* Commodity trading company's experiences with performance mgmt.
Trafigura, a London-based independent commodity trading company, upgraded to MPLS to improve application performance over distributed WAN links serving about 60 sites in 36 countries. But in the process of upgrading 17 sites to MPLS, IT managers at the company wanted to be sure to maintain performance of video conferencing and Citrix applications.
“We had invested in an MPLS network and prioritized various levels of applications, with voice, video and Citrix getting the highest priorities,” says Roger Smith, IT project manager. “But we still saw some latency across the network, roundtrip and delay, and we were getting reports that performance was a problem from Citrix end users.”
To alleviate the issue, Trafigura started to work with reseller EssentialNet to find a product that could help the IT team spot application performance degradations before it impacted end users. EssentialNet introduced Smith to Network Physics and the company’s NetSensory products.
Smith ultimately deployed NetSensory NP-Director and one NP-2000 at the main data center in London, and distributed three NP-500 appliances elsewhere.
According to Smith, the NP appliances are used for two main purposes: capacity planning when introducing new applications and performance measurement (to reduce latency) and ensure that bandwidth budgets are utilized in the most cost-effective manner. With a staff of about 12 IT people serving 40 of the offices and 800 end users, Smith says he wanted to get a tool that would provide more information with less manual work.
“We thought Network Physics could be useful if it could provide us with route topology information to help us more easily figure out what data is traversing our network, where and how many hops,” Smith explains. “In the event of something telling us about a problem, Network Physics will provide information on isolated events and helps us more quickly drill down into a problem.”
