Today we are able to celebrate the life of English scientist Walter Norman Haworth, the former Noble Prize winner for being the first to synthetically produce a vitamin. Ironically March 19th is the day that Haworth was born, in 1883, and also the day that he passed away, in 1950. Born in Chorley, Lancashire, England, Haworth finished grade school at the age of 14 and then went to work in a linoleum factory with his father. He was thoroughly unhappy with this line of work, and decided at the age of 20 to attend University, despite his parents’ displeasure. In just 7 years, he was able to gain the first of his two doctorates.

Haworth spent the bulk of his early career researching carbohydrates, during which he was able to figure out the structure of carbohydrate molecules. His methods are still commonly used today. His methods were responsible for allowing him to figure out the molecular structure of hexuronic acid, or what is more commonly known as vitamin C. This marks the first time in history that anyone was able to artificially make a vitamin, and earned Mr. Haworth the Nobel Prize.

Today we celebrate the life and accomplishments of John Frederic Daniell, a decorated British scientist in the fields of chemistry and meteorology. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday in London in 1790. Today is the anniversary of Daniell’s death, as he suddenly passed away just one day after his 55th birthday while attending a meeting at the prestigious Royal Society.

The British scholar was responsible for a number of successes and contributions to the world of science. He developed a new process for generating gas from resin and turpentine. He also invented a new hygrometer (device for measuring humidity) and a new pyrometer (thermometer for measuring very high temperatures). Both of these inventions became widely used in the meteorology community. However, Daniell is most renowned for inventing the first working electric battery.

Today we also are able to celebrate the birth of Joseph Priestley, the man responsible for inventing carbonation. Joseph turns 270 today, and ironically enough I had a difficult time fitting all of those candles on his cake. Priestly spent some time living near a brewery in Leads, England, and out of curiosity  began studying the clouds produced during the fermenting process. He soon discovered that the gas in these clouds was carbon dioxide, and that he was able to dissolve this gas with water, resulting in a bubbly beverage that we commonly refer to today as soda water.

You can also meet our own resident geek, the WhatsUp Gold Guru.

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.

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?

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?”

For those who don’t know, flow state is “…the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” [wikipedia]  It’s hard to explain, but when you’re in it, you don’t really feel the passage of time, you don’t get tired or bored, and you crank out lots of work, usually very good work.  Being able to get into flow at will is something to aspire to, something great artists and athletes can do.

What’s interesting about this – at least it’s interesting to me – is that I got into flow doing something that’s not usually part of my job.  I was setting up the next incarnation of The Daily Network Monitor Blog in WordPress.  I am by no means a codemonkey, but I was up to my elbows in PHP and CSS and RSS, and I was seriously into it and suddenly it was dark when I looked up from my computer.  I’m not going to pretend to have a hidden talent for programming, but I think I did pretty well.  You can judge for yourself when the new site goes live.

Until then, I hope you all step away from the reader and find a project that needs doing that you can dive into and achieve some flow.  Happy new year.

Last night I read the follow-up posting from a GigaOM article debating the merits of having a network engineer/administrator on the staff of a Web 2.0 company. The post’s author, Allan Leinwand, says a Web 2.0er recently told him that connecting to the Internet was like connecting to the electrical grid – you don’t need an electrical engineering degree for the latter and you don’t need a network engineer for the former.

I call this absolute nonsense and commend the Network World online staff for correctly pointing out, “the very servers that you read NW blogs on are at a co-location facility. Had we just allowed the third party to manage our systems, we may not have discovered a peering issue that was causing a decrease in site performance. Maybe these Web 2.0ers need to think a little more deeply about the plumbing side of the Web instead of just trying to impress their peers with the latest AJAX script.”

The world of Web 2.0 is exciting but it’s my strong opinion that it provides new challenges and opportunities for the network administrator and not the elimination of his or her job. The comparison of Web 2.0 to an electrical grid is tactically accurate but does not illustrate the enormous complexity that Web 2.0 provide – after all, I can’t recall another technology initiative that promised every device in the network connectivity.

I think we better hold on to the network administrators.

Your reaction to this post may vary depending on your ‘green’ view. I am not a ‘green’ fanatic by any means but I actively try to do my part to keep the place we call home (earth) safe for the next generation. Bombarded daily by environmental commercials, I am also afraid of leasing penalties – after all, I am constantly reminded that I did not inherit this home from my parents and grandparents as I had been accustomed to thinking but rather I am leasing it from my son and the rest of his generation. Having seen his 2-year-old temper explode already, I am sure he would penalize me immediately if he found my behavior degraded his place of habitation in any way.

Earlier this week, the IEEE introduced a new initiative designed to make idle or underutilized Ethernet connections more energy efficient, which could mean huge electrical cost savings for large enterprises. The trick: finding a way to seamlessly throttle between 10Mbps and 10Gbps.

Per their announcement, “The standards outfit recently formed an Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) study group to explore how to do this. The idea is to save power in PCs and laptops (most of which ship with GigE cards now) when LAN links are idle, or not utilizing full bandwidth. Researchers estimate that U.S. companies could collectively save $450 million a year in power costs by using such a technology.”

“The study group is essentially refiguring the process of auto-negotiation — a link-detection technology in Ethernet, where a switch and NIC determine what speeds are supported (10/100/1000Mbps) and establish the link rate. EEE would make this a more real-time process on Ethernet networks. For instance, a GigE-enabled laptop would switch to 10Mbps when idle, maybe 100Mbps during low-bandwidth activities, such as e-mail or Web surfing, and burst to 1000Mbps when downloading large files or streaming video.”

My criticism here is not directed at the goodwill proposed or the benefits derived for I support both. I criticize the consistent lack of strong ROI stories I see in proposals like this. Imagine the resource cost of hours that will be spent studying this problem while in parallel bandwidth prices continue to decline thus inviting larger and larger purchases. In the end, the large consortium of American enterprise will look at this business case that saves $450M and respond with great conviction that we need a more compelling statement to buy-in.

IPv6 techies IT professionals are interested in the additional authentication and security services built into IPv6 but few but few networks have committed to migrating to IPv6 because it lacks a measurable return on investment when compared to other initiatives like convergence.

The IPv6 wave is coming to our shores after notable success in Japan, China and South Korea. Stern minded industry experts say network professionals in the USA can expect trickles of IPv6 deployments by 2008…maybe.

Japan considers IPv6 key for the ubiquitous computing initiative called “u-Japan,” which is targeted for realization over the next five years. The Chinese Government has established a group led by eight ministers, which funds 50% of the cost to transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and there is an initiative to power the 2008 Olympics in Beijing with IPv6. The Korean Government has been successful too, with aggressive participation from vendors and ISPs, and the creation of a road map for nation-wide IPv6 adoption. Korea currently has various IPv6 networks, ranging from research and experimental through commercial (KOREAv6). Korea’s roadmap for IPv6 adoption calls for expanding IPv6 pilot networks and commercial services continuously toward the realization of all-IPv6 based services by 2010.

Closer to home, IPv6 is driven by the United States Government with the Department of Defense leading the initiative. President Bush’s 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace stated that, “The United States must understand the merits of, and the obstacles to, moving to IPv6, and based on that understanding, identify a process for moving to an IPv6-based infrastructure.”

As a network administrator, you are likely dealing with issues of higher priority than IPv6. When you are ready, rest assured we will be ready too with WhatsUp Gold which supports IPv6 out-of-the-box.