Art of Bandwidth Management

Today bandwidth availability is not at all a problem; there is plenty of it

available with your service provider. However, in-spite of so much bandwidth,

managing it still remains the biggest challenge for most CIOs. It's still

something you can never have enough of. No matter how much bandwidth you buy, it

quickly gets consumed and at the end of the day, you have to again opt for more.

So what's the reason organizations are always short of bandwidth? There are

several reasons for this, and in this article we will try to bring out those

issues and also discuss some of the trends that are developing in the world of

bandwidth to cope up with them. In addition, we will also identify the hot

technologies that are driving bandwidth usage in organizations.

Today, the primary aim of CIOs is to provide high availability to their

mission critical applications and to ensure maximum uptime for branch office

connectivity. For this, both bandwidth capacity and availability must be

ensured. This is always a challenge due to a number of reasons. The prime

culprit is the increasing number of applications that require WAN connectivity,

especially Internet bandwidth. For instance, in a survey that we conducted in

Feb this year, we asked CIOs about which applications are they currently running

over their WAN infrastructure. A majority of them (more than 50%) were already

using it for running business applications like ERP, CRM, VPN connectivity, file

sharing, and messaging/



collaboration. That's quite a mouthful, and yet an incomplete list. In the
future, they also plan to deploy video conferencing, online portal for

e-commerce, DR and BCP, and much more. Most of this requires assured bandwidth

because it's all business critical. Add to this all the non-business critical

traffic, and you'll be out of bandwidth in no time. So what do you do? How do

you guarantee bandwidth? The easy way out is to procure more bandwidth, and the

difficult way is to manage the existing bandwidth. Which path do you take?

Obviously, it would be the easy way out, but then you can't continue doing that

indefinitely. The good news is that there are several key developments in this

area that are making even the difficult job of managing bandwidth easy. In this

story, we'll take a look at some of these trends.

Applications currently running across the WAN infrastructure	WAN applications planning to deploy in the near future

Appliances are making bandwidth mgmt a breeze



In the olden days, to assure bandwidth, IT managers had to analyze the

entire network traffic using tools like Ethereal, Ntop, MRTG, etc to identify

bandwidth bottlenecks like improper architecture, faulty or out-dated networking

hardware, etc, which was causing congestion on the network and eating up

bandwidth.

Today, bandwidth management appliances have taken over, which sit on your

Internet gateway and analyze network traffic on a real-time basis. Based on the

kind of traffic, pre-defined management policies are executed to manage

bandwidth, automatically.

These intelligent devices not only manage the bandwidth, but also generate

detailed reports for faulty network hardware. Secondly, these advanced bandwidth

appliances offer load-balancing and failover features, which ensure high

availability to your mission-critical business applications.

Compared to the software-based solutions, these appliances require less

maintenance, take lesser data center space and are are more cost-effective.

Use Managed Service Providers



Outsourcing is a key trend that the world is heading towards, and IT is an

area where outsourcing is catching up very fast, even in India. The bandwidth

management can also be outsourced to a managed service provider (MSP). The best

part of this is that now the CIO doesn't have to worry about bandwidth

management and on behalf of an organization the MSP does it. Once you have

decided to outsource your bandwidth management, you just need to concentrate on

drafting a proper SLA and put penalties for under- or non-performance, on your

organization's behalf.

These days, you get two bandwidth options from MSPs. You can opt for

dedicated bandwidth or may agree to per-usage bandwidth model. If you are not

sure of the bandwidth requirements of future projects then let the MSP handle

the situation and come up with a customized offering. In this case, MSP may

quote on the basis of your bandwidth usage and offer you a premium bandwidth

pipe. As your applications need more bandwidth, it will automatically be

increased and your application would never face any bandwidth crunch. In

addition, MSPs will offer all bandwidth management features and policies

according to your IT infrastructure. Secondly, MSPs can also offer you

value-added services, where they will manage every bit of Internet bandwidth on

your network and may also help you resolve bottlenecks.

Single vs multiple service providers



Even if your ISP is offering you good service today, it can be a risky

proposition not to have a backup. What if there's a natural calamity or a

manmade one? Or perhaps there's a disruption on the service provider's

network-so much for your business continuity. The obvious solution to this is to

have a backup link, which has been the trend for a long time. However, the new

trend these days is to have a single service provider who will give you multiple

redundant paths. For instance, most of the key telecom service providers these

days provide an MPLS backbone, which is over a fiber channel ring. This has

multiple redundant paths, which ensures that if the primary link fails, your

connectivity is not disrupted, and even if the secondary link fails, there's a

third link that's still active. The benefit of this is that even the redundant

links can provide the same level of bandwidth, so even your quality of service

isn't impacted.

On the other side, you could also go for multple service providers. The

choice here depends upon which applications are you running across your WANs,

and whether a single service provider is able to provide you the necessary

banwidth and quality of service required for the job.

What's the biggest challenge you face with users of your WAN infrastructure?

Multiple connectivity options are becoming commonplace



The key reason for this trend to take shape is branch office automation.

Increasingly, organizations are enhancing the IT infrastructure of their branch





offices. If you have branch offices spread across the country to the remotest of
areas, then how do you ensure connectivity at each location? There are multiple

technologies available for the job depending upon the location and size of your

branch office, as well as the applications you're likely to run there. For

instance, if you've consolidated your IT infrastructure into your data center,

then branch offices would need to be given remote access to it. If you're

providing remote application access, then the banwidth requirement would be much

higher. However, if you've installed an application server in the local branch

office, then you would just require sufficient bandwidth to synchronize data

with your central application in the data center. Connectivity options are in

abundance today, ranging from MPLS-VPN, to radio towers, to VSATs, to WiMax,

VDSL, and much more. Like we said, connectivity options are not the issue. What

you need to understand very clearly are the applications you plan to run at each

branch office and their bandwidth requirements. For that, their characteristics

must be studied in detail.

B/W intensive apps are on the rise



Another trend that's choking all the bandwidth is an increase in the number

of bandwidth intensive applications. Video conferencing for instance, is

becoming more common, especially in certain sectors. We've seen it being

deployed in healthcare for tele-medicine. Likewise, with VoIP coming in, things

move beyond basic voice conversations. They move into multi-point conferences,

collaboration, sharing, etc. Then of course are the applications for DR and BCP,

and web enabled versions of ERP and CRM apps, etc.

WAN accelerators are gaining ground



To combat the new and more bandwidth hungry applications, WAN accelerators

have come to the rescue. They accelerate application performance, increasing WAN

capacity, and enable application prioritization.

They also increase the throughput by recognizing repeated data patterns. They

store repeated data patterns on a hard drive, similar to a cache, and serve the

same to a requestor then and there, instead of getting it from live hosts. This

saves a lot of bandwidth on the WAN links.

Overall, bandwidth is one the most misused service in an organization.

However, you need to control it using a mix of technology and policies. We hope

you've found the trends helpful in deciding the right technologies as well as

establishing a set of policies.