The 2014 March Madness games hit Sweet Sixteen this week with some of college basketball’s greatest men’s teams matched up against some of the most unlikely Cinderellas. I plan to watch Michigan State go up against Virginia at 10pm ET tonight to see how things play out. Moving along to our own March Madness games, with a network management spin, we are looking at those being played out in the Influx Region. To those in charge of network management, the introduction of new technology or a large influx of new users can produce its own kind of madness. In this game we matched ‘Introduction of New Technology’ with ‘Traffic Spikes’ to see which caused our team of experts greater angst. (If you are wondering what this is about, check here for the full Ipswitch Madness.)
Introducing new technology is always dicey, but at least you have the opportunity to test it along the way before rolling out the broader organization. Not that you always catch everything, but at least you have the opportunity to limit the damage. Traffic Spikes are a pointy fiend as they can disrupt your entire business. If your network or site goes down for too long due to an increase in traffic and you are unable to recover, it’s game over.
Therefore, Traffic Spikes are onto the Elite 8.
Our final matchup in round one pits ‘Fluctuating Number of Users’ against ‘Point-In-Time-Events’. Knowing how many people are attaching to your wireless network helps keep things running cost effectively. What doesn’t help is when you’ve got wireless network bandwidth hoarders doing things like streaming ESPN to catch up on March Madness games. But there are ways you can figure that out. At the end of the day you don’t want to overpay your ISP for bandwidth, but underestimating the need can be bad as well.
Another other issue that can create a problem for IT is Point-In-Time events. One of the biggest examples of this phenomenon is taking place right now and was the inspiration for our March Madness exercise. According to a survey run last year, the tournament was expected to cost $134 million in lost productivity over the two workdays when the most popular games were being played (this year that’s yesterday and today). An estimated 3 million U.S. employees were expected to spend one to three hours at work watching the games, and two-thirds of all workers were expected to follow the tournament at some point during work hours.
That’s a lot of video streaming by bandwidth hoarders who are chewing up more than is allotted to them to get their jobs done, at the expense of others who experience application performance issues as a result.
For this reason, in one our tightest matchups to date, we’re moving Point-In-Time events into the final 8.
Today marks the end of the first round in our March Madness games. Stay tuned for next week’s posts when our teams will battle it out during semi-finals.
If you want to learn more about how March Madness applies to your daily work life, join us on April 9 for webinar entitled “Network Management’s Sweet 16 – Solve the Problems Competing for your Time“. Register here for the 8:00AM (US ET) tip off or here for the 2:00PM (US ET).