The trick of assigning network priority to application suites

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

Recent research conducted by Webtorials indicates that over the next year roughly 60% of companies will increase their deployment of a converged WAN.  That research also indicates that roughly the same percentage of companies intend to increase their deployment of techniques to enable QoS.   

When we think of implementing QoS techniques for a converged network we typically think of giving voice traffic the highest priority and giving applications such as FTP and e-mail the lowest priority. That begs the question - what priority does everything else get? That question gets particularly interesting in the case of enterprise applications such as SAP. Given the business criticality of SAP, there is a temptation to assign a high priority to all SAP traffic. 

Where it gets tricky is that SAP is comprised of a number of modules, such as the Sales and Distribution module that is used for sales order entry. If this module is running slowly, the company's sales organization wastes time. If the module times out, this can irritate the customer to the point where they hang up, taking their business elsewhere.

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Recent research conducted by Webtorials indicates that over the next year roughly 60% of companies will increase their deployment of a converged WAN.  That research also indicates that roughly the same percentage of companies intend to increase their deployment of techniques to enable QoS.   

When we think of implementing QoS techniques for a converged network we typically think of giving voice traffic the highest priority and giving applications such as FTP and e-mail the lowest priority. That begs the question - what priority does everything else get? That question gets particularly interesting in the case of enterprise applications such as SAP. Given the business criticality of SAP, there is a temptation to assign a high priority to all SAP traffic. 

Where it gets tricky is that SAP is comprised of a number of modules, such as the Sales and Distribution module that is used for sales order entry. If this module is running slowly, the company's sales organization wastes time. If the module times out, this can irritate the customer to the point where they hang up, taking their business elsewhere.

However, many SAP modules are not time sensitive. Hence, assigning stringent QoS parameters to these modules adds no business value and may increase cost and negatively impact other applications. 

We would like to hear from you. Do you think it is better to apply one level of QoS to an application suite like SAP or would you prefer to be able to drill down and apply QoS on a module-by-module basis?

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.