How the WAN affects your business and how managing it is essential.

Increasingly businesses rely on their connection to the internet and or to their other offices. These Wide Area Network (WAN) links are increasingly busy and the effect on the day to day operation of your business can be detrimental.

There are very few businesses today that do not have a connection to the internet, equally few operate without using the internet. This use may be as basic as sending and receiving emails, checking prices on suppliers website and googling for clients. More advanced uses are supporting remote workers connecting into the office and linking offices via VPN links. Some organisations are also hosting websites, applications and more; all of which goes through the connection to the internet.

What typically happens is a connection is obtained to serve a small number of applications or users. But over time the number of users accessing the internet (or other offices) increases along with the number of applications that use the internet connection. This use can range from emails to copying CAD drawings between offices.

Each application and user requires a slice of the bandwidth available and each application grabs bandwidth in it’s own way. Most often, applications will try and use as much of the bandwidth as they can to get the task finished as fast as possible.

The result typically is seemingly random periods where the network is slow! It may be just the internet based traffic, but sometimes even internal traffic can be bothered depending on what applications are in use. Each time there is a “slowdown” users get annoyed, productivity dips and the business performance is affected!

Very few organisations are monitoring and managing the bandwidth of users and applications across their expensive WAN connections. There are basically four areas that help in managing the problem:

• WAN Monitoring
• WAN Management
• WAN Optimisation
• Load Balancing

WAN Monitoring
Monitoring of bandwidth use across you WAN connection will typical consist of installing a hardware appliance such as a BlueCoat (formerly Packeteer) “packetshaper” in between the router and your main switch. This appliance will then be able to observe all packets coming and going and create reports on the amount of traffic and also the applications that are using the WAN and which machines in your office are creating the traffic.

Most organisations (all those I have dealt with) have been surprised at the makeup of the traffic on their WAN. I recall running traffic analysis for a client during the “Big Brother” TV show and was shocked and horrified by how 80% of their internet traffic was video streams. Which explained why staff were complaining about internal applications (that used the same connection) being slow and causing delays when checking information for customers.

WAN Management
Having identified the applications traversing your WAN, and making decisions about the importance and bandwidth requirement for each application; the next step is to ensure that this happens. Traffic Shaping will normally be a process of setting quotas and priorities for applications. You may decide that the SQL database traffic from your HQ to your warehouse is the highest priority traffic as it affects the speed of delivery of customer orders. Delays here affect your revenue after all. As such you may guarantee via the Packetshaper that 10% of your bandwidth is always available to the SQL traffic and that it is prioritised above all other traffic. You may also prevent all iTunes (music), or Real Media (video or music) traffic from entering or exiting the office network. Other common traffic management strategies are to throttle website browsing traffic and email.

WAN Optimisation
Management can achieve quite a bit, but not everything. Bandwidth is still being used and management can smooth out the peaks to provide a more reliable WAN service, it can’t improve the situation. Optimisation however can improve performance to levels above that which the network could provide even if there is no network congestion.
For example, some traffic can be compressed decreasing the amount of traffic that must travel across the WAN, decreasing file open times considerably. Caching similarly can give near local speeds for access to remote files or applications. WAFS/WAAS solutions can have very impressive performance improvements depending on the traffic types.

Load Balancing
The problem may also may be related to too many requests going to a limited number of servers. For example your sales system might become if all your staff are accessing the same server at the same time. Load balancing can allow you to intelligently move traffic between servers transparently to users. This might mean that the local server is used, unless it becomes overloaded at which point you might use another server in another server, if the sum time including traversing the WAN would be less than accessing the local server.
You might also place a load balancer “in the cloud” in a central location (perhaps on the internet) and then have the traffic balancer serve traffic from the server closest to the user.
The classic application of load balancing of course is to simply balance all the incoming requests evenly across server application servers, but load balancing can be much more intelligent and even include altering you traffic management settings to throttle traffic in response to the amount off traffic being observed by the balancer and/or the traffic monitoring appliance.

What is the most important?
The question often raised is which of these elements is the most important or the one to start with? The answer to this is “…it depends…” and “…none of the above…”.

What matters most is having regular review and amendment of all the above elements. You need to report regularly on your bandwidth usage, which you then analyse and use to update traffic shaping solution settings. The reports also inform decisions about implementations of WAN optimisation and Load balancing. You need to review, revise and review on a regular basis, most commonly monthly. This helps you ensure that changes within your business don’t start impacting the performance, which in turn acts to the detriment of the business.

You need to carefully modify your traffic shaping, optimisation and other factors carefully and with a view to the network limitations, requirements and of course your business needs. Getting the balance right can be difficult, but the benefits in performance and savings make it worthwhile.

Of course, enVirtua can do all this for you and you can simply enjoy the improvements. Just drop us an email ( sales@envirtua.com ) or give us a call on 020 7193 8987.