WAN Optimization
There are 33 entries for the tag WAN Optimization
It has been a while since I wrote an installment of Load Balancing for Developers, and now I think it has been too long, but never fear, this is the grad-daddy of Load Balancing for Developers blogs, covering a useful bit of information about Application Delivery Controllers that you might want to take advantage of. For those who have joined us since my last installment, feel free to check out the entire list of blog entries (along with related blog entries) here, though I assure you that this installment, like most of the others, does not require you to have...
The complexities of life often escape a young child. The Little Man asked me the other day why I had to go work, which was both a compliment to wanting to spend time with me and an unintended backhand slap at Lori, who was going to hang out with him while I took care of business. The answer was the usual stuff, that working paid the bills, and work has its own rewards… It did not include “and I like my job”, though I do, simply because I didn’t want to imply “more than hanging out with you” to...
In our first house, we had a set of stairs that were horrible. They were unfinished, narrow, and steep. Lori went down them once with a vacuum cleaner, they were just not what we wanted in the house. They came out into the kitchen, so you were looking at these half-finished steps while sitting at the kitchen table. We covered them so they at least weren’t showing bare treads, and then we… Got used to them. Yes, that is what I said. We adapted. They were covered, making them minimally acceptable, they served their purpose, so we enjoyed...
Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....
When time and performance mattered, CSG Content Direct turned to Dell and F5 to make their replication faster while reducing WAN utilization. We talk a lot in our blogs about what benefits you could get from an array of F5 products, so when this case study (pdf link) hit our inboxes, we thought you’d like to hear about what CSG’s Content Direct did get out of deploying F5 BIG-IP WOM. Utilizing tools by two of the premier technology companies in the world, Content Direct was able to decrease backup windows to as little as 5% of their...
It is a very cool world we live in, where technology is concerned. We’re looking at a near future where your excess workload, be it applications or storage, can be shunted off to a cloud. Your users have more power in their hands than ever before, and are chomping at the bit to use it on your corporate systems. IBM recently announced a memory/storage breakthrough that will make Flash disks look like 5.25 inch floppies. While we can’t know what tomorrow will bring, we can certainly know that the technology will enable us to be more adaptable, responsive, and (yes,...
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historical timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… The oldest (24 y/o) being a WarHammer 40k player and the youngest (3 y/o) just plain enjoying anything that looks like a robot. While I have been modeling more or less for decades, only in the last five years have I had the luxury of owning an airbrush, and...
On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...
Having just returned from our annual D&D tournament, this year in Las Vegas, I have role-playing on the mind, so when I read the title of Elizabeth White’s blog IBM and Cable & Wireless to Develop UK Smart Energy Cloud, I immediately thought of the AD&D Druid spell Call Lightning which gathers clouds and then emits lightning every ten minutes until it runs out. Which is kind of in line with what her blog is talking about – two companies with a history in smart energy grids getting together to make it a reality. Most striking to me...
In nature, things seek a balance that is sustainable. In the case of rivers, if there is too much pressure from water flowing, they either flood or open streams to let off the pressure. Both are technically examples of erosion, but we’re not here to discuss that particular natural process, we’re here to consider the case of a stream off a river when there is something changing the natural balance. Since I grew up around a couple of man-made lakes – some dug, some created when the mighty AuSable River was dammed, I’ll use man-made lakes as my examples, but...
Recently I was in a conversation where someone seriously suggested that Web Application Acceleration and WAN Optimization should be the job of developers, since they are in the code and creating the network traffic. At first I was taken aback by this suggestion. I was a manager of a small team of developers and admins when Web Application Firewalls first started to be bandied about (though I don’t think they had the fancy name then), and went through this entire discussion then. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d revisit it on the much grander scale mentioned....
My older children, like most kids in their age group, all played with or collected Pokemon cards. Just like I and all of my friends had GI Joes and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Kung-fu grip versus hard hands, they and all of their friends sat around talking about how much cooler their current favorite Pokemon card was compared to all of the others. We let them play and kept an eye on how cards were being passed about the group (they’re small and tend to walk off, so we patrolled a bit, but otherwise stayed out of...
One day many years ago, Lori and I’s oldest son held up two sheets of paper and said “These two things are exactly the same, but different!” Now, he’s a very bright individual, he was just young, and didn’t even get how incongruous the statement was. We, being a fun loving family that likes to tease each other on occasion, we of course have not yet let him live it down. It was honestly more than a decade ago, but all is fair, he doesn’t let Lori live down something funny that she did before he was born. It...
It should be no surprise to anyone that the number of mobile devices is increasing at an astounding rate. In fact, according to Ericsson, mobile broadband subscriptions will double in 2011. Let’s all just take a moment to ponder what that means to our worldwide infrastructure. Lots has been written about this topic from a theoretical viewpoint, but we’re about to find out how flexible our infrastructures really are. If you have web servers or other resources on the Internet, some of those new mobile devices will be coming your way. Let’s take the worst case scenario and...
While helping Lori with her fishtank avocation, I have learned a lot of incidental information, like the fact that there are essentially three types of tank – reef, fish, and mixed. Reef tanks hold corals, anemones, etc, while fish tanks hold fish, with a minimum of incidental coral or coralline structure. Mixed tanks have fish who are carefully selected specifically not to eat the pretty corals, soft corals, anemones, and other tasty tidbits growing on the rocks. This is somewhat amazing to me, because in a sense, I share the Toddler’s view of fishtanks. He points and says “That’s...
It is an interesting twist in the IT world that with the increased usage of purchased packages and the growth of on-demand IT, we increasingly find ourselves talking about “Applications”. This is a good reference point, it addresses all of the things running on our servers with one fell swoop, but much like when you talk about “vehicles”, the phrase has little meaning beyond discussing similarities. In the IT sense of the word, Application can be defined as a program running on hardware. In the datacenter sense of the word, it can be a program running on one of our...
As solid and reliable as fishtanks and rifles are, they share a common weakness. The tiniest crack in either will eventually destroy the entire product. Why did I choose “fishtanks and rifles”? Lori and I’s hobbies include those two items, but there are other things the same applies to. My oldest son said his tom-tom had a crack at the bottom, and I made the same observation to him… Best to get that fixed now, since the point of a drum set is to beat on it and make vibrations, I can guarantee what will eventually happen if nothing...
One of the things that I love about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it. One of the things I hate about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it… And there are marketing geeks and pundits willing to tell you which one to choose before you even know that you have the problem. I was out in Anaheim last week with F5’s rockstar salesforce, telling them about the Future of IT. Or trying to, you’ll have...
That’s a mouthful, but this is just a quick blog to point you at the actual blog I guest wrote for our F5 Fridays series. In short, we’ve been toying with F5 BIG-IP WOM in the labs as a performance and distance enhancement tool for VMWare vMotion moves over the WAN when NetApp Flexcache is deployed. Pretty cool stuff, and while I wasn’t involved in all of the testing that went on, as the Technical Marketing Manager for WOM I did get to see the results as they rolled out of the lab. Take a read if...
If you’ve never heard of my Load Balancing For Developers series, it’s a good idea to start here. There are quite a few installments behind us, and I’m not going to look back in this post any more than I must to make it readable without going back… Meaning there’s much more detail back there than I’ll relate here. Again after a lengthy sojourn covering other points of interest, I return to Load Balancing For Developers with a more holistic view – application performance. Lori has talked a bit about this topic, and I’ve talked about it in the...
You could, in theory, install 2 foot diameter pipes in your house to run water through. If you like a really forceful shower, or want your hot-tub to fill quickly, bigger pipes would be your first thought. Imagine your surprise if you had someone come in, and install huge pipes on the inside of your water meter, only to discover that you didn’t get a whole heck of a lot more water through them? You see, the meter is a choke point. As is the pipe leading up to your house. It’s not just the issue of the pipes...
Someone said something interesting to me the other day, and they’re right “at 10 Gig WAN connections with compression turned on, you’re not likely to fill the pipe, the key is to make certain you’re not the bottleneck.” (the other day is relative – I’ve been sitting on this post for a while) I saw this happen when 1 Gig LANs came about, applications at the time were hard pressed to actually use up a Gigabit of bandwidth, so the focus became how slow the server and application were, if the backplane on the switch was big enough to...
We developers used to be obsessed with optimizations. Like a child with an Erector Set and a whole lot of spare parts, we always wanted to “make it better”. In our case, better was faster and using less memory/CPU resources. Where development came from – a few Kilobytes of memory, a much slower CPU, and non-optimizing compilers, this all made sense. But the rest of IT, and indeed, the business, didn’t want to see us build our Erector set higher, or make our code more complex buy more efficient, machines were speeding up at a relatively constant rate and the...
In the US, many people watch the entire season of NASCAR without ever really paying attention to the racing. They are fixated on seeing a crash, and at the speed that NASCAR races average – 81mph on the most complex track to 188 mph on the least curvy track – they’re likely to get what they’re watching for. But that misses the point of the races. The merging of man and machine to react at lightning speed to changes in the environment are what the races are about. Of course speed figures in, but it is not the only...
While there are a whole array of well-documented benefits to be found in virtualization, there is one truth to virtualization that has not escaped the experienced IT veteran. Virtualization sprawl is not just bad for operations, it is bad for disaster recovery planning. Not only are there a ton more systems to worry about in a world where a new system can be brought online and be fully functional in hours, there is a dedicated amount of disk packed behind that virtual machine that must be maintained also. And when the worst happens must be restored. ...
The last couple of years have been painful, to say the least. Some call them unprecedented, financially, but I do believe that is pushing the descriptor a bit far, since there have been plenty of instances where business pretty much en-masse questioned the amount that IT returns for their investment and cut budgets, so the feel of this recession is not much different than what we’ve felt before, it’s just by necessity. The funny bit of this is that everyone seems to agree that IT spending still went up in 2009, just by a massively reduced amount. Since the pinch...
YES, IT IS ABOUT THE BUSINESS… Over the years data archiving and backup technology have waxed and waned, growing closer and further away from each other as the needs of the enterprise, new technologies, and the external economic and regulatory environment have changed. There have been clear indications that the need for reliable backup and archiving of data was a growing regulatory requirement, yet it did nothing for the business, and that meant it was a hard-to-sell expense. BUT LET’S NOT GENERALIZE TOO MUCH. Out in the...
Anyone who has children and travels by car will tell you that there is no substitute for the mandatory array of bathroom breaks that must be taken by those children. One of the many reasons I prefer to travel at night when driving long distances is that children who are asleep are not asking to pull into the next rest stop for yet another restroom break. And I was one of those children. My father once told me I had the smallest bladder on the planet… Right before my mother made him stop at a gas station for me. ...
Where you are going has a huge impact upon the mode of transportation that you choose to use. If you are going to the neighbor’s house, you tend to walk. If on your way to town or downtown, you tend to take a motorized vehicle. Out for a leisurely trip around the subdivision? You are likely going to ride a bike. Going to another continent, probably a plane, maybe a ship… You get the idea. Several years ago (while working for Network Computing) I reviewed WAN Optimization products, with an eye to file transfer acceleration. Interestingly, F5 decided not...
Lori, the Toddler, and I drove down to my mothers’ house in Cincinnati (about 9 hours away) for the fourth of July weekend. Our youngest daughter drove her car with her sister, the sister’s fiancé, and our grand-daughter. We stayed in touch via text message and drove through the night. What does all of this have to do with networking, you ask? Well I was driving about 1AM around Indianapolis, Indiana, and realized that there were an awful lot of cars on the road for the middle of the night, presumably holiday traffic, but things were moving along smoothly,...
Ever hang out with the person who just wants to make their point, and no matter what the conversation says the same thing over and over in slightly different ways? Ever want to tell them they were doing their favorite cause/point/whatever a huge disfavor by acting like a repetitive fool? That’s what your data is doing when you send it across the WAN. Ever seen the data in a database file? Or in your corporate marketing documents? R E P E T I T I V E. And under a normal backup or replication scenario – or a remote office...
THE SLOW GROWTH OF SPEEDY COMMUNICATIONS It used to be that if you were replicating database or file storage to a remote location you had few options if your connection was not the best. You could use rate shaping to give more of the pipe over to your replication, increase TCP window sizes, turn on jumbo frames… All relatively primitive stuff. As time went on, the speed and reliability of data connections grew, which increased our usage of such connections to replicate data, which decreased the reliability of the connections because we...
It’s been a good long while since I wrote an installment of Load Balancing for Developers, but you all keep reading them, and they are still my most read blog posts on a monthly basis, so since I have an increased interest in WAN Optimization, and F5 has a great set of WAN Optimization products, I thought I’d tag right onto the end with more information that will help you understand what Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are doing for (and to) your code, and how they can help you tweak your application without writing even more code. If you’re...
