Networks Generation

Back from Interop and my 'beloved' Vegas from which I escaped just in time before being air-con'd to death  as my ongoing cough continues to remind me. Is it possible to sue "air"?

I don't know - maybe there are people out there (mainly the people who were "out there") who enjoy the delicious contrast of walking in from 42c temperatures into 15c, time and again, then in reverse, and the joy of being able to hear at least three different sorts of piped music at any one time, the exhilaration for the nostrils of seven or more simultaneous smells, 24 hours a day? Must be me being picky. I like my sound in stereo at least, but all coming from the same source...

Anyway  - reflections on the show itself; easy when there's less smoke and more mirrors AKA taking away the hype. What I found was a trend - that others at the show also confirmed - towards making best of breed "components" again, rather than trying to create a complete gizmo. For example, we had Vineyard Networks creating a DPI engine that it then bolts on to someone's hardware, such as Netronome's dedicated packet processing architecture, that then sits - for example - on an HP or Dell blade server. I like this approach - it's what people were doing in the early '90's; pushing the boundaries, making networking more interesting - more fun even - and simply trying to do something better.

There are simply more companies doing more "stuff" at the moment. Take a recently acquired client of mine who I met out there for the first time, Talari Networks, enabling link aggregation across multiple different service providers - not your average WanOp approach. A full report on the technology has just been posted on the Broadband-Testing website: www.broadband-testing.co.uk - so please go check it out. Likewise, a report from Centrix Software on its WorkSpace applications. Reading between the lines on what HP is able to do with its latest and greatest reinvention of networking - Virtual Application Networking or VAN - as we described on this blog last week, along with buddy F5 Networks, I reckon there is just one piece of the proverbial jigsaw missing and that is something that Centrix can most definitely provide with WorkSpace. The whole of VAN is based around accurately profiling user and application behaviour, combining the two - in conjunction with available bandwidth and other resource - to create the ideal workplace on a per user, per application basis at all times, each and every time they log into the network, from wherever that may be.

Now this means that you want the user/application behaviour modelling to be as accurate as possible, so your starting point has to be, to use a technical term much loved by builders, "spot on". Indeed, there is no measurement in the world more accurate than "spot on". While HPs IMC is able to provide some level of user and application usage analysis, I for one know that it cannot get down to the detailed level that Centrix WorkSpace can - identifying when a user loads up an application, whether that application is "active" or not during the open session and when that application is closed down... and that's just for starters. I feel a marriage coming on...

 

I don't think I can remember a time - and this is saying something - when there were SO many hyper buzz-phrases in IT circulation as there are currently. Every cloud variant, Big Data, SDN...

Live from the home of tack - i.e. Vegas, the Blackpool of the desert but without the classiness...or piers - is the latest bombardment of SDN, er, ness, care of Interop 2012.

Starting with a direct follow-up to my last blog entry - HPs take on SDN, AKA VAN (ok - enough TLAs...) or Virtual Application Networks, the big question was, who was going to drive the VAN since HP doesn't have the whole solution to deliver it? The answer is F5 Networks. So, the idea is to being to deliver a completely optimised, end to end solution on a per user/per application basis by using templates to define every aspect of performance etc. Makes total sense, sounds too good to be true. So, what's the answer - test it of course; watch this space on that one.

Meantime, I'll be reporting in daily from the show - seeing lots of new (to me) vendors who, one way or t'other, are all ticking the SDN/Big Data/Cloud boxes.

It seems to me that we need to get back to basics with SDN so that people actually understand what it is. For example, there's a definite belief among some that it does away with hardware... Nice idea - so we have software that exists in a vacuum that somehow delivers traffic? There also seems to be confusion between different vendors SDN solutions and OpenFlow. For those wot don't know, here's what OpenFlow is - in a classical router or switch, the fast packet forwarding (data path) and the high level routing decisions (control path) occur on the same device. 

An OpenFlow Switch separates these two functions. The data path portion still resides on the switch, while high-level routing decisions are moved to a separate controller, typically a standard server. The OpenFlow Switch and Controller communicate via the OpenFlow protocol, which defines messages, such as packet-received, send-packet-out, modify-forwarding-table, and get-stats.

The data path of an OpenFlow Switch presents a clean flow table abstraction; each flow table entry contains a set of packet fields to match, and an action (such as send-out-port, modify-field, or drop). When an OpenFlow Switch receives a packet it has never seen before, for which it has no matching flow entries, it sends this packet to the controller. The controller then makes a decision on how to handle this packet. It can drop the packet, or it can add a flow entry directing the switch on how to forward similar packets in the future.

In other words it provides one, open-standard methodology of optimising traffic, end-to-end, but it is not a solution in its own right, just a potential part of the action.

Whatever - the interesting theme here is that no one talks about MPLS any longer (well maybe apart from Cisco and Juniper that is) despite it still being THE methodology used to move all our data around the 'net and beyond. There are factions that stand for the WAN optimisation kills MPLS idea. And for good reason - but there's no overnight change here, given the gazillions invested in MPLS networks. It'll be interesting to see what the vendors here make of the situation, at least from a timeline perspective...

Meantime it's showtime, meaning a walk past a beach, complete with wave machine and hundreds of Americans trying to get skin cancer, in order to get to the exhibition halls - this is Vegas, after all.

Wore my journalist hat yesterday to attend an HP update event on its ESSN division (don't worry about what the initials stand for, but N is for Networking...).

While not the key focus of yesterday's blurb, the key thing for me to take from the event was the company's very recent announcement that they are going into the VAN market; no - not competing with Transits, though you could say the network is "in transit" but Virtual Application Networks - all part of the current SDN or Software Defined Network movement. For many years HP (as Procurve) and others have been trying to crack the whole "end to end" optimisation problem. I've been trying to personally crack it using any number of vendor parts since 1999.... 

So, VAN is the latest attempt. The aim is to use preconfigured templates to characterise the network resources required to deliver an application to users - i.e. to enable consistent, reliable and repeatable deployment of cloud applications in minutes. An end-to-end control plane virtualises the network and enables programming of the physical devices to create multi-tenant, on-demand, topology and device-independent provisioning. The idea is to be completely open, so this isn't an HP closed shop solution; that that they have created it.

Speaking with one of HPs customers, Mark Bramwell of Wellcome Trust at the event, we both agreed that it sounds like the latest and greatest "smoke and mirrors", "too good to be true" solution BUT - if it works, then great - every user has optimised applications, on a per user, per application basis. So we both agreed - the only sensible option is for me to test it. Watch this space on that one...

Speaking yet further on the subject in a broader manner with Lars Koelendorf who heads up HP EMEAs mobile and wireless stuff, we agreed that the ideal way to rebuild a network is to start with IPv6; with so many addresses available, every user could have their own virtual IP address that IS their identity so, whatever client they are using and wherever they are, all the logic sits behind their VIP(v6) address and the HP VAN man is complete. They would, of course, drive applications faster across the network than any other user type...

In conversation with Axel Pawlik, MD of RIPE NCC (which is obviously better than an unripe version).

The RIPE NCC is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. The most prominent activity of the RIPE NCC is to act as a Regional Internet Registry (RIR) providing global Internet resources (IPv4, IPv6) and related services to a current membership base of around 6,800 members in over 75 countries. So these guys are involved at the heart of the IPv6 movement.  Here's Axel's views on a few key areas:

What is at the heart of the IPv4/IPv6 issue?

"Although the IANA's pool of available IPv4 addresses is exhausted, the RIPE NCC can still assign IPv4 addresses to its members from its own reserves of IPv4 address space. We cannot predict how long this supply will last."

"IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses can't communicate directly with each other. So, before IPv6 addresses can be used to access the Internet, your organisation's networks, services and products need to be IPv6 compatible or enabled. This requires planning and investment in time, equipment and training. New hardware and software is required to make networks ready for an IPv6-based Internet."

IPv6 - What's The Deal?

"Unless businesses act now to safeguard their networks, the future expansion of the Internet could be compromised. IPv6 is the next generation of IP addressing.  Designed to account for the future growth of the Internet, the pool of IPv6 addresses contains 340 trillion, trillion, trillion unique addresses. This huge number of addresses is expected to accommodate the predicted growth and innovation of the Internet and Internet-related services over the coming years."

How will my customers be affected by the deployment of IPv6 in my networks?

"End users of the Internet may not notice any difference when using the Internet with an IPv6 address or an IPv4 address. However, if you do not invest in IPv6 infrastructure now, in the future there may be parts of the Internet that your customers cannot reach with an IPv4 address if the destination is on an IPv6-only network."

What needs to be done?

• Network operators should ensure that their networks are IPv6 enabled and can be used by their customers to access other IPv6 networks.
• Software producers should ensure that that their software is IPv6 compliant.
• Hardware vendors should ensure that their products are IPv6 compatible.
• Content providers should prepare networks so that they are accessible using IPv6 as well as IPv4.

It's a question we should all ask.

For the average IT user or network manager it's a significant point to actually consider. For a managed services company such as SAS Group, based down in an actually leafy bit of "greater" Crawley, it's a fundamental question to ask.

Charles Davis, CEO of SAS believes the IP world is reaching crisis point.

He points out that the number of addresses for IPv4 has long been predicted to run out soon arguing that, meanwhile, our readiness to move over to IPv6 looks increasingly unlikely to happen any time soon. Conventional wisdom among many analysts said that the industry wouldn't be ready for the switch until 2015. Personally, based on the indicators he sees every day, Davis thinks it could be even more distant.

But - and this is a big but (no pun intended for American readers) - the world IS running out of IPv4 addresses. This means that two of the current booms in technology he identifies, cloud computing and the" Internet of Things", might not be sustainable. You can't have an Internet of Things, Davis argues, if the 'things' in question (gadgets) can't get on the Internet. They simply won't be able to without an IP address, and all the IP addresses available under the old system are rapidly being used up.

Davis believes that, while it might all sound a bit "Mad Max", the IP crisis does bear some of the hallmarks of an apocalypse. For example, there are some alarming inequalities in the way resources are being shared out, he notes with just 20% of the world owning the majority of IP addresses. Hardly ideal...  India, for example, - which when I last looked at my globe is quite a large country (with rapid IT deployment) has only three Class B address ranges (i.e. 130,000 addresses). In contrast as Davis points out, just one US IT company alone, HP, can trump that with its two class A IP address ranges (i.e. 32,000,000 addresses). Could this lack of infrastructure restrict the growth of the BRICs (Brazil, Russian, India and China) he asks, therefore, and will the developing nations become frustrated at their lack of, well, development?

In circumstances like these, Davis can see drastic measures being taken, such as... companies actually getting round the negotiation table and talking to each other. Perhaps some decisions will be taken sooner and innovative solutions will be dreamt up to free up more addresses.

Davis points out, it wasn't as if it were planned. Yes, it was a class issue, but only in the sense that the early allocation of IPv4 addresses was based on IP class allocation. This was in the days when the eventual exhaustion of the IPv4 ranges was not seen as an issue, like many things IT. So the allocation that took place seemed appropriate at the time. As a result, large amounts of address space were unused.  Indeed, some estimate that as many as 80% of allocated addresses are not currently in use.  

The cloud computing lobby, too, will be exerting pressure for the IP crisis to be resolved. For cloud computing to work, you need certain conditions, one of which is perfect communications. Optimum communications, in turn, could be dependent on the adoption of IPv6.

This brings Davis onto another aspect of the next version of IP, which he believes nobody has really given much air time to as yet. With IPv6 giving companies complete visibility over the movements and browsing habits of smart phone and laptop users, it could become a marketing manager's dream.

If only we had the same perfect information about the migration from IP4 to IP6... (watch this space).

"M" might stand for Murder in the London theatre world, but the ultimate "M" word in IT has to be "Migration".

 

Apply this word to the challenge that is moving from IPv4 to IPv6 and you can probably hear the howls of despair and mistake them for an attempted murder. There are, however, some fundamental tools/advanced features of IPv6 that are designed to ease this process. These have been adopted to a lesser or greater degree by different vendors, so it's worth noting the availability of these features when shopping around for IPv6 assistance and future proofing.

 

We'll start with three absolutely fundamental ways to manage your IP addresses and how these work in a migratory environment.

 

NAT: NAT (Network Address Translation) has became a pretty fundamental tool for alleviating the issues with limited IPv4 address spaces, with most companies enabling it on their network gateways and other devices. So how to transition this to IPv6. First, there is what is known as Carrier Grade NAT (AKA Large Scale NAT) whereby Carriers/ISPs can allocate multiple clients to a single IPv4 address, standardising behaviour for IPv4 NAT devices and the applications running over them, using features such as "fairness" mechanisms - user allocated port quotas and the like. 

 

We also have specific transition technologies such as NAT 64. This is a mechanism to allow IPv6 hosts to communicate with IPv4 servers. The NAT64 server is the endpoint for at least one IPv4 address and an IPv6 network segment of 32-bits. The IPv6 client embeds the IPv4 address it wishes to communicate with using these bits, and sends its packets to the resulting address. The NAT64 server then creates a NAT mapping between the IPv6 and the IPv4 address, allowing them to communicate.

 

DNS: As with the 64-bit version of NAS, we also have a 64-bit version of DNS. The IPv6 end user's DNS requests are received by the DNS64 device, which resolves the requests.

If there is an IPv6 DNS record (AAAA record), then the resolution is forwarded to the end user and they can access the resource directly.

If there is no IPv6 address but there is an IPv4 address (A record), then DNS64 converts the A record into an AAAA record using its NAT64 prefix and forwards it to the end user. The end user then accesses the NAT64 device that NATs this traffic to the IPv4 server.

Dual Stacks/DS-Lite: An obvious feature to look for is dual-stack support where all IPv4 and IPv6 features can run simultaneously. In addition there is DS-Lite (Dual Lite Stack) which enables incremental IPv6 deployment, providing a single IPv6 network that can serve IPv4 and IPv6 clients. Basically this works using IPv4 (tunneled from customer's gateway) over IPv6 (carrier's network) to a NAT device (carrier's device allowing connection to IPv4 Internet, which can also apply LSN/CGN). Because of IPv4 address exhaustion, Dual Lite Stack was created to enable an ISP to omit the deployment of any IPv4 address to the customer's on-premises equipment, or CPE. Instead, only global IPv6 addresses are provided. (Regular Dual-Stack deploys global addresses for both IPv4 and IPv6.)

 

 

I've recently been in conversation with a number of network product vendors - from Cisco to Infoblox - users and test equipment vendors, with respect to what must be the ultimate in "let's sweep it under the carpet and forget about it for a while" IT topics and that is IPv6.

With the last of the public IPv4 address allocation now long gone and the Far East already deploying IPv6 big time, the reality is that we do all need to start thinking about moving from the "4" to the "6", albeit gradually in most cases. And with LTE around the corner in the mobile world, that being pure IP-based, how many new IP addresses will suddenly be demanded? And where are they going to get allocated from?

In the States recently and having a casual natter with Infoblox' Steve Garrison, Steve was saying how many companies still carry out IP Address Management (IPAM) using Excel spreadsheets (got to be in the "Top 10 misuses of a spreadsheet"). So how will they cope with the complexities of deploying IPv6?

Another worry, from a conversation with F5 Networks and others that dabble in L4-7 data "mucking about" is the potential performance hit when moving from IPv4 to IPv6. This is something that (quelle suprise!) vendors don't openly talk about, but F5 has seen up to 50% performance hit on some rival products (tested internally) when moving from IPv4 to IPv6 and generally reckons its own see up to 10% performance loss in the same circumstances. This claim was substantiated in talks with other vendors large and small, such as with a newly acquired load-balancing client of ours, Kemp Technology.

So, on the basis that someone has to do something about it, we are launching an IPv6 performance test program, with a view to developing what is effectively an ongoing buyers guide/approved list for companies to short-list their potential IPv6 related procurements with. 

Over the next few days we'll be looking at some of the key elements of IPv6 deployment - think in terms of something akin to the Top 10 Considerations when moving to IPv6. Because, sooner or later, we're all going to have to do it...

I just moved apartments in Andorra and asked them if I could keep my current 100MbpsFTTH account (actually tops out at 83Mbps), related phone number etc - and the answer was "yes, of course" (with a bit of Catalan thrown in for good measure, most of which I ignored).

Having recently got back from several weeks travelling around Europe, including a fair chunk in the UK, me and my 3G data dongles have been keeping close company, as the very WLAN products that I've tested over the years continue to fail to work when as badly deployed as they generally are in hotels, hotspots etc. Must be a biz opp here?

So, when a brand spankers new report out from Ericsson (or should I say Sony?) tells us that mobile data traffic will go berserk over the next five years, I think beyond the "well Ericsson would say that wouldn't they" and say it should be paid close attention to. And, besides, I am Eric's son, so we have something in common.

Headlines from the report are:

• Mobile data traffic will grow 10-fold between 2011 and 2016, mainly driven by video.
• Mobile broadband subscriptions grew by 60 percent in one year and are expected to grow from 900 million in 2011 to almost 5 billion in 2016.
• By 2016, users living on less than 1 percent of the Earth's total land area are set to generate around 60 percent of mobile traffic.

Regarding the latter point, I reckon I know who's generating most of that 60% of traffic - it's my Andorra/London mate Kevin Malone - he's now got a 25MB per day data tarrif that he can use anywhere in Europe with no additional charges - yes, even Andorra - and he makes full use of it. Now this is just the tip of the data iceberg. Imagine if everyone you know takes out a similar contract and starts using it to the full?

So, we're looking at a 10-fold increase in mobile data traffic.That's why I test a lot of optimisation products for a living. And all those vendors, talking in recent years of the era of unlimited bandwidth? Very funny indeed...

And it's not just the mobile networks that will get choked. Consider if just 1% of companies moved their (let's say currently "in-house") IT activities onto the public cloud? Do you think the Internet would cope? Don't think I need to answer that one...

I know that we IT lot live on a different planet to the rest of the world (or so we are often told), but I'm really trying to find the real recession out there at the mo'.

Take airlines for example. I've been doing far too much travelling for my own good over the past few months, including recent flights to LA (more on this in next blog), and they're all - at worst - full, or seriously oversubscribed, and I'm getting the same tale from mates of mine who are NOT in the IT industry.

Similarly, back to IT, vendors ARE spending serious money on acquisitions this year. Just been speaking with Stuart Paterson at SEP (pte equity guys) who recently sold my old client Zeus to Riverbed for $140m (which, trust me, was a GOOD price to make) and he tells me they've brought in £1.5bn from sales this year.

Is it simply a case of companies holding onto cash for a few years and now feel they need (through analyst pressure etc) to spend it? Hello Apple! Or is it that we have a new raft of genuinely interesting technologies that beg to be invested in? Certainly, from my perspective, there are stacks of innovative start-ups around at the moment. In the past few months I've become involved in everything from reinventions of network optimisation (essentially my specialist subject) to enterprise software and even project management being reinvented. The whole "cloud" clamour (and why do people look up into the sky when they talk about cloud computing?) is making the industry buy (panic buy in some cases?) into the technology to enable the very thing that they have created themselves, but didn't necessarily have the resource or expertise to pull off.

I'm currently speaking with the global biz dev guys from many of the top networking and comms companies in the world, because they are ALL on the lookout for new, enabling technologies. And we haven't even got to IPv6 and LTE/4G yet, at least not in Europe. So if anyone out there is interested in adding voice, LAN, WAN, browser-based web app, predictive data transfer (i.e. sending before it's requested) optimisation, completely reinvented enterprise software that is truly social-media aware, new takes on network management, compliance, SAM reporting, project management as a sell-on service and even VPNs reinvented, then please get in touch as we've tested and validated all of the above in recent months.

Talking of IPv6, watch out for an announcement on a new service we're offering at Broadband-Testing, in conjunction with CW and our test equipment partner Spirent, to offer proper IPv6 validation testing - i.e. not some scientific interop stuff, but does it really cut it, performance wise and with real-world traffic mixes, rather than just A talks to B = certification.

And, just for the record, those of you who know our old mate David Tebbutt, should know that he is NOT the poor sod of the same name who was murdered in Kenya yesterday....

http://teblog.typepad.com/

We lost a Kewney last year; we can't afford to lose a Tebbutt as well. After all, who would I choose to pick on to start a grape foodfight in a Tex-Mex in Houston, Texas otherwise (a memory tester for those of you involved)?

Wine tip: This month I have been mainly drinking boxed French wine at 8 euros for 5-litres of excellent Minervois by any other name (i.e. its Vin de Pays equivalent). Amazing what you can get for the money just before the new harvest each year...

Why is it that software companies assume everyone on the network is an IT person?

Just look at the vast majority of network management software, or even general enterprise business software and even IT-savvies typically still need a training course or two to get up to speed. When it comes to helpdesk - I mean just think about the average call centre person you deal with - why should that person have IT written all the way through them?

Such is the reasoning behind the release of Sostenuto CSM by the guys at Sunrise Software - a customer service management solution built from one of my favourite frameworks of the decade (Sostenuto - see various reports on the Broadband-Testing website for proof of this). I popped down to the Sunrise offices in Chessington recently for a demo, eschewing the attractions of the zoo and the theme park in favour of the Sunrise offices, principally because I knew they'd take me for a pint afterwards .Mind - thanks to the wonder that isn't the British rail network, it took me over three hours to do a 40 minute journey - so, not too bad you're thinking - so it was a good job that the software is so easy to demo that we still made the pub (just about) on time.

The idea is that, to date, CSM solutions are too long-winded (praise the lord!) and are therefore both too complicated and too expensive to use (hallelujah!). And they don't speak to the user in English, but ITish. Geoff Rees, would-be rocker and also sales director at Sunrise reckons that the classic CSM product is ideal for "internally focused" IT guys but is not designed for basic "human" query management - aka, normal people trying to find out what's happening. As it happens he's correct and his taste in guitars isn't too shabby either.

The point he makes is that no two customer service departments are the same - it's likely that agents will use unique terminology and the way a query is handled will also be very specific to each individual organisation. So, with the Sostenuto solution, you create the interface to suit the business model, very much like my mates at Thingamy.com do for general enterprise software. So, the business controls the software, not the other way around. Which is nice...

And looking outside of the Sostenuto applications - ITSM and CSM - that have primarily been developed to date, do not that if you fancy the idea of creating other service management tools that follow the Sostenuto approach, you can do - just speak nicely to Martin (Devonian lager lout) Julyan at Sunrise and he'll build one for you. He'll even tell you which bits of Plymouth and good to live in and which are to avoid and then tell you to live in Torquay instead. Nothing Fawlty about the software though; check it out!

OK - so who remembers Project Manager Workbench, PMW for hose who were there at the time (or even Microsoft Project, the project management software for the under 5's)?

Who remembers printing out Gantt chars on A3 that you wallpapered the office walls with?

Been there, done that, b****y rubbish wasn't it! Just one mention of Gantt charts and trees started to fall of their own accord. So, it was with a combination of historial interest (and trepidation) that I visited a project management software start-up, eTask, in Farnborough, arriving there on time despite accompanying PR mate whose client eTask is, Nick Spencer's, unique human sat-nav (in)capabilities. Bless him - great advert for Tom Tom.

Anyway, turns out that the eTask guys actually have advanced the art somewhat by, among other things, simply getting the priorities right. First up, they are keen to emphasise the importance of reusing information, given that many projects are actually variations on a common basic theme. So they have a blueprint concept, whereby a project can be defined and stored for reuse, much like a code library for developers.

Then, with project defined - why do so many fail or suffer huge delays? The answer lies with governance. eTask belives that only 30% of the value of PM software is in the blueprinting and the rest is in the true governance of those tasks within the project. So a huge amount of effort has gone into ensuring that projects are automatically managed correctly; for example, cormparing blueprint with the actual adherence to those projections. It's all about properly documenting human thoughts and processes and enforcing standardisation within a company; a far cry from the randomisation factor that controlled most mainframe-based IT projects I looked in on (from the safety of the PC team) in the dim and distant past.

Being Google/browser based, we are also looking at a true SaaS application here; one with a very small footprint that is truly distributable in nature; ideal when you have multiple users perhaps scattered across a large geographical area. Integration with 3rd party applications - CRM/ERP etc - has also been well thought out, so that key areas such as billing are supported between 3rd party apps.

In essence, it's a bit like my old mates at Thingamy.com who take the enterprise software concept and model it, the model turns into the app itself, all SaaS-based, very coolio indeed. Here, the idea is to take a pilot project, look at the most troublesome aspects, document those and - in doing so - build out the blueprint, then deploy. Logical, captain...

If anyone wants a quick summary of the product, this is a good starting point:

http://www.etask.it/en/whatwedo/top-10

While the software is aimed primarly at the service (provider) industry, it has obvious applications at enterprise level and beyond and pilot projects kick-in at about £10K+ I understand, so it's not exactly blowing the annual IT budget (even in current economic conditions, unless you're a council IT department of course) to get into eTasking projects. If you're a SP/hosting company/Outsourcer/NSP etc etc, then it has to be worth a look...

Much as I like to hope that my contributions to the analysis of IT products and tech are well observed and on the mark, it's nevertheless reassuring when those observations are supported further afield.

So it is with App-DNA, whose AppTitude OS/Browser/App migration tool I've been testing since its inception and, most recently at the beginning of this year. While the real purpose of the mention was a heads-up WRT a new version of said product - v5 - now being available, so if you're following the story do check it out, it's also worth mentioning that the App-DNA guys picked up an award: the Best of Synergy Award in the Desktop Transformation Category at the Citrix Synergy conference - so I guess it's a bit like the footballer's player's player of the year around - i.e. it has some significance!

Talking of awards, my mates at Spirent wanted me to mention the Spirent Network Hero Awards wot will be presented to individuals from nominations whom the judging panel considers to have made an outstanding effort in optimising their company's contribution in one or more of a variety of technical fields associated with networking, and as a result, benefited the business performance of the company they work for.

 

My only question here is: where were these awards back in 1988 when I was juggling supporting 1000+ users across the whole of the UK with doing product evals, managing maintenance contracts and chatting up the typing pool in my former IT role? I would call that pretty heroic...

 

Anyway, the awards panel includes my lovely old mate Camille Mendler from Informa, so there'll be no messing about, rest assured...

 

If you want to enter someone (no sniggers please), here's the entry point (I said, no tittering at the back) http://www.spirent.com/go/network-heroes.aspx

 

It's obviously that "awards time of year" since I've also recently been judging for another title; I won't be able to attend the awards night itself, kind of a shame cos it's a free p**s up, but it's also pretty excruciating at these do's either a) trying to console a losing finalist or, even worse, b) congratulating a winner that you didn't vote for. Lots of back-stabbing ensues. Noteworthy then, that the Spirent awards dinner is being held at the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall!

Final word on awards - my personal award for the finest beer (as a brief diversion from wine tips) in my recent bout of travelling that took in London, most of France, Wakefield, Devon and Brussels, that I tasted has to go to Otter Ale from Otter brewery near Honiton (Devon) and especially the pint at the Ship Inn in Kingswear (a nice place to retire to methinks). It's an English beer that's actually "brown" not "golden", so my old IT mate Steve Palmer would appreciate this. Joint 2nd, for the record, would be all the wonderful Westmalle Trappist beers I had in Belgium. It's just difficult to knock back several pints of them in one session when they're as high as 9.5%. Not that we didn't try our best...

This week I was at an HP press event (dusting off the journo hat) getting an update about many of the areas I've been involved in testing with recently with the company, notably the Converged Infrastructure (CI) solution and the TippingPoint-based Secure Virtualisation Framework. Key to the latter's enhancement is that we can now looking at exceeding the magical 10Gbps barrier on the physical IDS side, while still protecting within VMs - watch this space for further details on revisiting testing here...

At the same time, HP is heavily promoting its "single pane management" concept that is IMC - the idea being that you can control (almost) everything on the network from a single interface - nothing new here in concept but then it's never been perfected either. However, the company might be getting closer than most - customers have told them that it manages their Cisco environments (remember this is an HP product) better than Cisco does... well - only one way to prove this and that's to put it to the test; again watch this space on that one too - the test environment will cover both wired and wireless networks, as well as hybrid HP/Cisco and possibly a few jokers thrown in too (where are those 3Com CoreBuilder switches I used once?). Any other suggestions are welcomed...

The point about these observations from the HP event is that one very common theme runs throughout... that CI data centre solution is based around H3C switch technology that came with the 3Com acquisition; the IMC product is pure 3Com origin; the TippingPoint IPS tech also came with 3Com.

So, the primary product strategies of HP networking at the moment are all under-pinned by 3Com technology. When you consider how many billions have been wasted on dodgy acquisitions in the past, including by 3Com of old, the $2.7bn HP paid is starting to look like smart (and smartly used) investment already.

Footnote: I got to the event location (Stamford Bridge, Chelski - Imagine that as a Leeds fan...) on the Sunday, along with my mate Mr MOB who's in charge of MarComms EMEA for HP; so there was a certain high profile footie match on that late afternoon, involving Chelski - logical therefore to watch the match at a local hostelry? The problem is that Chelsea is far too HH (Hooray Hen) an area to show its own football team on TV in the local pubs, so consequently we missed half the match while trailing hopelessly from one near-deserted "Gastro Pub" to the next, in search of an elusive TV screen that was actually switched on....

And to add insult to injury: £9.61 for two pints of bitter and two packets of crisps? Welcome back Wakefield (£1.88 a pint for Clarke's Trad Blonde....

As ever (it seems) been doing a lot of travelling, hence a lack of blogs - is this because we can't contact the Ether-world when travelling?

Well - obviously not, but then it's still not as straightforward as it might be. For example, why was it that one US hotel in Bay Area with free Wi-Fi appeared to be sending out my emails, POP3 style, when it turned out that they were neither getting to their recipients, nor being rebounded back to me. I only found out when I got an urgent request to deliver a report and quote for a press release that I'd actually delivered 36 hours earlier (or thought that I had). Then there are hotel networks that actively block POP3 outgoing emails but will support browser-based outgoings; and you never know until you try. So could we please have some consistency in configurations, you WiFi world out there? BTW - tip for anyone using San Francisco International airport - it has an everlasting free WiFi service; basically you get 45 mins for free - then login again and you get another 45 minutes, and so forth and so forth (yes I did check in very early for my flight AND there is very little to do at SFO International terminal).

So - keeping the theme going; back to Europe via Heathrow T5 - where the hell is there a power socket to plug your (now exhausted) laptop or phone into? What happened to IT savvy designers when this was being constructed?

Then, once on the train (yes, this is beginning to sound like a parody of the old Python "Torremolinos" sketch) 3G coverage is still every bit as patchy as it ever was (interesting here that the US has "gotten" ahead again, with 4G coverage already available in a few regions, while we are 2+ years away from the delights of 45mins battery life in your SmartPhone) and tunnels are still a complete no-no. You would have thought that, since tunnels came before modern communications, they might have thought of a solution...

What I'm trying to say is, communications "on the go" is still way off the pace compared with what it could and should be. What is the point in me testing all this thoroughly good network traffic optimisation stuff, if there's no network available to optimise in the first place?

Quick mention here for a mobile service that was launched on the AppStore this week that I've been keeping an eye on via an industry mate - Bababoo.com - automatically chooses the cheapest network for your SmartPhone to use, both domestic/International, from one app without you having to make any decisions - assuming it can find any network coverage of any sort in the first place, that is...

It's a difficult one, isn't it...

...choosing between speaking to a (hopefully) fully-functioning human person who might be located anywhere in the world and whose accent might be a tad challenging, or 'interacting' with a disconnected website or voice, whose design or accent accordingly might also be challenging, giving you a wide range of options that may or may not eventually lead you to your personal holy grail.

We're talking about call centres versus self-service portals (web or voice-based) - and which do you prefer? Or is it a case of both working in perfect harmony (I'd like to teach the web to sing)? Avaya and BT have just published a report "The Autonomous Customer" which shows that a massive 90% of smart-phone owners (yes, that's YOU) still expect to use call centres in the future.  Meanwhile 56% of those surveyed think the subjects of their calls are becoming more complicated as the majority (81%) do their initial engagement with organisations online (unless you're from Wakefield like my mum and dad).

Chatting with Avaya's BT Account Manager, Gary Bennett, what became clear is that there is work to do in consolidating the two experiences. As Gary pointed out through personal experience, what starts off as an interactive session with the 'net can often now lead to a human voice at the end: "click here to speak to someone" but - as in his experience - if that person now on the end of the line has no view of, or access to, all the stuff you've just been doing online to this point (such as filling endless forms until you come to a question you cannot answer) then you're back to square one. Great...

Interesting here is, what is the starting point now for a bit of investigative, er, ness, whether just looking for the best online insurance quote for your 5-wheel drive BMW X-Factor or how to resolve a problem with your toaster? Often, something like Facebook, or some public forum (or against-um) is now the starting point. Equally, as discussed with Gary, Twitter is often the first voice of discontent now, so companies need to keep tabs on what their (ex?) customers are tweeting about (so it's not only football managers who need to worry).

So what we are looking at here is a clear case of disconnectedness (would score great on Countdown were it not too long) between company and customer, analog and digital if you like, which is precisely what the aforementioned report indicates in so much as, when it comes to managing these queries, many organisations are still falling far short of the desired mark. Despite 86% of consumers saying a good experience on the phone will make them more loyal, 69% said they also felt that the 'agent' at the other end of the line tried to rush their calls to an early (and presumably unsatisfactory) conclusion.

What's this - an implication that people working in call centres don't really want to do that job (ask my son: two weeks at a call centre achieving absolutely zero success, other than a second spell of unemployment at the end of said period)? What's really funny though - to me anyway - is that 90% of consumers said that the "human" in the call centre suggested that they might be better off trying the website... Eee - you've got to laugh (or at least be in IT for the long term).

So where does Avaya come into all this? Gary Bennett made the point that the customer now decides which of the various communication channels they wish to use to pursue their business, such as getting car insurance, so said insurance company has to be prepared to support all the communications channels available AND be aware of what the potential customer's activity has been to date. Unified communications, in other words... that'll be the one that I was testing with (RIP) Nortel back in the '90's then. Yes, it was way ahead of its time then (the system even did regional accents) but it's bang on the money for right now.

I mentioned recently that I'd been working with the App-DNA guys from Londinium on discovering just how its' AppTitude product can make our Broadband-Testing website IE8 compatible (and a host of apps we tested - checkout our website if you haven't seen the report yet) and now the company has gone all virtual on us...

Using the Microsoft TechDays Conference as a cheap excuse to go to Paris, App-DNA has announced that it can accelerate application preparation for Microsoft App-V application virtualisation projects by up to 50% using its AppTitude software; must leave would-be 'cowboy' consultants who would have fleeced such customers thinking: "I don't like your AppTitude".

Don't groan - the puns can get worse... So how doth it do it? AppTitude now features a Virtual App Machine to automate the creation of fully Microsoft supported App-V packages.  The AppTitude Virtual App Machine, combines with the aforementioned capabilities for Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 application compatibility to help Microsoft customers more quickly achieve the optimised desktop. 'Et voila, ca marche'  as they say in Paris (though possibly not at Microsoft TechDays).

First AppTitude analyses an application's unique "DNA" to determine if the application will suit the virtualisation process, then it recognises what changes may be needed before even starting to sequence an application, meaning lots of potentially wasted time is saved up front. AppTitude uses the Microsoft developed App-V Sequencer to perform the work, meaning that the resulting apps are fully Microsoft supported packages, which is nice. In line with our IE8 oriented testing, AppTitude also determines if an application will be easy or difficult to fix, due to the severity of the identified issues and, with its Effort Calculator, creates and models business-ready reports of the overall budget, staff and risk for an App-V project.

All of which sounds like a great way to spend money in order to save even more. It also sounds like another Broadband-Testing report is called for?

Footnote (F# for sole music): I should be in Barcelona getting slaughtered Neteventing this week, but worky committments demand otherwise, so instead I'll be looking to blog on anything interesting that comes out of said industry piss-up symposium, so watcheth this space... At least their bar bills will be lower than normal.

Been doing some more work with an old client of mine in ye olde Citee of Londinium - App-DNA.

These guys attempt to make the impossible possible - i.e. analysing applications for compatibility between different OSs, physical-virtual and now browser versions (IE6 - IE8 in the case of the testing I've been doing) and providing remediation. So, maybe smart but not that big a deal with a handful of apps - but what if you have 1,000+ to test manually?

Yeah, time to get another job. Or you could take a look at these guys' AppTitude product - report just gone live on our website on www.broadband-testing.co.uk. Basically, whereas you could get away with coding whatever you wanted in IE6, the guidelines for IE8 are much tighter. And since IE8 is inextricably tied in to Windows 7, and since Windows 7 is proving a runaway success, primarily due to the, er, inadequacies (to be polite) of Vista and XP being older than the average Pope, this has caused a real problem when moving huge user bases from XP/IE6 directly to Windows 7 or, in the case of Southern US of A, huge users (we won't get into the possibilities surrounding the definition of a "user base" here).

Don't just take my word for it. Gartner's Michael Silver suggest that, through to 2014, IE8 compatibility problems will cause at least 20 percent of organisations to run overtime or over budget on their Windows 7 migration projects and admits that Gartner has seen failure rates in the range of 40 percent. And he must be right, 'cos he's with Gartner...

As part of the test we imported a number of browser/web-based apps and websites, including our own website, which kind of made life interesting in the same way that analysing X-rays of your teeth at the dentists does. It brought up some lovely RED warnings (the software uses a Red, Amber, Green - RAG, geddit? - model to highlight issues and what level of severity they are) on the report of our website with its IE8 compatibility manager (and on some of the software we tested as well) which we investigated of course, being true pro's...

You don't realise just how many things can impact upon even a relatively simple website, let alone an application, until you see something like this - external links, hosting companies' unwelcome additions, Flash (ah-ah - he saves everyone of us... not in 64-bit mode he doesn't; did I ever tell you about the chance I had to meet Brian May, Queen guitarist?) and so on and so forth.

Anyway - all very interesting reading, so do check it out on our website. Meantime, I'm over in the US, West Coast, where there's not much sign of snow (70 Fahrenheit) and the local wine is still over-priced rubbish and all the food is TOO sweet, even the sour dough bread... Back in Andorra next week, where there's equally little sign of fresh snow so, if you're coming over to ski, bring some ice with you.

 

Was chatting with a client yesterday about IT spending and I was making the point that it is happening but IT departments are keen to make every penny spent (metaphorically and otherwise) as efficient as possible.

So, whereas a big, shiny router might have been top of the wish list 10 years ago, now it's more likely to be some form of optimisation hardware or - even more likely - cost-saving software.

Nice then, to see this point of view validated with a story yesterday in Comp Weekly:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/01/06/244752/Technology-is-key-in-efficiency-savings-say-local-councillors.htm

... whereby councils are citing technology as a key factor in increasing efficiency and saving costs. This certainly ties in with a recent visit I made to Hull City Council as part of the testing I've been carrying out for Certero (www.certero.co.uk) on its PowerStudio and AssetStudio products (both reports available on the www.broadband-testing.co.uk website). The aforementioned council are keen users of the Certero software and reckon it reduces weeks of manual effort down to hours and, in so doing, makes some, otherwise "impossible" tasks, relatively simple. Read about them in our report on AssetStudio.

Bucks County Council is another keen Certero fan, focusing this time on the company's PowerStudio software which ensures that PC/laptop clients are always powered down whenever possible. The focus initially here for Bucks is on controlling student usage (Bucks powers down powerbooks to save megabucks?) - a good place to start if my kids are any guide. I know - I pay the electricity bills on their digs in Brighton...

Thanks to the ability to name and shame lazy users it also acts as a splendid incentive to get the users to improve their own power-down behaviour.

Never has such a turn-off been such a turn-on...