Current Filter: Network>>>>>Feature>

   

Keeping your business profitable really matters, and it requires happy customers and productive staff. A competitive edge in a connected world is underpinned by IT systems that are challenging. Delivering your critical business applications to meet business objectives is your IT bottom line.

Knowing how your applications perform is vital as changes to the application environments are frequent. Changes such as moving to a new network, cloud migration, application virtualisation and new applications need to be thoroughly understood to reduce business risk.

We used to have direct control over IT environments. Applications were typically deployed over LANs and performance expectations were clear. Today, our critical business applications face greater challenges, often having to traverse unknown or uncontrollable networks, including GPRS 3/4G, WANs, Public/Private/Hybrid and cloud, and as a result the outcome is no longer certain.

All networks are subject to conditions including restricted bandwidth, latency and packet drop. In our highly distributed environments the effects of such characteristics are much more pronounced, often resulting in poor application performance and direct business impact.

Knowing how your applications will function on less-than-perfect networks demands insight. Only then can you be certain that users and customers get what they need at an affordable price. It is essential to understand how your applications will perform to overcome the variability of less-than-perfect networks, before deployment.

To understand this we can draw a parallel with aviation. Aviators know that the best way to learn to fly is through experiencing a diverse range of flying conditions. The safest way to do this is using flight simulators. Aviators learn quickly how to fly in all conditions and flight simulators enable them to gain experience at low risk, with high gain. This helps them cope when they encounter real world circumstances. So if flight simulators are essential for pilots, perhaps an equivalent and equally dependable technique is needed for those provisioning and managing business critical networks.

If we understand the restrictions and the ability of customers and staff to work in adverse as well as ideal network conditions, we are on the front foot. Like the weather network conditions are variable, and we have seen many examples of serious but avoidable operational impact caused by unexpected network dynamics.

The IT equivalent to the aviation simulator is the network emulator. Network emulators can quickly create all types of networks within a single appliance, sometimes called a network in a box, and their adoption is growing. Like a flight simulator, all the variables that your applications may encounter, including the good, the bad and the downright ugly network events, can be safely replicated, providing a clear view of likely network performance. Network complexity means that network emulation is a clear imperative, and frankly no longer optional in the fit-for-purpose IT network business armoury. Knowing exactly how your applications will perform gives the business confidence and improves the professional standing of IT and network professionals.

Recreating mixed and complex environments, including mobile networks, with preset friendly and unfriendly network conditions such as latency, error, loss, jitter and insufficient bandwidth, will deliver nitty-gritty understanding of Application performance. This understanding is now even easier to achieve, and at last you don't need to be a network specialist to use the latest generation of network emulators.

Your business can't afford failure. If your application performance is sub-optimal, you may lose customers, damage your reputation, and be hit where it hurts most - your bottom line. It's important to maintain that competitive edge and removing the guesswork helps to achieve this. Network emulators are not expensive, but with today's complex environments, their use, like their aviation counterparts, should be considered an essential component of any Application deployment strategy. NC