Infrastructure under the microscope
Infrastructure under the microscope
Holes in the global infrastructure can cause severe leaks in the performance of systems, especially when those weak spots are so hard to find. Rodney Appleyard reports on a system that promises to improve business agility by identifying the cracks so that they can be replaced with stronger fibres.
Research carried out by British Telecom (BT) recently revealed that 2000 European businesses are wasting more than three million working hours each year (a quarter of a billion euros) trying to get to the root of poor application performance, and 25 percent of IT directors don't know why.
Earlier this year, BT launched a major new initiative to combat this problem, called BT Applications Assured Infrastructure (AAI), which has been designed to increase the performance of core enterprise applications over the entire global infrastructure.
Its aim is to allow organisations to understand and master the complex interactions that occur within the infrastructure, from desktop to data centre. For Australians, this could mean that they will be able to overcome the typical lunchtime email and network failures, or the 9am, Monday morning failures when staff are using the network too much.
AAI provides a chance for an operator to view the performance of every single application and identify which ones are not performing to expectations or are hampering other applications.
Raj Kapoor, the vice president of BT, outlines some of the problems companies have been facing within their organisations, in terms of the overall global infrastructure, and explains how AAI can help to eliminate these weaknesses.
"There is too much of a blame culture in organisations. Typically, you have the users who complain to the network people, the network people will investigate then put the blame back on to the applications.
"What AAI does is it takes away the blame. Effectively, it gets the best out of the applications by identifying how applications can be optimised to perform to their maximum [capability]. It looks at the network side, as well as mission critical applications within an organisation, because it is important they perform well across the entire ICT infrastructure. So by that, what I mean is that the system does not just look at the Wide Area Network, but it also assesses the performance of the whole system. That includes the network, the servers and the application software.
"AAI is uniquely placed so we can look at the performance of specific applications across the whole chain. Usually what people do to fix problems is to increase the bandwidth when systems slow down. That's too much of a simple solution. We try to pinpoint exactly where the problem is. It might be inside one specific application. Once we have established that one application is causing less performance, we can then suggest what can be done to solve this problem.
"We audit the networks, the servers, the desktops and the applications and then provide a detailed report about all of this analysis. We have found, through talking to many customers, that 25 percent of ICT managers really do not know what is happening inside the network. The audit pinpoints applications which are not performing at the right level.'
The answer can sometimes involve consolidating servers, but before this can be done, consideration needs to be taken in terms of how this change will fit into the whole picture. The AAI solution allows the business to see what the knock-on effect will be before it is put into practice, taking out the risk of something else going wrong. One an idea has been activated, then the next stage will involve monitoring the application and viewing how it operates after the change. AAI's ongoing management makes sure that the replaced performance enhancement is maintained.
"In one organisation, we found that between the hours of 12 noon and 2pm, the network was really clogging up. This caused huge problems for the network, and the IT people could not work out why it was happening. Business critical applications couldn't run properly. The CIO was under pressure to do something about it. We found that between those hours, most of the users were surfing the Internet over lunch. So instead of the normal approach of an IT manager to increase the bandwidth, which costs a lot of money, certain sites were banned-the sites we found to be causing the exact problem. After that, the business critical applications were able to work properly again.'
Other examples of the AAI in action include a situation when certain workstations were involved with huge, constant data transfers with remote print servers. Rebooting a single workstation caused the link utilisation for the main site to fall by 50 percent instantly.
This single "rogue' session was using 18GB per day of available bandwidth (over 1.5 Mbps).
The problem apparently was the result of a faulty print driver, which the client's third party contractor had been working to correct. BT has been able to advise the client about the applications affected on a number of occasions. This has either prevented or corrected network utilisation issues at several client locations, including regional sites and the Command Centre.
This particular issue was still visible via the BT AAI service three months later; it is now understood that the client's third party contractor had re-installed some of the faulty drivers to support DOS-based printing.
Workstations that suffer from this problem often sustain losses of over 1 Mbps of WAN bandwidth. This causes general slowdown of applications and hinders normal capacity planning. In other cases, the impact can be more severe. For example, the Command Centre in one case was unable to access the main customer Internet site. A workstation with the printer problem was identified and when it was switched off, access to the customer Internet site was restored.
Kapoor adds: "The reports that we produce are meaningful. People at a senior level can use them to prepare the organisation for incorporating more applications. They will know which applications will work hand in hand with new ones. AAI provides a snapshot of what works and doesn't work on the network.'
As more companies expand globally around the world and integrate new hardware and software systems into their infrastructure, complications will continue to arise, but at least with AAI, they will be able to have more visibility over all of their systems from a single system, which will allow them to find exactly where problems and inefficiencies exist so that they can fix them immediately. In many ways, AAI will enable them to keep on expanding their infrastructure with fewer concerns about finding the little problems which can sometimes hamper the bigger ambitions.
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