Cost Effective Networking Solutions
Solve problems, improve service, and prepare for
convergence
WHITE PAPER
Authored by
Vicki Jones, Senior Product Manager, Managed Network Services
Zahir Virjee, Director Product Management, Enterprise Network Services
Krista Colonna, Product Marketing Manager, IP Services
Executive Summary
Budget cuts, cost cutting, and staff reductions continue to plague organizations around the globe as the economy wreaks havoc in every industry. Yet, providing innovative solutions, servicing customers and growing the business and
profitability remain high priorities. Within many of these organizations, the proliferation of video conferencing, voice and data traffic, and collaborative media is consuming bandwidth at an ever-increasing rate and adversely impacting mission-critical network applications and data. Businesses that are steadily expanding their global presence are further affected by the impact of supporting and communicating with a highly dispersed geographical workforce and partner network. They are also under pressure to find services that can help them defray costs and improve performance by leveraging the operational, storage, data access and other resources located (or replicated) in branch offices around the world.
To balance these somewhat disparate priorities, organizations are increasingly relying on Multiprotocol Label Switching Virtual Private Networks (MPLS VPNs) and other advanced converged network solutions to address some of their network challenges. While this has been effective, it’s not enough. Businesses must also leverage their existing resources while taking advantage of the advanced capabilities of newer network services.
An enterprise may use one or more readily available network services to achieve their goals. This paper takes a look at WAN Optimization, Application Performance Management, Remote VPN Access, and Managed Services to determine how they address many networking challenges. Most of these services can be implemented without significant investments in technology or resorting to the risk and expense of altering or replacing existing networks or infrastructure.
Tough Times Call for Innovative Services
The sluggish economic recovery continues to exact a serious financial and operational toll on global enterprises as they struggle with business demands for more resources and bandwidth to improve productivity, meet increasing customer and supply chain partner expectations, and deliver better customer service. Meanwhile, available bandwidth is being increasingly consumed in order to support newer technologies for business transactions, which can be difficult and expensive to manage. Companies require skilled employees who are adept at managing networks where so many different technologies can move around in real time.
All of this is happening at a time when companies are being pressured to drive costs out of their networks and business operations. Consequently, they are scrambling to find cost-effective solutions to meet these challenges by making the most out of their existing technology and human resources. Unfortunately, this attempt to juggle corporate IT and business needs and growing network complexities without budgets or sufficient skilled manpower is taxing organization’s staff, partners, and customers.
The primary advantage of MPLS is that it is flexible, cost effective, and intelligent. MPLS-based IP VPN services have grown dramatically in recent years because they allow global firms to reduce and manage their network costs through the implementation of converged network services. They also can leverage and maximize an organization’s existing network investment without the need to replace the networks they already have in place.
Companies can achieve cost savings by taking advantage of the capabilities and benefits offered by WAN optimization, application performance management, remote VPN Access, and managed services.
The Importance and Challenges of WANs
A multitude of recent mergers and acquisitions, software as a service (SaaS), social networking, staff reductions, outsourcing, data center consolidation, mobile workers, VOIP and similar innovations have restructured the typical enterprise. Networked applications provide the links to efficiently connect, integrate, and communicate with employees, partners, and in other companies, countries, and time zones. Further, as networked applications became the lifeblood of today’s global business operations, WANs became a critical part of business operations.
WAN Optimization Services Boost Network Performance
As companies shift more and more critical applications to the network, maintaining an acceptable level of network performance -- particularly at remote locations -- has become a challenge. WAN bottlenecks are common occurrences in large, geographically distributed organizations especially when bandwidth is limited. In addition, network latencies become unavoidable with increasing distance.
Since these and other network forces can affect the performance of networked applications, global organizations are examining their WAN throughput, costs, and implementations. They also are considering WAN optimization solutions as a way to accomplish many of their mission critical business goals, including:
resolve performance problems and increase user productivity. improve performance on many critical applications.
improve business continuity with faster replication of data among sites. maximize operational, storage, data access and other resources.
facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data and transaction processing among offices, countries, etc.
A key finding in IDC’s WAN Survey Report for 2009 is that “Improving
performance of applications running on the WAN is the second highest priority for IT managers.”1 Industry analysts view WAN optimization as an attractive
method to improve application performance, while also citing other benefits such as cost savings (reduced carrier costs from bandwidth upgrades avoided or even bandwidth reductions) and faster replication of data among sites. The challenges of managing a WAN can be daunting. Many WANs are collectively owned and managed and often use leased telecommunications lines. The distance involved coupled with the transmission requirements and contention for available bandwidth can result in higher latency connections. Increasing bandwidth doesn’t always resolve the problem. In many cases, the cause of the bottleneck is not directly related to the amount of available bandwidth, but to the way WANs are configured.
The applications that are carried over the WAN rely on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to deliver data to its specified destination through the Internet Protocol (IP) address. TCP ensures that IP data arrives intact. Any bit errors or packet loss can severely impact the efficiency of TCP windowing algorithms and compression schemes. When errors are encountered, TCP retransmits the data, further increasing traffic and consuming available bandwidth.
Furthermore, since TCP transmits all types of data equally, mission-critical applications and data have to compete with all the other types of traffic in the pipe. Consequently, business-critical applications and data-utilizing WANs may be subject to delays caused by everything from customer applications such as VOIP and Video conferencing to internet-based communications, including spam. WAN Optimization devices can act as a proxy for TCP, which reduces the round trip latency often experienced over long physical distances.
Additionally, anything that impacts the throughput or functionality of data transmissions frequently has serious, negative repercussions on user productivity, business efficiencies, and customer service. With a WAN
Optimization service, end-users will experience greater productivity since the network will be more efficient by decreasing server response time. Faster server response means more data input time, or less time spent waiting for data delivery to the user desktop.
There are many kinds of WAN optimization services available to address these networking issues. However, not all of them provide the same level of capabilities or efficiencies. The most useful and cost-effective WAN
1 Munroe, Courtney Bhattacharyya, Rena, “Preliminary results from IDC’s 2009 WAN Manager
Survey, August, 2009. • • • • •
optimization products are capable of resolving networked application
performance issues quickly. It is essential that whatever services are selected, they have no, or at the very least, have minimal impact on the network
architecture.
Many organizations will derive the most value from managed WAN optimization services that can achieve the following technology objectives:
Compress transmissions.
Store repeated patterns of data locally to avoid retransmissions. Provide administrators with good visibility into bandwidth utilization.
Requirements for Application Performance Management (APM) Services
Equally valuable in any good organizational strategy to leverage existing assets are those services capable of managing and improving the overall performance of networked applications. This is important now more than ever since
traditional enterprises have been restructured and reshaped over the past decade by a variety of events and paradigm shifts. For example, mergers and acquisitions, as well as a move toward outsourcing, were two highly influential factors that significantly changed the way corporations create and distribute products. Consolidation of a number of data centers certainly has been one of the byproducts of many recent mergers and acquisitions. Outsourcing jobs overseas and deployment of newer technologies that increase productivity and automate many manual developer tasks (such as testing tools, newer programming languages and development tools) shifted staff allocations and created an increase in the number of mobile workers.
Organizations need to know what is happening on the network at all times. Armed with the most relevant and informative type of detailed information, companies can make timely decisions on how to alleviate congestion or problems — often before they negatively impact the network and/or the users. Organizations should look for APM services that can deliver the precise information required to monitor and manage the integrity of networks,
applications, and voice and data traffic. The APM service should provide a wealth of transactional details and useful summaries, including:
performance analysis.
detecting and diagnosing problems. trend analysis.
event management. application availability. service level reporting.
notification via alerts for applications, group, location, events, etc. resolution assist and verification.
process analysis.
traffic pattern detection and monitoring. reporting.
Every business is unique in terms of traffic patterns, consumption of resources, infrastructure, reporting and governance requirements, and number of remote workers. One-size-fits-all services are not appropriate—or cost effective—in most situations. Organizations should consider APM services that can be
• • • • • • • • • • • • • •
customized to meet requirements of an individual company’s network and infrastructure. The services must be configurable so that an organization can satisfy its customers’ service level agreements (SLA), policies, and governance requirements without a significant amount of programming and additions.
Types of APM Services to Consider
Large global organizations have a diverse set of challenges related to maintaining the integrity of networks, applications, and VOIP. Companies dealing with these challenges want to give careful consideration to the various types of APM services available from their providers. The key is to look for those services that can support the network, applications, and VOIP traffic.
Network Services
Large, complex networks supporting everything from remote sites to individual applications are notoriously difficult for many companies to monitor and manage. Network services remove the complexities associated with monitoring an entire network. They collect and filter port and circuit information and display the relevant data about the overall performance and health of the network. The more advanced services display this information in an easy-to-understand and informative format. This data enables IT managers to immediately identify trouble areas or potential conditions that may put critical network resources or the business in jeopardy.
Application Services
Large enterprises frequently have to support latency-intolerant applications, such as VoIP, Video, CRM and ERP, on their networks. When these types of applications share converged networks with other applications, particularly those that use high bandwidth, monitoring and obtaining essential data about application-level performance is crucial. Application services are designed to provide organizations with near real-time, application monitoring information. Historical data can be easily viewed for analysis and reporting on all network traffic on an end-to-end basis. Organizations are equally interested in seeing advanced statistics on application performance and disruptive activities, such as latency, jitter and packet loss, and in seeing general bandwidth utilization. Not only is this type of information necessary to ensure everything is running optimally, it is also an essential way to measure compliance with SLAs and critical Class of Service (CoS) requirements.
VOIP Services
Converged networks are capable of transmitting data and voice,
collaboration, and multi- or rich-media traffic. However, it is often common for latency-sensitive applications, such as VOIP, streaming audio and video, video conferencing, and other similar applications, to experience a variety of problems whenever they have to compete with pure data traffic on the same network. To prevent packet loss and jitter, organizations require high levels of transparency along with end-to-end network monitoring and management of their latency-sensitive applications.
VOIP Integrity services are an ideal way to achieve consistent reliability and quality for VOIP and similar real-time applications. VOIP Integrity service provides real-time visibility and reporting capabilities, including per-call
advanced features of this type of service help organizations identify which applications running on their networks are not functioning at their optimal performance levels. This assessment is based on bandwidth analysis and performance utilization characteristics. When these services offer fast or real-time incremental data gathering, organizations can further optimize their VOIP network design. Companies can use this information to study their end-to-end performance in real time to make changes, if necessary. In addition, they also can use the data to trouble shoot a variety of problems that may arise.
Leveraging Investments by Managing Mobile Connectivity Costs
Another way for organizations to operate more efficiently is to do a better job of managing and controlling the costs of maintaining and supporting their mobile workers. There is no question that companies with a mobile workforce need secure dial, broadband (WiFi, Ethernet) and cellular-based (3G) access to the Internet and, ultimately, to their own network at an affordable price.
Mobile IP Connectivity
One capability that can significantly yield corporate savings for a mobile workforce is Mobile IP connectivity. This comprises a software client, which is typically installed on a remote user’s computer or their electronic devices. It allows users to automatically connect to the virtual network in their current city. The most effective of these services first authorizes the network service provider to allow access to the Internet. Then, it can automatically launch the user’s VPN to securely connect the user to the enterprise network (see Remote VPN Access below).
The more advanced services provide an intuitive and consistent user interface, as well as multiple access methods. For global organizations, it is imperative that their mobile IP connectivity services offer an extensive number of access points around the world along with a centralized billing capability. The service also must offer unified pricing, billing, policy enforcement, and reporting capabilities or the administrative costs might outweigh any savings the organization might achieve.
More advantageous services provide companies with a sufficient number of dial access points and WiFi venues with local dial rates in as many areas as possible. In addition, the IP connectivity services should not only provide a listing of the dial numbers and broadband access to those locations, but also integrate them into a single virtual network.
Global organizations absolutely require multiple redundant network providers in thousands of cities to protect against single-provider outages. Equally important in the face of so many cyber attacks are comprehensive security features, such as:
EPM (end-point management to check virus protection levels and security patches);
iSEEL (encrypted login to protect user authentication credentials); and Even more coveted are those services with features that allow granular definition and enforcement of corporate security policies for remote and
•
These features are particularly crucial for organizations that need to understand and control their costs.
Remote VPN Access Services
A third way to reign in the costs associated with supporting mobile workers is through remote access services. Global enterprises all require a secure, flexible, and scalable network solution that lets their mobile/remote workforce, suppliers, partners and customers connect to their corporate networks over the public Internet via IPSec and/or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) tunnels. Remote access services are designed to maintain productivity and secure throughput for these geographically dispersed employees.
Most companies considering these services want a solution that will let their own telecommunications/IT department be able to control, configure, distribute, and mange their VPN. Most also want to configure these services to match the requirements of their own infrastructure and business. They need to make additions, modifications, or deletions as their business needs and infrastructure change or evolve.
Ideally any services being considered should have the features that will allow an organization to quickly bring on new sites or back-up existing networks. They should enable the company to utilize any ISP and private networks worldwide. Since most global businesses operate around the clock, the remote services they obtain must deliver 24x7x365 support from the service provider.
Managed Services
Managed services for security, IP, and WANs have been available for many years. They are well suited for smaller companies without the IT resources or staff dedicated to support their network. However, many larger organizations now recognize the value their IT department can contribute to making the organization more profitable if they are free to focus on business-critical activities rather than engaged in operating and maintaining the network. Companies have discovered they can derive additional benefits by using managed services. They realize that outsourcing these network tasks to a service provider can actually reduce network operational and maintenance costs. The necessary cost of acquiring and maintaining essential technology and dedicated skilled workers is assumed by the third-party service
provider. The organization can also minimize or mitigate risks by offloading the complexities and challenges to a dedicated service provider with more experience and resources than the organization has in-house.
Finally, in addition to advanced network and hosted services, global
enterprises must consider the ability and expertise of their chosen services provider. Organizations would be wise to examine the provider’s existing customer base, area of coverage, and other salient criteria to ensure that the provider can support the organization’s own geographically distributed offices and/or multi-national customers. The service provider also must have or be able to deliver the following capabilities:
www.globalcrossing.com
an extensive portfolio of IP-based network and hosted services.
experience providing enterprise customer with global connectivity in the countries in which they have offices or remote workers.
compelling price points.
fiber and converged IP network support that can directly link cities and countries in which the enterprise operates.
extensive support for latest standards including IPv6, Layer 3 IP VPNs, Layer 2 VPLS, and multiple, differentiated classes of service.
compliance with local, domestic, and international government and confidentiality regulatory requirements.
Even in an uncertain economy, companies are willing to pay for the right services. If the services enable them to achieve their primary business goals, then the cost justifies the expense. However, with so many vendors and service providers promising a panacea of capabilities, organizations need to ascertain that the service provider can actually meet their needs and deliver on what they promise.
Conclusion
The economy will continue to factor prominently in the coming months in the strategy and budget discussions of today’s organizations. At the same time, increasing demand for more bandwidth and the need to carefully manage and optimize voice, data, and wireless traffic will remain a top priority for all businesses. As a result, organizations will continue to search for services and capabilities that will allow them to leverage existing resources while also delivering the services that enable them to derive the greatest benefits with their tight budgets. Advances in managed network services and application performance technologies have given enterprises the tools to manage their network resources more efficiently in order to stay competitive in today’s challenging business environment.
• • • • • •