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Support AppCritical is a powerful network testing tool we have been using to help our clients to diagnose a variety of WAN issues lately.
AppCritical allows you to test all the hops along a path without installing agents along the path. This we have found is useful for seeing where the bottleneck or problem lies. On more than one occasion in the past couple of months we have seen network issues affecting our clients that were on the ISP's network not our clients.
We've seen clients with double digit connections on their sites getting poor performance. A quick test with AppCritical was able to point at the culprit router and our client was able to open a support case with the ISP who replaced the router at fault.
Another example was a remote site (using our iShared appliance) that was getting huge packet loss across the WAN, we were again within a couple of minutes able to point the finger of blame directly at the xDSL privider and tell them exactly where in their cloud the problem sat.
On Internal LANs we have also been able solve a variety of issues.
AppCritical does not simply tell you where the problem lies, it is able to tell you what the cause of the problem is. Some typical performance killing issues AppCritical finds are Duplex mismatch problems, I.e. a network card set to 100 half but connecting to a 100 full port. AppCritical gives visibility on network congestion at each hop along with the detected bandwidth, so can help find problems if a certain segment of your LAN is getting hammered.
Unlike SNMP or sniffer based approaches to the problem, AppCritical does it's testing by sending a small less than 1% additional load carefully crafted amount of traffic across the network. This traffic is normally about 30 packets a second per hop so does not trigger alarms or add to congestion etc.
When we have been assisting our clients we have used the SAS or Stand Alone Sequencer, rather than the Network based sequencer. This command Line tool is given an IP address to test through to and generates an XML results file which our clients have emailed or uploaded to us. We then import the info into the analysis tool and this does all the math and generates the pretty PDF reports, etc.
The SAS tool allows our clients to test within the security of their WAN or LAN without giving access to us, opening ports or having to configure anything, it has proved really useful.
When installed in a permanent installation, AppCritical is able to proactively monitor your WAN/LAN giving alerts when problems are detected. Obviously, because of the way it does it's testing as well as reporting the existence of a problem it provides some diagnostics. This means that if you are being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, you can have diagnostic information/testing done before you even get your dressing gown on.
Links to further information:
WAN Analysis Service
AppCritical product page
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Gartner Predicts Instant Messaging Will Be De Facto Tool for Voice, Video and Text Chat by the end of 2011
Some interesting observations were made by Gartner today, saying that enterprises are starting to invest enterprise grade IM rather than consumer products.Highlighting the considerable business benefits that can be accrued by connecting people in different locations by text, video and voice in a single application is incredibly powerful and suits ad hoc chat as well as formal meetings.
IM is increasingly being used to rapidly disseminating critical information to the entire enterprise, groups of users or individuals in cases such as natural catastrophes, health issues, network outages or schedule changes. In some cases, the IM network remains operational when phone or e-mail systems are down.
In customer relations departments and call centres IM is being used to foster closer relationships by providing faster and easier access to the most relevant part of the organisation.
IM leverages presence technology, and businesses are beginning to see the benefit of using presence across multiple applications - real-time collaboration making presence information available beyond the confines of an IM application and using the client as a launch pad for many types of communications channels and services.
We can’t disagree with any of this; it is a case we have been making for a while now. The trouble is people think of IM as something kids do, but for the enterprise it can be so much more than that and having the ability to see peoples presence state, is just so powerful and can bring huge efficiency benefits.
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No matter what monitoring system you use for your network and server environment, it will probably have some sort of alarm system. The idea of course, is that the system monitors business critical services and alerts you should there be jeopardy to the service.
The problem is the theory and reality don’t match, or not in any environment we have seen. Most monitoring systems allow you to set an alarm level, once that level is reached and alarm is triggered. The problem with this kind of alarm technology is several fold:
• The alarm trigger levels are statically set – what’s true today may not be true tomorrow
• The alarm thresholds are just guesses, how can anyone know what the right value is for that parameter until it has been running for a while
• Service Packs and similar updates can cause changes, so requiring alarm thresholds to be reset
• No account is made of the context, perhaps that memory usage level is high just because the machine is busy, not because there is a problem
• No account is taken of cyclic requirements – people understand that the email system is busy first thing in the morning as people logon and check their messages, but alarm systems generally don’t
The end result is you spend a lot of time tuning thresholds and even then you still get false alarm overload. Some monitoring products are supposed to be smarter, but generally all they do is average over a period, so you lose spikes which might be important. In fact the literature for perhaps the best known one says:
Add performance thresholds that are appropriate to your environment. You may need to create rule overrides to enable granular deployment. Determine if the rule is actionable. If there is not an action to take when the rule generates an alert, consider disabling the rule.
and so on, or in English - add static rules which may or may not be relevant and if you get lots off false alarms, turn it off.
So how do you stop you data centre or NOC being flooded with false alarms and your operations people spending their lives chasing these irrelevant events? You could turn the alarms off. Might make the system a bit redundant, but at least the operations people could get on and do some work. A smarter alternative is put something on the end of the monitoring system, to take the output and apply intelligence to it to decide if that alarm event makes sense, if it does then sound the alarm, if it doesn’t then suppress it.
The situation is even worse for virtualised environments, where monitoring becomes even trickier and there is another layer of complexity to worry about.
The other issue is there are too many variables for most normal humans to keep on top of – datacentres are complex paces these days.
The only thing we have found that handles this kind of complexity and reduces data centre false alarms dramatically is Netuitive. Their engine is agnostic, so it integrates with all the standard monitoring systems, such as BMC, HP, Tivoli, NetIQ, Mercury, etc. With VMware it integrates directly, so you don’t need any monitoring tools, which is just as well, as some monitoring is not that good in such environments.
More details available here.
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There is a cracking blog by Ken Oestreich http://fountnhead.blogspot.com/2007/05/ ... -2007.html relating to Forrester Research’s 2007 IT Forum, which stimulated some interesting thoughts. Sounds like much of the conference was about aligning IT with the business (no brainer) summed up by CEO, George Colony "There are no IT projects anymore, just Business Projects"
Ken quoted from a presentation given by Robert Beauchamp, CEO of BMC software. Like the cobblers children with no shoes - IT (alright, BT) {Business Technology) organizations in enterprises are arguably the least automated departments around. ERP is automated. Finance is automated. Customer interaction is automated. But IT is still manually glued-together, with operations costs continuing to outpace capital investments.
To reinforce the point he showed a graph from IDC showing the OpEx costs are rising at an alarming rate, reported elsewhere to be twice the IT spend.
So, there are two thought chains that fall out of those observations. The first is this idea of the shoeless children. That is just so true!! We work with all this high technology, which helps (or in some cases allows) the rest of the organisation do their thing in an automated and effective way as possible and yet we shuffle CDs, or manually deploy images, or at best have some provisioning tool to help build servers, but we still have to fiddle with the VLANs and the LUN masking or whatever.
Purchase orders for materials can be automatically placed, based on stock levels and sales forecasts, yet we get a call in the middle of the night because the Exchange server has fallen over.
We (hopefully) get paid automatically at the end of the month, but if the application is resource hungry it usually requires someone to set up a new box or tweak some share settings or similar.
Much of what we do is pitifully bad. It can take days to manually build a server and get it fully patched, mounted in the network with the right backup agents, AV, etc. When something goes wrong we spend ages trawling through logs trying to work out what changed. Alarms go of all over the place for no obvious reason other than something has crossed some arbitrary threshold. No wonder running costs for IT departments are so high. For some people, this must allow for the buzz of a big empire, but from the companies point of view it is bad news. If this was the right way to do things they would still have accountants handwriting ledgers in double entry bookkeeping. There is a reason no one would think such a thing is reasonable. It is NOT reasonable.
Even worse when you get round to things like asset utilisation. Most non virtualised environments run at something like 10% utilisation. Even virtualised ones (from the feedback we get) only run at 20) to 30%. Lets be generous and say a good department runs at 50% utilisation (if that is you, please let us know – we would love to know how you do it). Imagine the fuss if half the people in the organisation spent their entire “working” lives sat in the canteen drinking coffee? Or the airline that kept half their fleet on the ground?
What are the options to put shoes back on the children’s feet? Having acknowledged the problem, presumably the objective is threefold:
• Get better asset utilisation
• Reduce fire fighting and evolve proactive management
• Automate, like the rest of the organisation
For the first, virtualisation is a natural consideration and a look at our study on consolidation and virtualisation might be food for thought.
For the second, everyone spends loads of money on monitoring systems that tell them things they don’t care about and send them on wild goose chases. Getting the false alarms under control means you can do something constructive with the time freed up.
There are lots of solutions for provisioning, but that is not really the issue. The real need is to define the service level the business needs and having the system do whatever it needs to provide that service level, without human intervention.
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Some real life analysis revealed some significant figures and potential improvements.
The original environment was 40 or so HP servers with about 2TB of direct attached storage (DAS). A fairly typical environment, with file and print servers, domain controllers and application servers, like SQL each running on separate servers.
Traditional Like for Like Replacement
Procuring 40 or so replacement servers with appropriate direct attached storage for a ballpark cost of £111,280, plus £11,200 per year hardware maintenance would be the standard approach. We estimate that 40 servers would consume 176,952kWh electricity per year and would generate 49,480 BTU of heat, giving an electricity bill of about £15,000 per year. So just to buy them and power them for 5 years would cost about a quarter of a million pounds (£250,000).
By its nature, such a system will always be over provisioned (if it is not it leads to even bigger problems). Most research shows 20% is a good level of utilisation for such a system and 10% is not unusual, so potentially 90% of the asset is wasted. It gives little flexibility for future, unforeseen changes in requirement and recovery requires one for one replacement and rebuild, meaning average time to get a system back can run in to days.
The Alternative
Going to a centralised storage system allows for much greater flexibility, eases management burden and significantly improves asset utilisation. The immediate need could be solved with a decent, scalable NAS system, such as the agámi unit. agami’s IP SAN capability is used for application server storage.
The file systems can be replicated to another agámi device, in a different physical location without needing to take the servers offline. This provides a robust disaster recovery solution.
Server consolidation through virtualisation. Virtualisation brings a significant advantage of asset utilisation along with greater flexibility and speed of deployment and dramatic improvements in recoverability – where a system could be recovered nearly instantly, rather than days. In this case the workload was not huge and a few well spec’d boxes, such as top of the range DL380s or DL580s were sufficient.
Outcome
A ballpark cost for a couple of servers and a storage system, would be £26,260, plus £2,160 per year hardware maintenance. There would of course be a cost for the virtualisation software and there is a significant variation between the three products, but assume perhaps £2,000. We estimate that the servers and storage would consume 3,311kWh electricity per year and would generate 5,590 BTU of heat, giving an electricity bill of about £1,596 per year. So just to buy them and power them for 5 years would cost about a £37,000, giving a saving of over £200,000 for the equivalent 5 year period, including a 90% saving in electricity alone.
Summary:
• Improved flexibility
• Better asset utilisation
• Reduced management overhead
• Saving 90% electricity utilisation
• Saving £200,000 over 5 year anticipated server life
...Read the full story
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