The Daily Network Monitor

It’s good to stretch the ol’ brain once in a while. To that end, I popped in to MIT’s winter term to check out a workshop called “Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity.” I don’t pretend to understand all of what was discussed, but I was struck by the analogies between the social network mapping shown, and the data network mapping performed by tools like WhatsUp Gold.

Prof. Peter Gloor showed off a tool that takes input from email records or online communities to create maps of social or business interactions, and Chandrika Samarth showed a real-life case study of how such mapping can lead to real process improvements in a real workplace, in this case a hospital. Characteristics like “betweenness,” “connectedness” and “sharing” are important attributes of social network nodes, also known as people. The charts show the communication between people as lines of length and thickness corresponding to the frequency and intensity of the interaction. Interesting data visualization, indeed.

Interesting thing virtualization, everyone is talking about it and lots of IT professionals are investigating it and quite a few are implementing it.

Virtualization offer a whole host of benefits; most significant of which are:

• hardware cost savings
• reduced server focused infrastructure to manage.

There are other points to consider with respect to virtualization as well as it does represent some risks as well. Specifically:

• total software cost – virtualization cost component is introduced
• for SMBs – introduces risk with a single point of failure

Putting the risks and benefits aside, we think the real question is how to manage it. While there are vendor specific monitoring and management solutions, do IT and network management professionals really want or need another dashboard or management tool to worry about?

How about a single management platform that embraces networks (single site or multi-site), servers (virtualized or otherwise) and any other network attached device and doesn’t cost your entire yearly IT budget?

Ok, that was bad.  I freely admit it.  But that doesn’t change the fact that good ol’ TCP/IP is in fact 25 years old, as I was tipped off to by Jeff Caruso’s Network World blog.

It was Jan. 1, 1983, when Internet precursor ARPANET switched over fully to TCP/IP. TCP/IP is so well-known that it’s one of those acronyms we no longer spell out at Network World, but in honor of the date, we should address this underappreciated and taken-for-granted bit of engineering by its full name, Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol.

As I like to say, you learn something new every day.  I wonder if future generations of network types look to us old folks and ask, “Do you remember where you were when TCP/IP was born?”