Performance

When it comes to network based systems and applications, more likely than not, your organization has run into performance or functional issues that are difficult to resolve. Precious operational cycles are lost as the problem is passed from one team to the next, each team doing their best to isolate components. With today's multi-tier or distributed systems, a silo approach to problem resolution may not get to the root cause of all issues in a timely manner. This is where a skilled, end-to-end network analysis approach can pinpoint problem areas, providing quantitative, detailed data on performance and functional issues.

Here is just a sampling of the types of services PBM IT provides in this area of expertise:

• Application Network Troubleshooting – We specialize in troubleshooting performance or functional issues with distributed or client-server applications. Through packet analysis, fault isolation, data gathering and validation; we can assist in identifying the root cause of complex issues that plague enterprise applications.
• Application Network Analysis – We provide analysis focused on understanding and describing the properties of an application, as it pertains to the network. Data can be used to address an issue or to assist in understanding the impact of a change or anomaly within a system. For example:
  • You need to understand why this application is performing poorly or why an application is failing.
  • You need to make changes to your environment and want to understand the network aspects of the current systems in order to make the right choices for the effort as well as to identify potential risks or constraints to the effort.

It's easy to make the mistake of assuming your application bandwidth is directly related to your WAN bandwidth. Most applications rely on TCP as an underlying transport mechanism, which is constrained by a window buffer. Most modern systems have a 65Kbyte window, which means only 65Kbytes of data can be in transit across the WAN before receiving an acknowledgment from the recipient host.

If your WAN latency is 100 millisecond, you could only have 65Kbytes of data in flight before the next acknowledgment. Another way to put this would be to say that you would only be able to achieve 81,250 bits/second!