June 4, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
REVIEW) -- The rapid proliferation of network operation centers and
peering points has created new demands and challenges for service
providers. Increasing numbers of users and bandwidth-intensive
applications have put huge strains on networks, creating a growing
market for solutions that enable businesses and service providers to
ensure reliable performance of enterprise, e-commerce and e-business
applications; increase network efficiency; and enable the convergence
of data, voice and video traffic.
The combined impact of such new
applications is that network performance suffers. At best, performance
is inconsistent and unpredictable, and at worst, it is consistently
slow and frustrating, which impacts productivity and, in the case of
e-commerce, profitability.
The common response from many enterprises
and service providers is simply to increase bandwidth. Network managers
spend large portions of their budgets on bandwidth upgrades in attempts
to solve performance problems. Usually their efforts are in vain,
because traffic and control problems normally persist.
Increased use of intensive applications
results in an unending cycle of more traffic, more unmanaged congestion
and bandwidth bottlenecks as new bandwidth connections become
saturated. Increased bandwidth also always imposes a set-up cost.
Enlarging bandwidth pipes always increases costs, and such costs are
always recurring. Continually increasing bandwidth can thereby be
construed as a cyclical model with limited benefits. In networks
overwhelmed by increasing traffic and unmanaged congestion, application
performance and company productivity will persistently be undermined,
even after bandwidth upgrades.
The challenge to enterprises and service
providers therefore is to exercise more visibility into, and control
over, bandwidth allocation and utilization within their data centers.
In terms of the network services, service providers need to improve and
protect the performance of their clients’ urgent and critical business
applications. They need to pace important but less urgent traffic. They
need to provision bandwidth for streaming applications to ensure smooth
reception. And lastly, service providers need to compress traffic so
that more data can fit through increasingly constrained links. Traffic
optimization and control solutions can address all these requirements
by ensuring the efficient routing of data and through the
implementation of policy-based bandwidth usage.
Good traffic optimization systems allow
service providers to gain visibility, control bandwidth and compress
traffic. A solution should inform network administrators precisely what
applications traverse the network, what portion of the network they
consume, how well they perform, and where delays originate. A solution
should also offer policy-based bandwidth allocation to boost or curb
application performance over network connections. Flexible policies
protect critical applications, pace greedy traffic, limit recreational
usage, and block malicious traffic. Finally, traffic optimization
should enable more data to flow through constrained links, freeing
bandwidth for the critical applications that need it.
Traffic optimization solution developer Packeteer (packeteer.com)
says its technology can solve all those problems for a hosting company.
Packeteer offers a comprehensive set of solutions that provide
visibility, control, compression, and management of Internet-enabled
business applications and managed application services. These solutions
- which include PacketSeeker PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress,
ReportCenter, and PolicyCenter - enable service providers to offer a
platform for delivering application-intelligent network services that
control quality of service and expand revenue opportunities.
For businesses, these solutions optimize
use of network resources, and align application performance with
business priorities. Packeteer delivers its application traffic
management system via intelligent appliances at the local area network
and wide area network interface. This helps enterprises maximize IT
investments by aligning network applications and resources with
business needs, providing significant cost savings in the process. The
Packeteer system protects and accelerates key business applications and
controls malicious, recreational and other non-business traffic.
Packeteer's solutions automatically
detect more than 400 applications running on an enterprise WAN and
allow users to set policies and partitions to ensure that critical
application get the network resources they need to perform optimally.
With its multi-algorithm compression, Packeteer also ensures that an
algorithm to enhance network performance compresses multiple traffic
types. This allows users to obtain 10 times the compression on some
traffic types.
IDC (idc.com)
is quite impressed with the technology. Late in May 2004, the research
firm showed that Packeteer had almost four times the market share of
its next closest competitor.
"WAN managers and IT architects are under
pressure to cost-effectively manage bandwidth costs while improving
application performance," noted IDC analyst Stephen Elliot. "Adding
additional bandwidth to improve WAN application performance is the
wrong approach as it does not provide cost efficiencies and utilization
improvements. Packeteer has been and continues to be the major dominant
vendor in this market."
Indeed, in a recent case study, a Fortune
1000 company that was initially spending over $1 million a year in
bandwidth and was experiencing bottlenecks was able to able to save
$600,000 in bandwidth costs and lower connectivity demands with a
$200,000 investment in Packeteer technology.
This is a powerful example of the
cost-savings that application traffic management systems can exact for
large businesses and service providers with comparable bandwidth
requirements.
