October - 2003 issue > Technology

By Ajmal Noorani

IN THE BATTLE FOR BANDWIDTH ON CONGESTED Wide-Area Network (WAN) links, aggressive applications like music downloads and large email attachments can flood capacity, jeopardizing business applications and the business performance that they are expected to provide. Abundant data, protocols that swell to use any available bandwidth, network bottlenecks, and new, popular, and bandwidth-hungry applications—they all seem to conspire against network and application performance. The selection and deployment of a suitable application traffic management system can help IT overcome these problems, align resource use with business priorities and ensure a satisfactory end-user experience.

Identifying performance problems is a good first step, but it’s not enough. You need the ability to solve performance problems as well. Application traffic management systems that protect, pace, contain and provision bandwidth on a per-user, per-session, per-stream, per-location or per-application basis are a necessity in today’s enterprise networks.

Suppose an insurance firm posts a new file to be downloaded by customers and prospects. Although these file transfers are critically important, they are not time-sensitive. When too many users grab the file, interactive applications grind to a halt—including urgent applications that support claim processing and sales. If WAN application performance is unmanaged, or even monitored but not controlled, the company’s network and application performance will fall short of supporting the company’s business goals.

What’s needed? After all, the file transfers are necessary, just not at the expense of more business-critical applications. The company needs to be able to divide its link into multiple, unequal portions. Downloads should have some bandwidth but should be capped. And urgent applications need to be protected. Bandwidth partitions do just that.

Partitions
A partition creates a virtual separate pipe for a traffic class. You specify the size of the reserved link, designate whether it can expand, and optionally cap its growth. Partitions function similarly to frame-relay PVCs, but with the added benefit of sharing unused excess bandwidth with other traffic.

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