The right network management capabilities will provide the feedback you need to eliminate bottlenecks and IT failures while also enabling your network’s ability to deliver data, voice, wireless, Internet, and video services. 

Which is why adequate performance management, trending and capacity planning, protocol analysis/fault isolation, and onsite/remote network health monitoring have become so essential. 

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Thanks to virtualization, network dynamics are changing — fast.

Server virtualization consolidates resources on fewer physical servers in ways that require distributed workloads to communicate with each other. This boosts utilization of servers, but it also increases — and changes the nature of — network traffic.

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When it comes to keeping your IT network performing optimally, finding and fixing network faults certainly is crucial. But it’s just as crucial to sustain network operations while the issue gets resolved. 

Which means that the first order of business is to ensure that your network has entered one of the failure modes you’ve designed for it so that remaining network resources are allocated according to your organization’s business priorities.

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Even before you automate your network performance monitoring and management, you’ll need to do some planning. If you don’t have experts on hand, consider bringing in a reliable, dependable network advisor to help you:

1. Establish a performance baseline
   Planning involves establishing baseline performance thresholds — called quality-of-service (QoS) rules — using historical data, estimates of how existing services will grow, and anticipated demand for new services.
   
   To determine if your plan is working, you’ll need to measure current network behavior. Such metrics include the traffic generated at certain interface points and the load levels of trunks and devices.
   
   This is how network administrators monitor and manage network conditions. When conditions are out of whack, an alert is generated.
   
   These alerts can indicate an emerging issue, such as a need for additional resources, or a serious problem, such as load levels so high that network and/or application performance has been impacted.

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One of the greatest threats to your company’s productivity comes from poor IT network performance. Yet it can be tough to maintain a healthy network in the face of cost constraints, changes to your business, and constantly evolving technologies.

Which can put you between a rock and a hard place, because when it comes to your organization’s IT network, what you need — regardless of whether you’ve undertaken virtualization or cloud computing or unified communications — is a stable framework for delivering communication, applications, and services that provide a consistent, reliable experience under normal conditions.

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In my experience, poor network performance can cause outages that cascade unpredictably through the business and cost you plenty. Are you experiencing any of these signs of trouble?

1. 1 Network-dependent applications have become sluggish — and your employees, customers, and suppliers are letting you know how unhappy they are.
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This month's issue of our newsletter is all about virtualization. And for good reason.

Taking advantage of virtualization technologies can improve your operational efficiency, saving you money and freeing up resources that can be put to work on other important technology projects. Take a look at the Did-You-Know article from our March 2011 Newsletter for why your business should be considering it. I think you’ll find the numbers are compelling.

Yet, while the improvements virtualization offer are real, simply running out and virtualizing as much as you can as fast as you can will leave you wondering just where all your benefits went.

Look before you leap

Before you jump into virtualizing every server in your data center, you need to know that as good as this technology is, there are some applications that will do well in this environment and others that will not.

A good first step is to make sure your IT team truly understands all the nuances of the technology. Many virtualization projects end badly because something as simple as I/O capacity (the ability to move data) is not considered — even though virtualization depends on efficient data movement.

And don’t be fooled by vendors pitching some kind of virtualization starter kit. To really reap the benefits, you need to see the big picture of virtualization in your IT environment. It’s essential to have a plan that moves you from a starter phase to a management phase. As always with complex technology, we suggest talking with a trusted expert before signing on for a do-it-yourself project.