* QoS devices gain compression; compression devices gain QoS
It goes without saying that as organizations grow more decentralized, greater amounts of network traffic traverse the WAN to reach remote sites and users. You could consider the WAN, in some ways, the IT “glue” throughout highly distributed organizations, in that the WAN is what enables intercommunication among corporate sites, e-business with partners and e-commerce services.
As mentioned last time, however, a survey of Network World subscribers shows that WAN application-traffic-management efforts by user organizations fall short compared with the WAN’s important role in supporting business processes. A survey of about 190 Network World readers, co-sponsored by traffic-shaping appliance supplier Packeteer, revealed that 82% of respondents first learn of application slowdowns on the network by employee complaints.
Wouldn’t you rather head off the productivity and possible revenue losses associated with these slowdowns (not to mention the hassles) before they occur?
To manage your WAN application traffic effectively, you first need to know what applications are running and how they are affecting one another (the monitoring component). If you monitor your WAN connections and find that everything is hunky-dory, great. However, you might be surprised to discover applications on the network you didn’t know existed, such as a disproportionate amount of peer-to-peer file-swapping, instant messaging and recreational Web surfing crowding out higher-priority business traffic.
Once you know what you are dealing with, you can determine a strategy. If it seems you are simply running out of network capacity, you can, of course, add bandwidth to existing links (the most popular approach among survey respondents). But do you really need to spend the extra money each month?
If you just want capacity, you could evaluate some of the sophisticated compression algorithms from the likes of Expand, ITWorx, Peribit and Packeteer for anywhere from a 2:1 to 10:1 throughput improvement, depending on the application (some are more compressible than others).
Applying traffic shaping generally yields a further performance benefit without increasing circuit size and monthly recurring fees. In addition to Packeteer, traffic-shaping companies include Allot Communications and Sitara Networks; recently, Expand and Peribit also added shaping capabilities to their compression devices, while Packeteer recently added compression to its traffic-shaping capabilities.
