How to improve n/w performance over hosted environment?

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.

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Elasticity: The virtualized hosted environment offers service providers the ability to deploy resources based on demand. This also adds to the complexity of performance monitoring, as resource availability will have little meaning without integration into service/product catalogues and awareness of business context and SLAs.

Reducing MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery): As enterprises warm up to the idea of using cloud-based services, they will demand resource availability and end-user experience SLAs. A performance monitoring solution for the hosted environment has to enable the service provider to reduce MTTR and ensure these SLAs are met.

CIOL: How to overcome these concerns?

Girdhar: While it is not yet on the radar for many service providers, who are still in the fulfillment stages of their cloud services deployments, service assurance plays a major role in enabling faster adoption of these services.

Along with enabling service provider to meet SLAs, a good service performance assurance tool that meets the challenges of the hosted cloud environment will also open new sources of revenue by enabling them to offer service/performance assurance as a value-add.

CIOL: How can one calculate network usage and also optimize network performance?

Girdhar: These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The key here is to choose a performance monitoring tool that is multi-tenant aware, and can provide overall performance visibility along with accurate usage information per customer.