White Paper Library

Route Dynamics – Product Bulletin

RouteDynamics is a newly announced Circadence network management product that delivers—through continuous network monitoring—a high – fidelity Layer 3 view of the IP control plane. By listening to routing protocols and related activity, the product reconstructs the state of the network and its service paths, providing a representation of all the Layer 3 components and paths in "network – time." The intelligence delivered by Circadence RouteDynamics makes possible a preventive, rather than a reactive, network management capability. Network operators and engineers can pinpoint a variety of persistent and transient problems that are difficult to diagnose—or even invisible—with traditional management techniques and tools.

WAN Optimization Made Easy

WANs are now an essential part of most companies' computing infrastructures. WANs connect remote offices to central offices, allowing a major physical presence in multiple locations without sacrificing corporate computing power; WANs directly connect smaller branch offices with headquarters, enabling them to perform big-office tasks with more cost-effective staff; and the next-generation WANs enable mobile workers to become highly productive in the field by tapping into the main corporate office.

While the benefits of WANs are indisputable and essential for most corporations, the cost and complexity of optimizing new or existing WANs may seem too complicated and expensive to consider. As a result, many WANs perform at sub-standard speed, with a consummate loss in productivity. If leased lines are used, these un-optimized WANs are costing businesses far more money than necessary.

As companies spread workforces across the country and the world, fast, secure remote access to centralized corporate facilities is the key to increased productivity and profit. These regional, branch and mobile workforces require increasingly sophisticated applications and services to perform productively. Some or all of this remote access should travel over public networks. As computing continues to expand beyond the comfortable confines of the corporate firewall, a number of security, performance, and productivity issues should be addressed if corporations are to achieve a secure and demonstrable return on their WAN investments. These WAN connections, due to the increasing complexity and bandwidth demands of soft ware applications, will become more and more crowded over time. The trend is toward more traffic and more congestion. Today, it is estimated that 31 percent of business communications costs are consumed by WANs (Newman 2006).

Of perennial concern to corporate WAN administrators looking to contain costs is the issue of network and application performance. Without performance enhancements, the latency and traffic inherent in WAN connections can drag remote connections to a crawl in some instances. When remote applications are response-dependent, optimized WAN connections from end-to-end are crucial to prevent applications from timing out, corrupting data, or frustrating workers at the remote sites. New applications such as video, virtualized server applications, and SaaS (soft ware-as-a-service) require more bandwidth than traditional text- based data fi les and database records. As a result, just a few years after deployment WAN connections may already be showing signs of severe bandwidth constraints. First and foremost, WANs need to be optimized for performance to maintain remote-access users' productivity and help applications function smoothly. Businesses need to squeeze all the bandwidth they can from expensive leased lines.

Building and Maintaining Effective Cloud Computing Infrastructures

A number of technical issues prevent the wide-spread adoption of cloud computing infrastructures in the enterprise, including WAN performance, security, and central management of virtual and IP services. This paper explores the nature of these technical challenges and offers solutions for building and maintaining more effective cloud computing infrastructures.

Introduction

Cloud computing holds great promise as the next leap in efficiency for enterprise computing. Primarily enabled by server, storage, and network virtualization, cloud computing enables businesses to dynamically allocate and assign computing resources from across the company's assets to where the resources are most needed. This promises to cut hardware and soft ware acquisition costs significantly and can have a tremendous savings in energy expenditures as well. With cloud computing users access data and applications as they always have but that data and the application may reside anywhere within the company's cloud; in many cases the application and data may be spread among many diff erent sites, depending on demands placed on the network.

Problems Implementing Effective Cloud Computing

For all its promise as a cost-effective solution for fully exploiting enterprise resources, cloud computing faces a few significant technical challenges before wide-spread adoption is possible. Three potential problems in particular can complicate implementation of an effective cloud computing infrastructure:

• WAN performance
• Data security
• Central management of virtual resources

Problem: WAN Performance with Cloud Computing

The chief problem in cloud computing is the performance, reliability and security of connections to the cloud infrastructure. These WAN connections, due to the increasing complexity and bandwidth demands of soft ware applications, will become more and more crowded over time, especially when pressed into the service of cloud based computing. The trend is toward more traffic and more congestion. In a cloud infrastructure, in many cases, congestion may not be easily predicted. Today, it is estimated that 31 percent of business communications costs are already consumed by WANs (Newman 2006). Cloud computing may easily raise the cost of communication if WAN optimization is not properly implemented.

Without performance enhancements, the latency and traffic inherent in WAN connections can drag remote connections to the cloud to a crawl in some instances. When remote applications are response-dependent, optimized WAN connections from end-to-end are crucial to prevent applications from timing out, corrupting data, or frustrating workers at the remote sites. Applications such as video, virtualized server applications and SaaS (soft ware-as-a-service) running in the cloud require more bandwidth than traditional text-based data files and database records across normal WAN connections.

Service Fidelity: Taking IP Assurance to the Next Level

When service providers send voice and video applications over next-generation IP networks, end-to-end service assurance becomes their most important concern. While traditional approaches to providing service assurance work well for high-speed data, they fail to address many of the network conditions that affect video and voice services. These problems may be caused by transient failures, misconfigurations,or even design violations.

Circadence takes a new approach. We call it service fidelity. Service fidelity derives from real-time, highly accurate views of the network and applications. And service fidelity relies on the ability to detect and remediate issues that are invisible to traditional service assurance and network management systems. Service fidelity is the next level of IP service assurance. This paper discusses Circadence's service fidelity approach and rationale.

Circadence presents a unique and unexcelled model for next generation IP networks. We call it service fidelity. Service fidelity offers real-time visibility together with sophisticated analytics and remediation. Service fidelity enhances traditional fault management, configuration management, and other network and application management systems to address the need for NGOSS optimization. Circadence is certain that service fidelity will be the standard for next-generation IP networks.

Next Generation OSS: Service Path Technology and Circadence’s Role

In order to meet the demands for converged delivery of real-time applications such as video, voice, and gaming, service providers are investing heavily in new IP infrastructure, often identified as Next Generation Network or NGN. A critical component of NGN is the operational Support System (OSS) which manages, monitors, maintains the infrastructure, and proactively resolves issues that may result in the perception of service degradation.

Service providers have successfully implemented OSSs that address the requirements of data-oriented IP applications for today's networks. But the dramatic increase in IP traffic within NGNs as well as the emergence of new IP applications and new networking protocols has caused a fundamental discontinuity within NGNs. The demands on OSSs have become real-time, resulting in new management requirements often referred to as New Generation OSS or NGOSS. In this white paper we will explore how Circadence's RouteDynamics solution adds value within OSS environments—particularly NGOSS.

Service providers are searching for ways to more effectively deploy and support the sophisticated infrastructure and associated real-time application services. While the emphasis of this white paper has been on the contribution of real-time service path visibility through RouteDynamics to existing OSS systems, the contribution of service path visibility to service management of NGN is paramount to the long term success of managed converged services. Real-time service path information is one of the core unique capabilities and values of Circadence's technology. What's more, Circadence's orchestration model expands on that value by enabling service providers to increase revenue generation and reach higher customer retention goals.

Central Management of Virtual Resources

Virtual sprawl, a lack of uniform security, and the inability of corporations to clearly see and manage their entire virtualization environment are hindering the effective use of virtual computing in enterprise environments. This paper examines the root causes of these potential obstacles in enterprise virtualization and proposes cost-effective solutions to more effectively deploy and manage virtual assets.

Introduction

There is no denying that virtualization has become the most adopted technology by businesses over the last four years. According to a study released by IDC, virtualization services are expected to grow to $11.7 billion in sales by 2011. Th e Gartner Group estimates sales in 2008 reached $2.7 billion. Th e reason for the enormous growth in virtualization technology is simple: virtualization enables businesses to better utilize a greater percentage of all their computing resources, saving them money, time, and energy. Th e cost savings are real and readily quantifi able. Initially adopted by large enterprises, virtualization is now making great inroads into medium and even small businesses as the technology becomes more aff ordable and easier to deploy. In particular, this growth in adoption by smaller businesses is a key indicator that virtualization is now a mature and stable technology.

Virtualization—the abstraction of computing resources into virtual representations—is generally deployed in four key areas:  

1. Network virtualization, where physical connections and bandwidth are bundled into virtual data channels,
2. Server Virtualization, where virtual servers (including CPU, drives and memory) are created from one or more physical servers,
3. Storage Virtualization, where pools of physical disk drives are used to create one or more virtual drives.
4. Desktop Virtualization, where pre-configured desktop environments that include authorized applications and configurations are delivered to users on the network, simplifying the deployment and support of end-user devices. Subsets of virtualization include application and memory virtualization, as well as the creation of computer clusters and grid computing by combining multiple physical computing resources into larger, virtual meta-computers.

Companies experienced the biggest financial gain when implementing server virtualization; this consolidation led to reducing the number of physical servers in most data centers while increasing the overall utilization of existing resources. Network virtualization helped many companies overcome network bandwidth bottlenecks and, again, get the most from their existing equipment rather than purchase additional switches and routers. Finally, companies deployed storage virtualization to reclaim partially used disk space and to enhance disaster recovery at their sites. All virtualization technologies allowed companies to more quickly deploy new resources within a virtualization environment—once they had developed a virtual server, network or storage template, they could easily replicate the virtualized service for additional resources.

However, as with many maturing technologies, rapid adoption of virtualization also introduces a number of complications. While virtualization architecture, engineering, and features have stabilized, customers are now turning to making their operations more efficient and secure. As more and more solutions enter the market, selection of the right virtualization product for a particular business environment or application becomes more difficult, particularly when customers must integrate products from multiple vendors. Additionally, management and optimization tools for virtualization technology have yet to mature at the same rate as the core technologies.

Improving Connections for Mobile Workers

The world's mobile workforce is growing faster than any other segment in the industry. According to analyst reports, spending on mobile devices and mobile applications will grow at a rate of over 20 percent per year through the year 2011 (Compass Intelligence 2007). A need to stay close to customers and keep workers in touch is driving this growth. Not surprisingly, the major mobile applications used in the field are email and SMS/text messaging. However, project management, CRM, collaboration, and file sharing applications are becoming increasingly popular outside the walls of the enterprise as companies see real profit in delivering customer service, order-entry, and other business functions to the customer's door. This increase in mobile activity creates a significant management challenge for any company's IT department.

For example, businesses have managed laptops and notebooks in the field for decades, but the new mobile business model adds challenging performance and security issues into the mix. Because of the power and flexibility of laptop computers, full-featured CRM and soft ware as a service (SaaS) applications can be routinely delivered to the field, transforming the typical mobile worker into the equivalent of a virtual branch office. This is a tremendous boost to the bottom line. However, maintaining peak employee performance requires regular, reliable connections to network services - either wirelessly or over a cellular carrier network.

The latest innovation in the mobile workforce is the use of handheld, PDA, and smartphone computers. For example, order entry and customer service applications were once confined to laptop computers. Today's handheld devices are powerful enough to provide client-server computing. Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Mobile Linux operating systems can run full-featured client applications over cellular, WiFi, and new 3G networks, connecting these remote applications to enterprise resources.

From laptops to handhelds, any organization can benefit from mobile applications. But according to many industry analysts, if the underlying infrastructure of mobile computing is not sound, delivering a productive business environment into the field becomes a severe problem. "Vendors and organizations alike must recognize that mobile enterprise solutions are not just about mobilizing a particular application," said Stephen Drake, program director for IDC mobile enterprise research. "Organizations should seek out suppliers that offer robust underlying infrastructure to support the applications and provide enterprise-grade scalability for future expansion." (Jaques 2006)

Optimizing Oracle Applications

Without question, Oracle soft ware is at the heart of many enterprise computing infrastructures world-wide. Businesses rely on Oracle for transaction processing, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, data mining, and much more. The soft ware has grown over the years from a centrally-located, SQL database to a distributed business platform for the enterprise. Oracle applications have expanded from LAN campus installations to remote offi ce, mobile user, and extranet partner access. As off -site connections to the Oracle platform become more critical to business productivity and profi t, companies are seeing a dramatic increase in WAN traffi c generated by Oracle applications. Because of this increase in Oracle data over WANs, IT administrators are constantly struggling to balance the performance and security of these applications with the need to add increased functionality to an ever-broader base of users.

The challenges of Oracle Access across the enterprise WAN

Users can take many paths to an Oracle enterprise application. Mobile users on laptops can connect over public Internet networks; and PDA and smartphone users can log into the network over 3G or CDMA cell phone carriers. Business partners can use private leased-line WAN connections. Even remote offices may have a multitude of different entry points to the Oracle application repository. IT administrators must accommodate all these types of connections. Moreover, not all users are created equal. Some users may require access to a full complement of Oracle applications, while others may need only a simple connection to the data center. To be effective and efficient, the IT infrastructure must address each user's requirements.

Unfortunately, many enterprises experience Oracle WAN problems after the initial testing and roll-out phase of the applications. For example, an order entry system that tested well on the campus LAN and remotely over common carrier lines from a laptop can experience performance and data integrity problems when accessed over a cellular network. An increase in peak users can grind a formerly well-tuned application to a halt, regardless of the connection types. As a result, many IT organizations continually refine, upgrade, and monitor Oracle WAN performance and make adjustments accordingly. Many find themselves continually reconfiguring WAN hardware, buying additional equipment, or restricting application features. This is an expensive and time-consuming effort. (Milsap, 2003)

Latency and bandwidth restraints

"When organizations, regardless of size, began pushing big applications over a WAN, latency was introduced. This became exceedingly challenging for small to mid-sized enterprises that lacked the budget for big WAN links but wanted to take advantage of Web-based applications, especially for remote branch environments, "Sandra Kay Miller writes in Processor. (Miller, 2008) But even large enterprises are finding latency to be an issue as they push Oracle out beyond these high-performance WAN links to mobile environments. Two of the chief bottlenecks to optimum Oracle application performance over WANs are latency and bandwidth. In a worst-case scenario, high latency may cause some Oracle applications to time out and disconnect the user. More common, however, are latency delays that frustrate the user and hamper productivity. In most cases, this is unacceptable to many businesses, especially when it directly affects customers and business partners. While some latency issues can be traced to the application itself, most are a result of insufficient bandwidth or intermittent connections. Each WAN connection topology presents its own set of bandwidth management and optimization challenges. Leased-line WANs may suffer congestion during peak usage periods even though initial provisioning seemed adequate. Remote offices over common carriers are subject to outages and slowdowns beyond enterprise IT control. Wireless and cellular networks may impose arbitrary bandwidth restrictions or deliver vastly disparate connection speeds depending on the location. Finally, application feature creep and the gradual increase in user demands on the WAN may degrade performance imperceptibly until they cause critical congestion. As a result, many companies find themselves addressing mobile, common carrier, and leased-line optimization with multiple products; this causes an increased risk of incompatibilities and escalated management costs.

SaaS Performance Challenges

While soft ware as a service (SaaS) originally took hold primarily in small to medium sized businesses as a means to save on soft ware purchases, larger companies and enterprises are increasingly deploying SaaS applications. (Holinchek, 2006) In fact, in 2007 fully 75% of SaaS industry revenue was generated from companies with over $1 billion in revenue. (eWeek, 2007) Regardless of the customer company size, saving money on soft ware purchases and maintenance is the primary motivator to outsource applications. Companies no longer need to spend management resources tracking down soft ware fixes and upgrades, nor do they need to meticulously track soft ware license compliance. The latest version of the application is always online. Licensing is on a per-use basis, not per seat.

Another chief reason for deploying SaaS is that it eases the burden on the customer's computing infrastructure. Buying and installing soft ware has a significant impact on a customer's local storage, network servers, and desktop resources. SaaS places far less of a burden on these components. For these reasons, the pay-as-you-go model of SaaS applications has seen tremendous growth over the last three years. Companies about to deploy SaaS solutions as an alternative to traditional soft ware or service providers offering SaaS applications to customers should take note, however, of the potential pitfalls in delivering soft ware over WAN connections.

Deploying SaaS over WANs

Unless SaaS applications are offered as in-house, firewall-protected applications, they must travel at least part of their delivery route over the public wide area network. The conditions on this public network are almost entirely out of the control of either the SaaS customer or the SaaS soft ware provider. The nearly serendipitous routing of traffic over the Internet along with the inconsistent traffic and congestion along the routes makes predictable performance impossible. In addition, the open nature of the network leaves data—even secure socket layer (SSL) protected data—vulnerable to attack, data hijacking, or diversion.

Customer concerns when deploying SaaS

In polls and surveys taken by leading analyst groups, the three top concerns of companies when deploying SaaS are:

1. Security
2. Lack of control
3. Reliability and performance

While companies can insure security themselves when installing soft ware on their premises, SaaS applications are off site and beyond traditional security parameters. The nature of SaaS application architecture, such as hosting multiple customers on each SaaS host (multi-tenancy) and storing data on a server outside the enterprise certainly underscores the sense that data may be at risk. (eWeek, 2007) Exacerbating this sense of lack of control is the very nature of the data communication—over a public network. Many companies are reluctant to outsource missioncritical applications that are delivered over unsecured, public WAN connections.al increase in user demands on the WAN may degrade performance imperceptibly until they cause critical congestion. As a result, many companies find themselves addressing mobile, common carrier, and leased-line optimization with multiple products; this causes an increasedrisk of incompatibilities and escalated management costs.

Contributing to the uneasiness on the part of some potential SaaS customers is the inherent unpredictability of public network WAN performance. If applications lag, lose data, or crash due to congestion or outages on the public WAN, company productivity suffers. Understandably, many companies will not consider.

Enhancing Healthcare IT Performance and Data Reliability

Healthcare information technology is undergoing enormous change. Most of the impetus for healthcare IT modernization is driven by the need to cut costs while improving service, but important government mandates and regulations are also adding significant burdens on these IT organizations. Besides HIPAA, the U.S. government is proposing a nation-wide Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) initiative that will require healthcare IT organizations in many cases to completely reengineer their information system infrastructures to comply with online records requirements.

In addition, Congress is proposing the Health Information Technology for Economic Clinic Health Act (HITECH), which offers funds for improving healthcare through IT, but provides few, if any, guidelines for achieving this goal.

The EHR system, in theory, will streamline healthcare management, improve the quality of patient care, and cut costs by providing a universally accessible online repository for patient records. In reality, healthcare IT administrators must now upgrade their hardware and soft ware infrastructures in many cases to accommodate the new system. Beyond the significant issue of infrastructure upgrades, many healthcare workers themselves will need to be trained, retrained and provided with unfamiliar technology to perform routine tasks on their jobs, such as physician order entry, or moving from bedside charting to electronic recordkeeping. (Mearian, 2009)

These changes will require the addition of more endpoint devices such as PDAs, PC carts, and laptops within an organization itself, but it will also require a substantial rise in connectivity to its data from outside the organization.

The need for optimizing performance

As a result, the requirement for ubiquitous electronic access to data may put many healthcare IT infrastructures under severe stress. As more workers are required to access data exclusively in electronic form, LAN, WAN, and storage subsystems will see a tremendous increase in traffic and congestion. This congestion, however, can be mitigated with hardware upgrades, optimization of existing connectivity, or both. In many cases, IT administrators will have little control over the manner in which electronic data is accessed from outside its organization and will need to provision their systems accordingly.

Beyond the baseline stresses of converting records to a purely electronic format, the move toward pervasive computing in healthcare is already creating additional IT demands on health providers and facilities. The increased use of handheld devices, wireless laptop connectivity, and remote site access to data is becoming the norm for many healthcare workers as they see technology providing direct benefits for patient care. (Bardram, 2006) Pervasive computing in healthcare is cutting costs and improving the quality of care, but in many cases it may adversely affect the performance and reliability of the overall existing network infrastructure.

The most severe stress on healthcare IT infrastructure is the secure storage and transmission of medical images across the network. Imagery will increasingly be accessed by handheld and wireless devices and shared across WAN and campus-wide connections. The sheer size of the images generates a great deal of network traffic, and this increase is erratic and unpredictable. (Valentine, 2004)