WAN Optimisation
Over the years we have had a vast amount of successful experience in networking satellite offices to head offices by deploying dedicated site to site internet connections. These WAN links drive business applications and increase productivity whilst reducing the cost of IT by not having to have servers in each geographical location.
Increasingly however we have found that these traditional connections can be cumbersome at best due to the large amounts of “traffic” now being pushed over the network. For example, a network user could send an innocent internal email containing a large video from “Site A” to “Site B” that would be replicated to all staff. The way that email servers work, this email would be pushed through the connection as fast as possible and to the detriment of all other network traffic. Similarly if a user was downloading movies or watching “YouTube” videos, these too would have a serious detrimental effect on business applications that are accessed over WAN links.
Luckily there is a solution to the problem with the deployment of a Wan Optimisation / Packet Shaping solution from Dbam Systems.
With these products we are able to allocate bandwidth on a percentage basis to network protocols, services and Layer 7 applications such as HTTP Web browsing, Email, Remote Desktop/Citrix, Video, VOIP, etc, etc. We can even allocate borrow rates to critical services so that if they are using their maximum percentage they can literally “borrow” some bandwidth from another service that is not using its allocation. The result of this Packet Shaping is that the bandwidth of the “pipe” is now managed and that the connection will no longer suffer from highs and lows in connection speeds – it will always be at a constant resulting in a stable connection and consequently a stable application.
In the past, the solution to this problem would have been to deploy faster and faster internet connections. The problem with that though is they are costly and essentially they just have the same problems as before due to the fact that emails and videos still saturate the bandwidth albeit less frequently. Packet Shaping delivers tangible results at a fraction of the cost of high speed internet connections.