You don't deliver applications in a vacuum. Applications and the infrastructure that supports them are dynamic systems that change over time. Unrelated system using the same network, servers, and storage can adversely impact application performance. With virtualization, the risk of one virtual server impacting another is quite real. Our End to End Application Performance Management (APM) Tech Center delivers best practices, emerging trends, new products and strategies to help you delivery applications effectively.
News and Analysis
Super Bowl Web Traffic Blitzes Advertisers
Super Bowl Web traffic crushed sites from Coca-Cola, Doritos and other brands that blended interactive marketing with televised commercials. Online statistics show that site design proved just as important as network capacity.
Riverbed Tackles APM with Acquisition of OPNET
WAN optimization and network performance management vendor Riverbed is acquiring OPNET, which will broaden its application performance management capabilities.
More Stories
Blogs
The Importance Of Correcting Packet Loss In VDI
March 30, 2011 11:13 AM
Posted by David Greenfield
Recently, on the LinkedIN WAN optimization professionals group, I participated in a conversation around whether virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is ready for the WAN. Face it, delivering responsive VDI over the WAN is going to be a challenge. One of the interesting points that came up was the importance of correcting for packet loss when considering WAN optimizers.
See all blogs by David Greenfield
What WAN Optimizers Can Learn From Firewalls
March 11, 2011 10:28 AM
Posted by David Greenfield
Listening to the give and take about WAN optimizers made me remember another battle between networking giants. It was nearly 10 years ago, during the early days of firewalls, when it seemed Marcus Ranum, then with Network FlightRecorder, would go head-to-head with Check Point's Gil Schwed on a weekly basis. Ranum was among the early creators of the application proxy and was vociferous about the value of delivering a firewall that terminated and inspected every session before passing the contents onto the destination. It was very effective, very secure and yet ultimately eclipsed by competing approaches.
See all blogs by David Greenfield
Cloud Connect Is All About Automation
March 08, 2011 08:29 AM
Posted by Mike Fratto
Automation. That is the theme I continue to come back to while at Cloud Connect. I think organizations are going to be getting the most benefit from automation in the near term, and automation is one of the many steps on the road to private cloud computing. Automation, when done right, can save you and your staff loads of work and can ensure that deployments go more smoothly. I sat down with representatives from VMWare, Gale Technologies, HP, TransLattice and Cloud.com, and got the lowdown on automation and private cloud.
See all blogs by Mike Fratto
The First IPv6 WAN Optimizer: Speed At What Price?
February 16, 2011 01:57 PM
Posted by David Greenfield
Last week, Blue Coat upgraded its MACH5 to become the industry's first IPv6-compatible WAN optimizer. WAN optimizers have long supported tunneled IPv6 over IPv4, but the MACH5 is the first WAN optimization appliance to accelerate native IPv6--and then some. The MACH5 is actually a very sophisticated IPv6 application layer gateway (ALG), providing IPv6 connectivity, security and optimization in a single device. Yet it's precisely its sophistication that raises questions around device scalability and price.
See all blogs by David Greenfield
WAN Optimization and the VDI Challenge
February 14, 2011 11:56 AM
Posted by David Greenfield
I was sitting in on a peer-to-peer exchange about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) hosted by Wikibon and listening to how great VDI is for organizations. I asked about multisite VDI and what recommendations people had for implementing VDI between sites. The speaker paused and said that she hadn't see any multisite implementations. No surprise there. VDI itself is still in its infancy, but it hit me once again that if organizations are going to see VDI's benefits at the remote office, they've got to pay close attention to their WAN acceleration layer.
See all blogs by David Greenfield
Data Centers: The Next Frontier For WAN Optimizers?
January 06, 2011 11:04 AM
Posted by David Greenfield
Signs of the increasingly pivotal role that WAN optimization is playing in the enterprise can be seen in the emergence of hybrid cloud architectures within corporate networks. As Mike so poignantly pointed out in his blog, the simple ability to run a VM does not make an application ready for the cloud. If developers are to leverage on-demand services, such as Amazon's EC2, they need to rethink how they architect their software to leverage a hybrid cloud environment.
See all blogs by David Greenfield
Best of the Web
VXLAN termination on physical devices
VXLAN is an Experimental IETF draft of protocols to enable the creation of a large overlay, multi-tenant network.
ONF Deadly Serious About OpenFlow-Based SDNs
: OpenFlow is poised to reach over-hyped status, yet there are practical, useful reasons for keeping an eye on Openflow. The biggest cloud players are involved and driving the feature creation.
Practical Introduction to Applied OpenFlow
Get a primer on the Openflow protocol and what it can do for networking.
On Resilience of Spit-Architecture Networks
This research papers investigates the practical issues in split-architecture networks and the placement of the controllers, such as Openflow controllers, in the network.
