Posts by Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold

Nasdaq red-faced after software snafu stalls Facebook IPO

Not at the races

So, the biggest IPO in history was blighted by a system malfunction characterised as a ‘race condition’ because of the huge interest the Facebook IPO was generating among traders. This clearly brings to the fore the importance of knowing how much strain your critical systems are under at any one time. The interest in the Facebook IPO was hardly surprising, but such peaks and troughs in demand on a system and its applications are often far less predictable without the proper monitors.

Through the execution of synthetic transactions and active polling in real time, one can capture key performance and process related information, meaning that problems such as this could have been identified and alerted upon before they become an issue that was felt, and reported on in this case, across the globe.

UK broadband speeds crippled during 'rush hour'

Mirrored in the business domain

These worrying trends are unfortunately also hitting the business domain as bandwidth-hungry services such as video conferencing and streaming become more popular in offices up and down the land. A survey of some of our 80,000 customers pre-empted this earlier this year with almost a quarter or respondents (23.9%) saying that managing bandwidth utilisation was the biggest challenge for corporate network management in 2011. On top of the increase in bandwidth sapping business applications, general employee internet surfing around this time of year is also having an effect on bandwidth use.

Steve Demianyk, Channel Manager, Ipswitch Network Management Division