amongst some customers we talk to about application acceleration and WAN optimisation as there is often a lack of understanding about this pretty complicated area. We hear comments like �I can ping it OK but it runs like a dog.�

Ping is sometimes OK for testing connectivity, but that�s about it. CoS and QoS are not the same animal. Latency is a killer. Bandwidth limitations can often be overcome by other means. Even experienced network managers are often surprised when they get visibility of what is really running over their WAN. Knowing what changes (network behaviour) is key to troubleshooting as well as making sensible decisions about which applications to accelerate and which techniques to use. Once WAN optimisation and application acceleration has been applied, there is an ongoing need to monitor the WAN in detail to ensure the optimisation is doing what it is supposed to be doing.

Companies that can view bandwidth consumption per network location, and per application, per user, can better plan for changes in capacity and preserve optimal application performance. Those which can then apply policies to give granular control of those variables and measure to confirm optimal acceleration are those who are most likely to succeed with their application acceleration and provide users on remote sites with services which allow them to work effectively.

You can read the report on the Aberdeen site

What is RPO and why it matters with CDP using InMage DR-Scout.

With our work in Continuous Data Protection (CDP) we often end up in discussions about this three letter acronym RPO.
RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective, and in basic terms it is that window of risk between backups. It is the amount of data the business is prepared to lose.

Wikipedia describes it like this:

"..Recovery point objective (RPO) describes a point in time to which data must be restored in order to be acceptable to the owner(s) of the processes supported by that data.
This is often thought of as the time between the last available backup and the time a disruption could potentially occur. The RPO is established based on tolerance for loss of data or re-entering of data..."

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_point_objective )

In real terms it works like this. If you do your backup at say midnight everyday, then at 9am the next day the RPO would be 9 hours, at noon it would be 12 hours. The worst case scenario is at 11:59pm, where you have a RPO of 23 hours 59 minutes.

Now, why does this matter? It matters because is your server dies at lunchtime (RPO of 12 hours) you've lost all that data from, this morning. :(
In real terms you have probably only lost 3 hours work (9am-12), but that's still 3 hours lost! How many sales orders, reports, invoices, etc have been lost?

Why this comes up when we talk to people about CDP is pretty easy to illustrate. Keep in mind the example above and take a look at the chart below:

This is a RPO chart taken from a live server with a CDP product called InMage DR-Scout installed. The RPO times are in the range of 1-2 minutes, meaning should something bad happen, at most 2 minutes of data would be lost. We can repeat the question "How many sales orders, reports, invoices, etc have been lost?" but instead of 3 hours think in terms of less than 3 minutes.

The chart above, we should point out is a server being protected via DR-Scout to a target server via a 1MB WAN link (with about 40ms round trip ping times). This server has about 200MB of data "churn" per hour. So what the chart tells us is even in a catastrophic disaster where the entire primary site was lost, our disaster recovery site would have all the data up to at worst 2 minutes before.

Further reading:
Should I replicate data or use continuous data protection?
Does Your Data Protection System Meet Your SLAs?
CDP or Replication for DR and Business Continuity?

Using Packeteer iShared WAFS to improve application performance over the WAN.

WAFS, is predominately a technology used by users. By this I mean that in a typical scenario, your users in the remote locations access files directly from the cache to get nice fast access to files from the central fileservers.

Recently however, we have worked with several firms to enable applications to access the cache rather than people. In one case we ran a live test where the cache was used exclusively by an application and users had no access to files on the cache whatsoever.

Overall, it has proven quite successful.
Caching data for applications provides the same speed benefits that user�s experience. We have seen the typical speed improvements that we have documented previously (previous blog entry) which have delivered improvements in performance for users but also shown measurable time savings with large processing jobs.

Here are a couple of examples:

1) Web-based knowledge/document management system.
A lot of clients we work with are using knowledge management systems, especially those involved with large client projects, such as design firms or in construction. Typically built on a platform with a web front end and database such as IIS and SQL, like SharePoint, these systems allow users to "check-in" and "check-out" documents via a client or web interface. These systems often maintain copies of the data at remote sites for users at say a construction site itself or in remote offices.
We have used iShared to maintain this data, which has reliably served the data quickly and saved time especially where the file would not be on the remote site normally. Most of these systems use simple mechanisms to transfer the data from the central data store to the remote data store, using full file copies and standard protocols such as HTTP or CIFS/SMB.
By using iShared we gained considerable speed improvements just in transferring these files as the iShared system uses several optimisation methods and its own efficient protocol to send the files.

We have struck some "issues" with some packages, as obviously they were not built to have a smart cache like iShared. On one occasion we experienced some file loss as a result of the knowledge base software deleting files prior to copying files from the data centre. This resulted in the files being deleted obediently by the iShared system from the data centre. Then the software tried to copy the file it had just requested be deleted... bang!

It highlights the need to be cautious when implementing WAFS for applications as unless you have a thorough knowledge of how WAFS works and how the application interacts, some subtle but catastrophic problems can arise.

2) Data processing and report runs.
Although it seems mad in this day and age, running batch jobs to process data and or produce reports is still a required evil. Often, the location needing/producing the reports is not the one producing the data. For example in the manufacturing sector, "head office" might be the ones needing the reports based on the data being produced at the "factory". Moving the report runs to the Factory might be one solution, but the reports would still need to be moved to the HQ at some point.
WAFs can help in this scenario too. iShared is able to optimise file transfers and is also able to optimise/accelerate application protocols also, say for example SQL traffic. We have done practical and lab experiments where we have optimised SQL queries (see here for some details) which have produced some marked improvements. We have worked on examples where data has been required to be exported to XML prior to importing into another application this again is handled well by iShared. The "byte-level differencing" in fact becomes a considerable optimisation when especially when exporting to the same file on a regular basis as only the new data added is transferred.

The biggest issues we have come across when using WAFS to optimise applications have been related to the internal working of iShared and the specific applications. We've discovered that running iShared in a "normal" configuration as you might get find "out of the box" is often not ideal and can in fact cause some of the issues that we have observed. This is because the application's behaviour has been designed to work with a cache (or at least with a cache that the application itself does not maintain). We have on occasion had to advise our clients that WAFS although providing some impressive speed gains would simply not be a sensible solution as we discovered an incompatibility in their application that would have caused serious problems.

If you are considering WAFS as a way to improve application performance you are probably on the right track, just be careful in terms of making sure you have a pretty detailed understanding of both your application and WAFS, as getting it right can take some tweaking and getting it wrong could be P45 territory.

Product Page:
Packeteer iShared WAFS