My earlier blog entry on the idea of a Network DVR made me think of a conversation with a friend who remarked, “Why can't real life be like Tivo?” He wasn’t asking to rewind and relive his childhood again. Rather he was fantasizing about a magic machine that could look through his life and pick out the most interesting events and record them automatically. Facebook’s Timeline feature attempts to do this, but it’s still dependent on you manually adding all your life’s notable content to their website. Wouldn’t it be nice if such a machine exist?

THAT DREADED TROUBLE TICKET: You get a call Thursday morning from the owner of a high value application in a line of business within your company. The call goes something like this: “Our department’s application was performing very sluggishly yesterday afternoon. End users were complaining about slow page loads and transactions that timed out while waiting for the shopping cart to complete. I think something is wrong with the network infrastructure – please find the problem and fix it ASAP before today's busy hour. Oh, by the way the problem isn’t happening right now.” How would you troubleshoot an intermittent problem like this that happened the previous day?

INTRODUCTION: I have helped enterprises “deliver” their applications for a long time. And somewhere in every conversation with a prospective customer I always asked, “What will your traffic be like in 3-5 years?” Yes, I was sincerely trying to size their network equipment to sell the right load balancers. But, I was also doing my company’s bidding to sell enterprises more gear than they would likely need. I was as guilty of doing it as any of my counterparts at competitive load balancing vendors. It was always good to play up the prospect’s optimism especially tech-heavy Silicon Valley. However, the traffic growth question asked by hardware ADC vendors is impossible to answer by mere mortals and most companies just capitulate and buy enough capacity for 4-5 years down the road. More often than not, when I revisited many of my customers in 12-24 months, I found that gear still running at single digit capacity. The tendency to oversell gear wasn’t an intentional desire to exploit customers, but was driven by the architectural limitations of an inelastic hardware model. Paying upfront for anticipated future growth has been an accepted norm in the IT industry for a long time. Disruptive forklift upgrades are par for the course in the IT world where nobody has a crystal ball for how traffic might outgrow existing equipment.