Blog: The Network View

According to the Forrester report, Updated Q3 2011: Power and Cooling Heat Up the Data Center, energy costs make up 70% of the approximate operations costs of a data center facility. Perhaps more interestingly, the report states that the data center rack is becoming the bottleneck in forward progress due to increased density and reduced energy and greater space efficiency. Data center racks aren’t the sexiest topic around, but it is interesting that with all of our impressive technology, the rack itself may be hampering our progress in achieving improved density.

With the introduction of vSphere 5.0, you can now use virtual SPANs to monitoring virtual traffic with existing hardware tools.

In our ongoing conversations with your peers, one message has resonated across the board: virtualization is here to stay, and it introduces unforeseen complications and problems into the packet capture and monitoring world. The term “Virtual Blind Spot” has begun to fly around, but what does it mean? Basically, when you have resources and servers that are virtually moving between hardware boxes, the tried and true methods of monitoring traffic are unlikely to provide the required visibility for maintaining a secure and well-performing data center. After all, if I activate a SPAN to attach an IDS or an Application Monitor, great. But how the heck will I know whether the same traffic streams will be available to those tools over time?

Performance Testing was always a part of Software Testing whether explicitly stated or not. The world of software testing is becoming smarter and mature. With the changing landscape of Computing and an Industry-wise paradigm shift towards SOA/web based applications has brought to the forefront a focus on Performance Testing. The expectations sought from this kind of testing are measurable numbers.

Earlier this week, Network World Senior editor Denise Dubie published a very insightful article, “How far has virtualization come?“. In it, she reviews the results of three annual surveys conducted at Interop, all focused on virtualization technology deployments and adoption in the data cen