ClearSight Networks, a pioneer in application monitoring, analysis and reporting for real-time network management, is one of only a handful of network management companies that identify network problems at the application layer. With this, the company enables IT administrators to easily and immediately visualize and pinpoint the source of network problems, leading to faster resolution that ensures business continuity.

 

With ClearSight, businesses around the world in enterprise, financial, telecommunication, R&D and other sectors are improving the performance of their applications and networks, as well as optimizing their IT investments.

 

Recently launched, the company’s NTM Express is a cost-effective platform that allows small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to benefit from the network monitoring and capture capabilities of the NTM.

 

Steve Wong, senior director of marketing, ClearSight, explains why network monitoring and management solutions should be available to all businesses that view the network as an important element of their overall strategy, and discusses other related topics

 

TMCnet: For those who are unfamiliar with ClearSight Networks, please give a brief description of the company, its services and who its customers are.

 

SW: ClearSight Networks was founded in early 2001 by former employees and founders of Network General (News - Alert) and Cinco Networks (which was acquired by Network General in 1997). Previously known as AppDancer Networks, ClearSight received a majority investment in April of 2003 from Japan-based Toyo.

 

The company is one of only a handful of network management companies that identifies network problems at the application layer, enabling IT administrators to easily and immediately visualize and pinpoint the source of network problems, leading to faster resolution that ensures business continuity. Using ClearSight, businesses around the world in enterprise, financial, telecommunication, R&D and other sectors are improving the performance of their applications and networks, as well as optimizing their IT investments.

 

ClearSight’s product offerings include the Network Time Machine (NTM), a hardware appliance that integrates a protocol analyzer for application layers 1-7, with a high-end storage subsystem. Not only does the NTM provide enterprise customers with the ability to continuously perform network monitoring, but it also provides the ability to perform network capture and store for an extended period of time. A software module called Atlas is available to complement this capability.

 

As soon as data is captured by the NTM, Atlas begins indexing and classifying the information. From there, new and powerful views based on the data stored in the NTM storage subsystem are available, making it easy to mine application, network and data link information. This is accomplished by drilling down from areas of interest in order to view related trending charts, flow data and packet data. Most of the popular VoIP protocols are supported, including H.323, SIP and RTP.

 

 

SW: If you look at what’s happened to traditional telephone companies over the past 5-10 years, you’ll find that many have to reinvent themselves in order to remain viable as businesses. For example, AT&T makes a substantial portion of their revenue today mobile access. This is a far cry from just a decade ago when their toll and inter-exchange businesses provided them with the bulk of their revenues. This change in AT&T underlying business fundamental is due to its recognition that VoIP has arrived and they either have to adapt or go out of business. Skype and Vonage (News - Alert) are examples of popular VoIP providers and services who offer low VoIP rates. 

 

The Internet’s reach is both broad and wide, with fixed traditional telephony lines on the decline. You can literally make a call to just about anyone in the world through a partial or complete VoIP network. VoIP is becoming an increasingly popular form of communication for people and businesses because it’s an extremely cost effective solution. Most consumers and companies are switching to VoIP because it offers lower long distance rates than a traditional phone bill. 

 

It is difficult to discern the VoIP penetration rates in enterprises. However, it is clear that the rate is on a straight march up to 90 percent. The only question is whether that rate will be reached in five years or 10 years. There will always be some resistance toward using VoIP. But the ubiquity of the internet will make VoIP ultimately the de facto standard in making voice calls. Since the invention of the telephone system, technological advances such as the implementation of VoIP has revolutionized the way society communicates today.

 

SW: Existing analog and digital phone systems have set a very high standard for voice quality and reliability. To meet these expectations when it comes to VoIP applications, it is important to understand the common problems and how to isolate and resolve them should they arise.

 

The loss of packets can be caused by a number of issues on the network. One of the most common is a mismatch in the duplex settings between two devices. Another possible cause is the overflow of buffers on networking devices between the sender and receiver. Unlike TCP traffic, the UDP frames containing video data are sent without waiting for acknowledgements. If the sender begins overflowing buffers along the way, it will not back off.

 

IP packets are typically routed across a wide area network. By this very fact, it is almost a guarantee that different packets streaming from a given VoIP voice connection will take different paths getting across the network. Routers use varying algorithms in order to choose the actual path for each packet. It is not necessarily the optimal path, but typically it’s the most effective.

 

Another problem is that Ethernet traffic tends to be burst. There are situations where there is little to no traffic present on the wire and there are situations where the traffic comes to saturation. This can also cause content packets to arrive out of sequence or not at all. This is part of the inherent nature of Ethernet.

 

SW: Businesses can protect themselves from losing money and users by taking a proactive approach to protecting their network from slowdowns and outages. A certain amount of congestion will not degrade a listener or viewer’s experience, but too much can make the reception unintelligible.

 

A network administrator must assure that the experience at the receiving end is acceptable and therefore must have some way of monitoring the quality of VoIP transmission on the network. You cannot fix what you cannot see. Network management tools give you the visibility to peer into your network and reveal information that cannot be obtained in any other way. 

 

When troubleshooting the loss of packets, one of the first steps is to inspect the error counters on the networking devices located between the sender and receiver. On a network, no packet is ever lost without some evidence of that loss. The packet may be corrupted by cabling problems or aborted by duplex mismatch, but in both of these cases, the error counter on the receiving port will be incremented. If the packet is discarded due to a buffer overflow condition, this too will be seen in the error counters.

 

If the error counters are not accessible or do not yield a definitive answer, the next step is to place an analyzer at various locations between the sender and receiver to monitor for packet loss. This can be easily accomplished through the use of the ClearSight Analyzer agents, which can be accessed remotely, allowing analyzers to be placed at key points along the path of the packets and controlled from a central console.

 

SW: In an ideal environment, the packets of information carrying audio or video content would arrive at the receiving station in an orderly sequence of equally spaced packets with no packets lost along the way. However, in the real world, packets may be lost, arrive out of sequence or at irregular intervals. This is especially true since the networks today are far more complex with 10 GbE finding its way more and more into the data center. Additionally, modern networks are also called upon to carry more and more application of varying types. If just one of these applications is problematic, it can have serious consequences for the entire network and all the other applications that rely on it for transport. Even if your VoIP infrastructure is working well, a hiccup by another application (such as a database) can manifest itself in calls with poor quality or calls that get dropped.

 

ClearSight allows enterprises and SMBs to improve the health of networks, troubleshooting potential problems before they impact performance and visualizing the source of network problems. For example, the ClearSight Analyzer is an advanced tool that provides network administrators with a direct view of application flows and allows them to quickly analyze and troubleshoot their networks. In essence, ClearSight extends the use of network analysis tools by allowing network administrators to visualize problems. 

 

And of course, there is the Network Time Machine (which we have discussed earlier), which has integrated the ClearSight Analyzer with hardware based storage subsystem and a data mining and network forensic tool called Atlas. Atlas is completely VoIP-aware.

 

SW: The introduction of newer technologies such as 10 GbE, VoIP and IPTV (News - Alert) are increasing the demand for network and application analyzers that can deliver visualization and management for IT environments. If not properly monitored, minor issues can escalate and damage the performance of an entire network.

 

Traditional analysis solutions cannot provide the sophisticated diagnosis and prevention capabilities necessary to manage, maintain and support these advanced networks and prevent many of the problems plaguing enterprises. Additionally, when economic conditions are difficult and uncertain, businesses need to be more carefully focused on how to do more for less. ClearSight allows organizations to maintain a high level of performance at a low cost.

 

In monitoring the quality of VoIP transmission on the network, ClearSight enables enterprises to stay ahead of potential problems in order to save thousands, even millions of dollars, due to lost packets or poor performance.

 

Moreover, the act of monitoring VoIP traffic produces a myriad of statistics that one can use to assess the health of the VoIP network. The Network Time Machine, for example, computes a Mean Opinion Score (MOS), jitter and latency values. It is similar to doing a blood chemistry panel. It can tell if network is healthy, or if further testing is required because certain values are abnormal.

SW: Using ClearSight to carefully monitor the video streams – both prior to deployment in a production environment and after deployment – businesses can determine the appropriate threshold values (a process known as baselining) to ensure that the video quality meets or exceeds the expectations of the viewer. By monitoring the video stream at various locations along the path between the server and the viewer, sources of impairment can be identified and resolved. As with VoIP troubleshooting, ClearSight provides a playback feature that can be used to determine the quality of the video at each of these points within the network.

Networks do not typically break down overnight; it usually takes a longer period of time for this to occur. The path to outage can be as relentless as it is unpredictable. This is why the process of baselining becomes so important. Often, a static or snapshot view of your network is not sufficient. Rather the ability to baseline and look for trends against that baseline can be the first clue to detect a potential problem.

 

SW: Monitoring video streams is essential to identifying network impairment and its sources. When ClearSight began to build a VoIP engine for its analyzer, the video component was an integral part of the architecture. We developed a video Quality of Service (QoS) measurement called VQFactor, similar to the R-Value measurements used in VoIP, but provides deeper network visibility, measurement and alarming capabilities.

 

This component has allowed us to passively monitor and record data, while simultaneously measuring it to ensure that the video quality meets or exceeds the expectations of the viewer. Yet this VQFactor value is very easy to use. When the value exceeds a chosen threshold, then you can be sure that the video stream is of acceptable quality.

 

Moreover, one key feature of our solutions is to view and listen into multimedia content in real time. This unique capability gives the IT manager the ability to judge for the quality of the connection. Pixelization, for example, is a problem that can often occur on a multimedia link. This phenomenon is typically due to packet loss where frames from the video are missing or are pixelized. This phenomenon can be discerned by looking at metrics such as jitter and latency, but the VQ-Factor we talked about earlier will clearly reveal this problem. 

 

Or you can simply see and hear the visual and audio abnormalities and artifacts occurring in real-time using a component of ClearSight various products. This has been an incredible time saver and useful feature for people who work in the industry.

 

SW: ClearSight and its application performance management solutions are part of the broad, multi-billion dollar network and systems management market that continues to grow steadily. An early pioneer in this space, ClearSight continues to deliver solutions that ensure organizations get the best performance out of their critical and emerging technologies.

 

For example, in today’s ultra-competitive financial environments, electronic trading systems not only require advantage in the delivery and receipt of market data and in the execution of trades. ClearSight has been working with a large market data and news provider to introduce a product for financial markets that provides an end-to-end high precision measurement solution, characterizing and measuring latency (down to microsecond resolution), message loss and microburst information over an extended period of time in days, weeks and even months. Microbursts can happen on most networks, but its occurrence in financial sector can be particularly disruptive and damaging. This product will also provide support for intelligent threshold-based alarming that sends notifications to users and other systems; support for many market feed data protocols will be standard.

 

ClearSight’s Cronos will allow customers in the financial market information delivery, electronic trading and streaming media in 2009 can expect a completely vendor-neutral way to monitor, characterize and understand the latency, message loss and microburst profile of their networks, and to ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) are being met. No longer will these organizations have to take the word of their providers and equipment vendors, as a great deal of money is on the line. Customers in this market space will be able to take advantage of the networking experience ClearSight brings to the table and the stability of partnering with a company that has been in the network management space for over 7 years.

 

Moreover, the company plans to enhance products such as market leading Network Time Machine and Atlas products. Atlas is proficient in VoIP applications built around H.323, RTP and SIP. ClearSight will continue to support new applications to reflect market requirements and customer needs. Today, our Network Time Machine is built around 3 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage technologies. In 2009, the storage industry will transition to the 6 Gb/s SAS specifications, doubling the effective disk rate. ClearSight has been working to ensure that when this technology becomes available to the market, it will become available to our customers. Six Gb/s SAS will allow very high speed links such as 10 Gb/s Ethernet to be captured and stored accurately and continuously. 

 

We have just recently released NTM 6.9, which is able to better interoperate with Wireshark®. Wireshark is compelling to over 25+ million users, not only because it is freeware, but also because it offers some very able capabilities not even available in many mainstream commercial products. Look for ClearSight to offer a new whole new level of interoperability with other applications in 2009.

 

Not withstanding the versatility and staying power of SONET, Ethernet is the most persuasive networking technology in use today. Last year, ClearSight rolled out 10 Gb/s support for the NTM. The IEEE committee has been working hard to define the 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s versons of this near future-proof standard. ClearSight has been doing significant work to support data rates beyond 10 Gb/s in our solutions. Ultimately, it is our customers and the market that will decide the timing of such products.   

 

SW: Open source telephony platforms will drive a lot of the product announcements and partnerships that will occur in the future. Linux and other open source standards have naturally encouraged growth and adoption. Large public companies such as Nortel (News - Alert) and 3Com are already adopting and marketing solutions based around open source standards to provide high quality products.

 

The availability of larger pipes built around 10 Gb/s data rates and beyond will only further support the growth and confirm the viability of IP communications. Since IP communications has proven to be a successful adoption, I advise companies to reap the benefits of IP communications.

SW: Consolidation: There are far too many VoIP vendors in the marketplace today. This often causes customers and system integrators confusion, as they try to select from a myriad of product offerings by various vendors. The problem has only been compounded by the emergence of open source telephony platforms which only serve to further attract market participants by leveling the playing field and lowering entry barriers. 

 

The fragmented nature of this entire industry also tends to drive down margins and as a natural consequence, innovation. Take a look at Google’s (News - Alert) search engine market and Apple’s mp3 player product lines. Google and Apple’s position as an innovation leader is fueled in a large part by its ability to pour a great deal of resources into its R&D functions, allowing it to make quantum leaps up the innovation curve.

 

The implication of this market condition for the VoIP communication is clear. The convergence of these trends will surely drive consolidation, making for an overall healthier and more innovative industry. For consumers of VoIP products and technologies, it means fewer but superior offerings at more compelling value/price points. Both vendors and customers win in this best of all worlds scenario.