In the Extreme: The extreme environment created by iPhone

The recent case at Duke University, where a handful of Apple iPhones took down the wireless LAN (WLAN), has shed some important light on the rising impact that individual IP endpoints are having on sophisticated IT infrastructures. IT is now grappling with a vast and fast growing range of networked devices, including iPhones, VoIP phones, video cameras, PDAs, and more. A significant part of the challenge facing IT is that the behavior of these endpoints is increasingly becoming a source of issues that affect the application experience of other endpoints sharing the same infrastructure. Even though the Duke case ultimately ended up being a bounded problem caused by a Cisco access point bug, IT cannot rest easy--the iPhone is going to be an unsuspected thorn in its side.

This perspective comes from understanding two considerable constraints that IT is dealing with: one infrastructure-related and the other operational management tool-related. The extreme iPhone example I am about to detail illustrates both these constraints. iPhones are not the first device to straddle the line between business productivity tool and personal electronics gadget; they just blend them together better than any other device--and therein lies the problem.

The iPhone's user-friendly features are IT's curse. The iPhone automatically connects you to the fastest network available, which at work is going to be the office WLAN. And while on the WLAN, with access to the company's "fat" Internet connection, carefree iPhone users are going to take advantage of the devices' "sweet" streaming media features to download their favorite TV shows and songs from iTunes. One can imagine that this type of activity is going to get fairly frenetic near the end of the day, when people on a whim decide what program they want to watch on the commute home. A 45 minute program is a little over 200MB in size and will be a substantial burden on the WLAN network, especially when one person's smart idea spreads like wildfire throughout the office.

End users don't understand the havoc they are about to cause for their peers and for their IT organization. The fundamental problem is that although the company has high-speed fixed connections everywhere, an increasing number of the most productive workers are primarily connected to the WLAN so they can have continuous access to their networked applications. Regrettably with respect to bandwidth, WLANs pale in comparison to a physical switched connection: 54 Mbps shared bandwidth (since most WLAN deployments are 802.11g) vs. 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth.

In the context of this extreme example, iPhones are going to start grabbing a disproportionate share of the WLAN bandwidth. This will adversely affect the performance of the network, the mission-critical applications running on it, and then ultimately the productivity of all its connected end-users. And this is just the beginning of the story.

If only IT was aware of the scenario as I've described it, IT could do something about it. But unfortunately, its traditional management tools don't provide this kind of visibility. Instead, the help desk is going to get a flood of calls with a disparate set of complaints: "wireless is flakey," "my CRM application is timing out," or "my ERP application is really sluggish." The result will be a set of separate escalations assigned to different teams within IT based upon the end-user complaints.

There is no knowledge that all these issues are in fact related to bandwidth-hogging iPhones. Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president at Yankee Group, points out that "Without having a top-down view of the behavior of endpoints, IT more often than not finds itself chasing down problems that it doesn't catch and even worse, return intermittently." One could easily see this extreme scenario played out in the late afternoon every day--with no resolution.

There is no stop-gap solution; the iPhones cannot just be taken off the network. First, they are business productivity tools like any other smartphone; their users cannot be penalized because it just happens to have better personal features than Blackberrys or Treos. Moreover, in the next couple of years smartphones running VoIP clients are going to be both our "desk phones," connected to the corporate PBX, and our cell phones. You can't stop progress. What is needed is a new model that helps IT manage iPhones and other smartphones by taking charge of these endpoint-related issues.

Kerravala refers to a "top-down" approach that focuses on the application experience of each and every endpoint. Knowing what endpoints are doing with applications--and how these behaviors affect other endpoints and applications--will help eliminate the chaos that I previously described. An emerging class of products called rapid problem identification (RPI) solutions leverages the top-down approach, alerting IT about all endpoints that are having application experiences out of the norm.

Through RPI, IT will be aware that a number of users are not receiving applications at the regular performance levels and also that a set of iPhones is simultaneously consuming a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Moreover, IT will be able to see the relationship between these sets of endpoint issues, which is that they all share the same WLAN. As a result, IT will be able to understand the core problem directly instead of going on a "ghost chase" based upon user complaints that will never get IT to the problems' source.

The extreme environment highlighted here is not a narrow issue tied to only the iPhone; it is a part of the rise of new productivity-enhancing endpoints that leverage the IT infrastructure. Given this trend, IT should be actively searching for emerging solutions that help them understand and manage the behavior of endpoints so that the application productivity of all endpoints is assured.

About the Author
David Messina, VP Marketing at Xangati, is a seasoned executive with fifteen years of experience in the marketing and selling of enterprise, consumer and service provider networking equipment on a global level. Prior to Xangati, David held product marketing and marketing communications executive positions for CoSine Communications and Bay Networks (acquired by Nortel Networks). David holds a BS in Economics from The Wharton School, UPENN. He can be reached at: david@xangati.com