NetEqualizer Is Coming To Southern California
 Will you be in Southern California this March? If so, be sure not to miss the next complimentary NetEqualizer Technical Seminar at Biola University.Join Biola University Director of IT Operations Scott Himes and APconnections CTO Art Reisman on March 22 to discuss network optimization and get a first-hand look at the NetEqualizer technology. Whether you’re an existing customer or just starting to think about bandwidth shaping, come learn more about the NetEqualizer’s capabilities, get your questions answered, and share your experiences with other users.We would love to see you in sunny Southern California! Please reserve a space by registering today.Click here for details and to register. |
| Best Of The Blog The Dark Side Of Net NeutralityNet neutrality, however idyllic in principle, comes with a price. The following article was written to shed some light on the big money behind the propaganda of net neutrality. It may change your views, but at the very least it will peel back one more layer of the onion that is the issue of net neutrality.First, an analogy to set the stage:I live in a neighborhood that equally shares a local community water system among 60 residential members. Nobody is metered. Through a mostly verbal agreement, all users try to keep our usage to a minimum. This requires us to be very water conscious, especially in the summer months when the main storage tanks need time to recharge overnight.
Several years ago, one property changed hands, and the new owner started raising organic vegetables using a drip irrigation system. The neighborhood precedent had always been that using water for a small lawn and garden area was an accepted practice, however, the new neighbor expanded his garden to three acres and now sells his produce at the local farmers market. Even with drip irrigation, his water consumption is likely well beyond the rest of the neighborhood combined.
You can see where I am going with this. Based on this scenario, it’s obvious that an objective observer would conclude that this neighbor should pay an additional premium – especially when you consider he is exploiting the community water for a commercial gain.
The Internet, much like our neighborhood example, was originally a group of cooperating parties (educational and government institutions) that connected their networks in an effort to easily share information. As the Internet spread away from government institutions, last-mile carriers such as cable and phone companies invested heavily in infrastructure.
To keep reading, click here. |
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YouTube Caching Testing Leads To Load Generator BreakthroughWe continue to have great success with the NetEqualizer YouTube caching beta units we released in January and are very close to a full release. However, to ensure the best possible results in our upcoming general release, we’re still fine-tuning some of the technology’s details.While we obviously would like to release the YouTube caching feature as soon as we can, we’ve had some significant breakthroughs in the testing process itself. In our mission to provide as efficient and effective product as possible, we’ve developed an entirely new load simulator that’s opening new doors when it comes to pre-market testing.Our existing class of load generators is very good at creating a heavy load and controlling it precisely, but in order to validate a caching system, we needed a different approach. We needed a load simulator that could simulate the variations of live Internet traffic. For example, to ensure a stable caching system, you must take the following into consideration:
- A caching proxy must perform quite a large number of DNS look-ups
- It must also check tags for changes in content for cached Web pages
- It must facilitate the delivery of cached data and know when to update the cache
- The Squid process requires a significant chunk of CPU and memory resources
- For YouTube integration, the Squid caching server must also strip some URL tags on YouTube files on the fly
To answer this challenge, and provide the most effective caching feature, we’ve spent the past few months developing a custom load generator. Our simulation lab has a full one-gigabit connection to the Internet. It also has a set of servers that can simulate thousands of simultaneous users surfing the Internet at the same time. We can also queue up a set of YouTube users vying for live video from the cache and Internet. Lastly, we put a traditional point-to-point FTP and UDP load across the NetEqualizer using our traditional load generator.
Once our custom load generator was in place, we were able to run various scenarios that our technology might encounter in a live network setting. Our testing exposed some common, and not so common, issues with YouTube caching and we were able to correct them. This kind of analysis is not possible on a live commercial network, as experimenting and tuning requires deliberate outages. We also now have the ability to re-create a customer problem and develop actual Squid source code patches should the need arise.
For more information on the upcoming NetEqualizer YouTube caching feature, or on our load generator, contact us by emailing admin, 1-800-918-2763, or see some of our past blog articles:
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