HP and Agilent to Ensure WebQoS - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, Jan 12, 2000 by Brain Ploskina

Hewlett-Packard Co. and its subsidiary Agilent Technologies are combining e-business solutions to give e-commerce administrators the ability to provide and ensure extraordinary service for their most loyal and cherished customers.

By combining WebQoS, a new solution from Hewlett-Packard (HP, www.hp.com), and Firehunter, a Web monitoring service from Agilent (www.agilent.com), companies will be able to both administer and monitor e-business priorities.

"We like to think of [WebQoS] as the maitre d' of the restaurant," says Rich Friedrich, chief architect of WebQoS at HP WebQoS will do what it needs to do to keep servers from being overloaded, even if that means not letting any more customers in the door.

"If your site was receiving more demand than it could handle, your throughput would drop 20 percent to 50 percent," Friedrich explains. "So when it's having the highest demand, you're making less money."

One remedy is to prioritize traffic. A maitre d' knows when the mayor comes for dinner, so he doesn't wait for a seat.

Likewise, administrators can set up the system to ensure priority for certain users. This can be based on who that user is or what each customer is doing.

For instance, if a Web user puts an expensive item in his online shopping cart, WebQoS will give him priority until he checks out.

"If you come in without high priority, your response time just won't be as good," Friedrich says. "It depends on the policy the administrators put on the site."

The other piece of the solution is Agilent's Firehunter.

Firehunter allows an administrator to actively monitor and measure the priority performance supplied by WebQoS. Larry Robinson, Firehunter product manager, explains that Firehunter performs a request to the Web page, measures the response to the end, and then deconstructs the response time to discover what response can be expected from the server.

"It gives you a view of how to identify where the performance is being delayed, whether it's a server or network problem," Robinson says. After these measurements are taken, Firehunter performs active reporting about that server.

Firehunter also can do real-time monitoring of service-level agreements (SLAs).

Usually SLA reporting comes after the fact, but with Firehunter an administrator can take action before the service goes into a non-compliant condition.

Networking vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com) also provide network service assurance, but Roberto Medrano, general manager of HP's e-services division, says this guarantee only goes as far as the network. HP's solution will monitor and administer server performance while using the technology in Cisco hardware to monitor network performance and prioritize network traffic.