Networks become more difficult. A network must provide a
growing range of services, from ERP, CRM, and email to VoIP applications and
web services, each with its peculiarities and requirements. Each new service
introduced to the network competes for available resources with all other
services, affecting the network's ability to support the business.
Meanwhile, the network itself is continually evolving. New
locations are added, some of which may be in another country or on another
continent. The equipment is updated and reconfigured. The new administration
and security tools can influence service performance. Decisions about
consolidation and reorganization of data centers also affect the network in
different ways. All of this makes the system a highly dynamic environment,
where even subtle changes can have a significant and unexpected impact on
application performance and availability.
However, business users expect this complex environment to
be as reliable as electricity, even if network budgets don't increase in
proportion to these growing challenges. As a result, network administrators
cannot simply over-provision the network infrastructure to ensure that each
service has all the bandwidth it needs. Also, oversupply may not even solve the
problem and guarantee the required level of performance.
This is why network
administrators face many challenges, including:
1) Identify potential network performance issues early in
the development lifecycle
Ideally, the impact of the network on a new application or
service should be addressed early in the development process, when potential
problems are much more comfortable and less costly to solve. Unfortunately,
this is generally not the case. Issues related to the “network capacity” of an
application are usually not discovered until after deployment has started in
the production environment. At this point, it is often too late to make
significant changes to the design of the application. The problem is, therefore,
on the shoulders of the network team. This is why, in 2005, administrators of
intelligent networks will focus on solving these problems at the root.
2) Validate new or modified applications and infrastructures
before being deployed in production
As the network becomes more complex and essential to the
day-to-day operations of the business, the risks to network performance
associated with changing applications and infrastructure continue to increase. Some
of the worst business disruptions that companies have experienced historically
were not the result of an unexpected equipment failure. They were the unforeseen
consequence of a planned change. Therefore, network teams should implement best
change management practices in 2005 so that they do not have to put out fires
that accidentally start.
3) Improved troubleshooting of intermittent/transient
network problems
One of the most frustrating things for a network administrator
is to manage an issue that continues to disappear before it can be adequately
understood and resolved. However, as the company's tolerance for network
outages continues to decrease, these intermittent issues will become a more
significant management issue. This year, network management teams must develop
more efficient methods to capture transient network conditions and discover the
root causes of these problems.
4) Accelerated balance time for new and updated applications
When C-level leaders decide to invest in new applications
and services, they want these investments to be quickly rewarded. That is why
the slow and staggering production implementations of the past will no longer
suffice. Instead, network teams need to deploy new applications across the
enterprise quickly. This can only happen if caution and uncertainty about the
actual behavior of these applications in the production environment are
replaced by confidence and certainty in 2005.
5) Smarter planning and support for business growth.
Network administrators are always faced with change. They
need to determine how increasing network usage will affect application
performance. They must decide how best to design the network to support
business expansion, reorganization, or mergers and acquisitions. However, they
can only do so if they have an effective way to perform capacity planning tasks
and assess a full range of simulation scenarios. These scenarios are also
essential for the formulation of realistic emergency plans that can guarantee
business continuity under various possible conditions.
In light of these challenges, it quickly becomes apparent
that conventional production network management tools are no longer sufficient
for today's network teams. These tools are excellent for monitoring the
production network and detecting certain types of problems. Still, they do not
allow network administrators to validate new technologies and applications
before their deployment on the production network. They also force network
administrators to resolve issues that should have been resolved during the
design of the use.
Conventional tools are also not very useful for solving
intermittent and transient network problems, as they do not provide a way to
reconstruct and analyze these sporadic conditions. They also do not help to
speed up the implementation of production, to facilitate the testing of
hypothetical scenarios or to support the formulation of network emergency
plans.
So what should an overworked and under-resourced network administrator
do? The answer is to look at network modeling technologies. These technologies
provide an environment in which new applications, techniques, and
troubleshooting strategies can be safely and thoroughly evaluated. Because they
allow you to fully validate the network behavior of an application before it is
deployed in the production environment, these technologies also enable network
administrators to run deployments more quickly and smoothly. Additionally,
modeling technologies are particularly capable of providing information on any
number of simulation scenarios so that network administrators can plan plans
for growth, business restructuring, and post-disaster recovery.
"Empirical" modeling solutions provide today's
network management teams with particularly excellent business value due to
their precision and ease of implementation. This precision and ease is achieved
by running real applications on a model that uses the conditions captured in
the production environment. The result is a clear understanding of the user
experience long before deployment.
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