BANGALORE, INDIA: Did you know that features such as elasticity, dynamic virtual infrastructure, multi-tenancy, which are supposed to be the main attractions of virtualized or hosted environments, can, in turn, be the cause of network bottlenecks as well?

Let's see what are the best practices to solve network performance issues, especially in hosted environments, from Girdhar Java, director, South Asia, InfoVista. Excerpts:

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CIOL: Many service providers hesitate to jump into hosted or virtualization technology owing to the inability to monitor network performance in such environments. How true is this? How does a hosted environment make network monitoring even more difficult than a normal one?

Girdhar Java: In a hosted environment, the challenge is to be able to ensure network performance and accessibility of mission-critical applications in a dynamic and often opaque virtualized data centre environment.

To troubleshoot application performance issues in a hosted environment, you have to be able to monitor the traditional access network performance, but also have correlated visibility into the performance of the virtualized data centre all the way up to the hosted application or service.

Achieving this is often complicated by organizational structure and delineation of responsibilities, as there are different monitoring systems and processes in use across organizations.

Service providers need a monitoring solution that provides correlated network, infrastructure and application performance information, along with end-user experience data in a single-pane-of-glass view that can be used across the organization for easy root cause analysis and service assurance.

CIOL: What are the main challenges in a hosted environment?

Girdhar: Some of the challenges in a hosted environment are:
Multi-tenancy: In a virtualized hosted environment, infrastructure resources are shared among multiple customers. Correlating infrastructure performance issues to customer-specific services, and providing customers with adequate visibility into the performance of their services while ensuring privacy of data are the challenges that need to be addressed.

Dynamic Virtual Infrastructure: The advances in virtualization technology is now extend to the network and storage layers, enabling movement of customer infrastructure across data centres and geographic location.

While this helps in reducing opex and improve customer experience by locating services based on demand, it introduces exponential complexity for monitoring systems that depend on fixed infrastructure topologies.