Branch Office Breakthroughs
March 2008
Branch offices are rife with bottlenecks and slowdowns, caused mostly by too much traffic travelling too many kilometres with too little bandwidth. The problems are exacerbated with a lack of skilled IT staff and uncontrolled Internet usage. Here are 3 developments that assist in solving these issues.
Is your branch office line performing badly?
The Problem
| • | Repeated bandwidth upgrades fail to address performance but can increase costs substantially. |
| • | Excess download costs |
| • | Intranet applications at a main data centre offer easy access but poor performance. |
| • | A branch office’s ERP performance plummets whenever an employee synchronises email. |
| • | Enthusiasm for VoIP (Voice over IP) fades when callers routinely face stutter and static during peak network usage. |
| • | Surges from recreational and infected traffic cause urgent, interactive applications to struggle. |
| • | Nightly server backups that haven’t finished by the next morning. |
These problems are not just going to go away by themselves. Aberdeen Research has found that, on average, 52% of the total workforce is operating outside of corporate headquarters - either as dedicated branch office employees or as individual remote and mobile workers.
Traffic growth stems from trends in applications, networks, and users habits, including: an increased application footprint, increasing recreational traffic, a decreased infrastructure footprint, server consolidation, redundant data centres, voice/video/data network convergence, worms, viruses, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and an increased expectation of reliability.
Bandwidth upgrades sometimes do not solve the problems. They can impose setup costs and in some places, especially in remote locations, larger pipes are not available or are extremely expensive. Even if bandwidth costs drop, they remain a recurring monthly cost. Gartner Group recently stated, “The WAN represents the single largest recurring cost, other than people, in IS organisations.”
The Solution
If more bandwidth is not the answer, what is? More visibility and control in managing bandwidth allocation and utilisation. Specifically, companies need to:
| • | Improve and protect the performance of urgent and critical applications |
| • | Control the flow of important but less urgent traffic (such as large email attachments) |
| • | Spot and stop malicious security threats |
| • | Limit recreational traffic and its impact on critical traffic |
| • | Provision bandwidth for streaming applications to ensure smooth reception |
| • | Compress traffic by putting more data through constrained links |
| • | Accelerate traffic to fully utilise bandwidth capacity in high-latency environments |
The Packeteer Packetshaper solution combines:
| • | Monitoring: which applications traverse the network, what portion of the network applications consume, how well they perform, and where delays originate. |
| • | Bandwidth control: policy-based bandwidth allocation to manage application performance over the WAN and Internet. |
| • | Application control: Flexible control policies protect critical applications, pace greedy traffic, limit recreational usage, and block malicious traffic. |
| • | Traffic Compression: enables more data to flow through constrained WAN links, freeing bandwidth for the critical applications that need it most |
| • | Traffic Acceleration: maximises bandwidth utilisation, speed up application response times, accelerate the transfer of large files, and minimise the impact of other problems that are common with TCP-based applications on high-latency links. |
Packeteer's portfolio also includes storage & server consolidation, and a WAFs (Wide Area File Services) solution, and this is discussed elsewhere.
The Breakthrough
Packeteer recently launched the PacketShaper 900, a branch office appliance that matches small size and modest cost with the full range of network monitoring, shaping, acceleration, and compression capabilities. This is good news for Australian companies.
Packeteer's new PS 900 line includes two devices, the PS 900(meant for space limited situations - it's footprint is much smaller than the other models) and the PS 900 Lite (feature-limited version of the PS900). Both provide full visibility and control over all seven layers of the network stack, allowing network administrators to withhold bandwidth for non-critical applications like FaceBook, while giving priority to critical applications like ERP systems. Overall, the devices recognise more than 500 applications. The PS 900 supports up to 5,000 IP flows across 256 classes of traffic and 10 active tunnels. The PS 900 Lite provides slightly less control: only 4,000 IP flows across 64 classes and five active tunnels. Both devices support networks with speeds up to 2 Mbps.
"The PS900 packs major muscle into a small chassis for hot-rod performance," says Roy Agostino, vice president of marketing at Packeteer. "PS900 brings the full visibility, policy control, acceleration and performance of our larger PacketShaper solutions down to size for those places where a larger appliance won’t do."
Listen to the Forrester Group's Sr. Editor, Rob Whitely, on achieving high performance for key WAN applications
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