Why Maximise IP Networks ?

All corporations today depend on their IP networks for their business operations. In general, two major uses have become extremely important :

• public internet access for information access, e-commerce, emails, web hosting, video streaming
   

• private IP networks for running in-house applications such as ERP and CRM. Such private networks could be international private leased lines, frame relay networks and MPLS networks.

Many companies are finding that they are constantly overwhelmed by increasing traffic congestion in their internet bandwidth or WAN network that it undermines their application performance, resulting in overall company productivity. Further analysis on these congested networks usually reveal that there is unimportant traffic such as web surfing that are competing with mission critical applications for the limited bandwidth. One quick way of solving this problem is to purchase higher bandwidth capacity to overcome the congestion.

In reality, most networks don’t actually need to purchase additional bandwidth to ease the traffic congestion. We recommend two methods of helping enterprise avoid the trap of never ending data traffic congestion : Bandwidth Management Solution and Enterprise Cacheing Solution. Both solutions have their unique advantages and will suit the needs of different enterprises depending on their network configuration and objectives.

Bandwidth Management Solution

Bandwidth management involves controlling the data types that are utilizing the network bandwidth. Controlling may involve restricting the amount of bandwidth for non-critical traffic such as emails or ftp. It can also involve setting priorities to certain types of data so that they are given priority when there is a data traffic congestion. In general, bandwidth management involves first identifying the data types that are running in a network, then these data are analyzed to determine the mission critical ones from the less important ones, thirdly priorities and bandwidth allocation are set for each data type (or called shaping) to control the flow of each data type and finally detailed reporting is carried out on the shaping to help fine tune the control.

Bandwidth management is a proven technology and has been widely deployed in many enterprises as well as telecom operators. By taking control of the network, efficiency is improved, bandwidth costs is kept to the minimum and also helps to ensure that staff and customers are happy.

Enterprise Caching

Enterprise Caching involves accelerating IP traffic between two points irregardless of the types of WAN circuit in between as well as the type of applications that it is carrying. By sitting on both sides of the network, enterprise cache can reduce the number of repeated contents from being sent through the network, thereby reducing the overall bandwidth consumption. Whenever it senses new applications, it immediately learns the pattern of the application to cache any data that is repetitive. With enterprise caching, network bandwidth is increased almost immediately.

Enterprise caching has been deployed very successfully in many big MNCs that run their mission critical applications such as ERP and CRM. It has been proven to increase WAN bandwidth by up to 400%.