In any enterprise architecture, there are a lot of “middle boxes”. I’m talking about your load balancers, application delivery controllers, firewalls, NAT devices, proxy servers, and increasingly common these days, WANOp devices. These devices sit between the network and an end host and operate more or less transparently. While prevalent, middle boxes are really getting the short shrift when it comes to application-level metrics.
WANOp is increasing popular these days and sometimes gets talked about like it’s a panacea to solving performance problems. The reality is WANOp is not well suited to ease all performance pains. In some instances, WANOp can actually break things. Think about it: WANOp devices like those from Riverbed are designed to accelerate certain protocols, intercept connections, inject certain elements to make the transaction go faster, sometimes they even serve as full proxies and terminates connections. This is a complex process that may have unexpected side effects.
We were sitting around the video conferencing table for a company all-hands meeting. Raja recounted a story of a recent customer meeting, arranged by a channel partner, it had to be really short to squeeze into this prospect’s schedule. 10 minutes into his allotted 15 minutes, the prospect interrupts, “I get it, you’re like so-and-so, runs at about 200 Mb, right?” “No, we run at 10 Gb.” Raja responds. The guy just stops, does a double take, and the tone of the meeting changes completely.
According to a recent CIO Insight survey, server and storage virtualization stay at the top of the IT Spending Priority List, seeing the strongest growth in 2009. Sixty-two percent of companies are budgeting for it, and many companies plan to expand the use of virtualization. I’ve written about the challenges of virtualization management before, with regards to virtual packet loss. Here’s another fairly recent example.
At ExtraHop, we sometimes talk about L2 and L3 statistics as “table stakes”. For a network and application management solution, you need to have visibility into those layers. But by and large, they are just not enough to solve some of the more complex problems in today’s environments.
