Enterprise Briefing

 

 

Applications are key to many businesses-critical processes and their good performance is essential to maintain business productivity. Unfortunately the trend towards networking applications has made guaranteeing application performance more difficult. The vast majority of businesses would be severely affected by poor network application performance as was shown in a recent WAN optimization survey of 150 large enterprises in the US and Europe by analyst Ovum. Thirty-eight percent of respondents said that degraded networked applications would have a severe impact on their company revenues. A further 40% said that it would have a major impact on their processes and reduce productivity. Only 22% said that it would have a minor impact on their business.

 

They do to some extent, because classes of service allow businesses to separate batch traffic like email and Internet browsing and real-time traffic such as IP telephony from business applications. But as Ovum points out, large enterprises typically have 50-100 business applications, most of which depend to some extent on the WAN. According to Ovum's survey, 70% of enterprise VPNs support business applications such as SAP, along with file and backup services (60%), and multimedia applications (50%). It is a challenge for IT departments to maintain high service levels across all these applications, particularly as they nearly all behave differently over the network. Application optimization helps them improve the performance of networked applications by using a range of different technologies, including TCP optimization, compression, de-duplication and caching.

 

There are a variety of reasons IT departments are interested in application optimization: they may need to improve the performance of applications affected by IT infrastructure centralization; perhaps they want to minimize further capex network investment and do more with their available bandwidth; they may want better visibility of what applications are running over their network; or they may simply require a key performance indicator of application performance that they can share with end-users and business units. All of these requirements can be met by application optimization.

 

There are many technology vendors who offer solutions that can help companies improve elements of their application performance. This technology can be implemented per site (also called ‘site approach’ or point-to-point) or throughout the whole network or VPN (also called ‘network approach’). The complexity of managing the different types of technology is leading many companies towards managed services, which also enable them to focus on their business. Network providers are in a strong position to provide effective application optimization services along with network services such as the IP-VPN under the same quality of service, service desk and availability. Ovum found that 30% of companies it surveyed would pay extra for improved QoS for business-critical applications, with a further 27% willing to pay for the ability to optimize bandwidth over their network.

 

Many companies are looking at application SLAs as a way of ensuring the consistently good performance of their critical applications. These range from end-user targets such as availability and guaranteed time to recover, through to network metrics such as jitter, delay, bandwidth and packet loss. Optimization technology is not only essential in delivering application SLAs, it is also used to ensure that these targets are being met. Probes throughout the network gather information on actual traffic and deliver the information in a report so that the IT department can have an overall picture of their performance and take immediate action on any performance shortfalls.