* What causes application sensitivity? Gartner analyst Bjarne Munch explains.
There are a wide range of tools available for boosting application performance over the WAN, but it’s not easy to figure out which ones are appropriate for each enterprise.
A key step is to understand how applications are architected and use that knowledge to figure out how distinct applications will behave in the network. In late December, Bjarne Munch, a principal research analyst at Gartner, published a report that dives into the technical details which govern how applications perform over a network and provides options for mitigating some network-unfriendly characteristics inherent in many applications.
For instance, Munch says one way to evaluate an application’s network sensitivity is to examine how the application protocol — which might be common Internet file system (CIFS) or remote procedure call (RPC), for example — operates.
“For many client/server applications, performance issues are dictated by protocol design choices, and problems are often caused by protocols that use a large number of message round trips between client and server to support a user operation,” Munch wrote in the report.
Mitigating issues such as an excessive number of message interactions during a file transfer can be done, but it requires figuring out the best technology — perhaps compression, protocol manipulation, traffic and bandwidth management, or something else altogether.
“The complicated task for the enterprise is to match the various technologies to specific applications so that they minimize overall application response-time delay and maximize application data throughput,” Munch wrote.
To get started designing network solutions for optimum application performance, here are just a few of Munch’s many recommendations:
* Early in the procurement or development phase, make sure applications are developed for use over high-latency WANs. Performance testing should include the use of a WAN emulator to identify application response times.
* Network and application teams should work closely to identify application network characteristics and map those characteristics to the appropriate traffic management, such as MPLS class of service.
* Use network prioritization and QoS features to minimize interaction between applications with different network characteristics.
For the full report, “How to Network Applications With Acceptable Performance,” check out Gartner’s Web site.
