Over the past decade, IT organizations have increasingly focused on ensuring acceptable application delivery, leveraging two main disciplines: application performance management (APM) and network and application optimization (NAO). Both of these disciplines are traditionally practiced in a reactive fashion, after an application has been developed or a major change has been made to the infrastructure. Increasingly, this risks and costs of this reactive approach are becoming less tolerable.

"Networked services and applications have emerged as the most popular solutions architecture in the enterprise today. Distributed solutions, Service Oriented Architectures, IP based services with their striking cost advantage, global partnerships and collaboration place enormous stress on the underlying network infrastructure.

Taking all of these together and you have an operational network environment that can play havoc with networked application performance because of dependencies, interactions, and behavior that cannot possibly be replicated in a development environment. To meet the high expectations and rigorous demands of today's global competition, networked services must be rigorously tested under a range of conditions to assure performance. Accurate physical reproduction of global network conditions is prohibitively expensive in terms of resources and time for even the largest enterprise.

Yet, testing must be done.

Virtually no enterprise has escaped the experience of data center relocation and/or consolidation. As noted above, these can cause tremendous disruption in services even when done in planned stages and even with provision made for extra resources in terms of processor power and bandwidth during transitional periods.

Shunra provides the enterprise with a solution to the testing dilemma with its Shunra VE network simulation product which includes a rich library of operational models in a comprehensive, integrated, easy-to-use automated modeling, analysis and performance evaluation tool. With Shunra's VE 5.0, enterprise IT professionals can use simulations to create, test, and evaluate changes in application architectures, network configurations, and data center setup and locations under wide range of operational conditions." Rich Ptak (April 2007)

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Download this Movers & Shakers Interview of Les Murphy, CTO, Shunra Software by Olga Yashkova, Industry Analyst/Program Leader, Frost & Sullivan. Topics include application performance management and monitoring & test automation industries; current market/technological trends in the test automation and application performance management markets; end-user concerns and how Shunra supports the end user's needs and application performance success.

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This EMA Advisory Note is an excerpt from a recently published EMA report entitled “An Adopter's Guide to User Experience Management: How to Pick the Right QoE Solution for You!” The Adopter's Guide is specifically designed to help you select the right Quality of Experience (QoE) solution to improve the interactive experience of your application end users based primarily on your functional and business needs and the constituencies you are attempting to serve.This excerpt focuses on one of the leading vendors in the report, Shunra and their Virtual Enterprise solution.

Shunra's capabilities target application-to-network interdependencies and network issues in context with application performance and end-user experience at the remote desktop. EMA especially likes Shunra's combination of flexible deployment with rapid time to value, combined with truly strategic benefits in ensuring that QoE across real networks is proactively anticipated by application development. EMA has seen IT executives leverage Shunra's portfolio to promote better collaboration across domains in what might be viewed as a pragmatic and well-focused example of IT transformation.

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