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An independent briefing by Quocirca Ltd.

www.quocirca.com

QUOCIRCA BRIEFING

Contacts:

Bob TarzeyQuocirca LtdTel +44 1753 855794

bob.tarzey@quocirca.com

Rob BamforthQuocirca LtdTel +44 1962 849746

rob.bamforth@quocirca.com

A short guide to a faster WAN

Wide Area Network Security and Acceleration

Wide areas networks (WANs) are essential to the majority of businesses, connectingremote locations and individuals back to centralised IT resources. But as thenetwork is expected to handle more bandwidth intensive applications such as voiceand video it is essential to ensure the WAN usage is well managed – eliminatingunwanted traffic and accelerating business content

•

The majority of businesses deploy wide area networks (WANs) to connectthe remote parts of the business back to centralised resources

For most a private network is unaffordable so they rely on virtual privatenetworks across shared public infrastructure, predominantly the internet

•

Internet traffic continues to grow apace, doubling in volume and speedevery two years

The applications driving this growth such as voice and video communicationsare more bandwidth hungry

•

Achieving high performance across public networks is paramount forensuring individuals and business processes are productive

This requires getting access to priority bandwidth – which has a cost – andmaking sure that employees are using that bandwidth productively

•

Unnecessary traffic needs to be stopped

This includes junk email and unproductive end-user activity on the internet butalso ensuring that business applications running over the WAN are not too chatty

•

The “wanted” traffic needs to be accelerated

Using compression, local caching, stream splitting and other techniques it ispossible to accelerate “good” data to remote users and reduce the overall use of bandwidth

•

Don’t try and do it all at once, address the fundamentals first

Make sure the best affordable connections are in use, that they are secure andreliable, that the whole network is moving wanted data as quickly as possibleand that employees are not wasting time online

Conclusions

A high performance WAN is a key part of the foundation on which today’sbusinesses are built. It enables flexible working, which increasingly carries anenvironmental message, underpins sound business processes and enables effectivecommunications within organisations and with customers, partners and suppliers.Failure to address WAN performance issues will be to the detriment of most otherareas of a business’s activity.

June 2007

BRIEFING NOTE:This briefing has beenwritten by Quocirca toaddress certain issuesfaced by businesses as theybecome more and morereliant on wide areanetwork communications.The report draws onQuocirca’s knowledge of the technology andbusiness issues faced byorganisations in this areaand provides advice on theapproaches that can betaken to create a moreeffective and efficientWAN for future growth.During the preparation of this report, Quocirca hasspoken to a number endusers and vendors and isgrateful for their time andinsights.Quocirca would like tothank Blue Coat for itssponsorship of this report.

www.quocirca.com

June 2007

The congested internet

The commercial world hasundergone a revolution inthe last 15 years driven bythe direct electronicconnection of mostbusinesses and manyconsumers via the internet.This revolution haschanged the way variousentities communicate with each other, allowedmore flexible working practices and enabled thecreation of whole new business models.Such breakthroughs are not new. Thedevelopment of the motorcar in the early 20thCentury can be said to have achieved all the samethings, but that revolution created problems. Theroads the motorcar needed to move aroundbecame congested. Employees, having been giventhe freedom to live further from work, now facedthe frustration of commuting. Sales reps, able toextend their range further and wider alsostruggled with the increasing traffic, and the vansand trucks delivering goods could also becomedelayed by congestion. Still no one is seriouslycontemplating abandoning road transport as theprimary means of moving goods and peoplearound. But there are ways to make it moreefficient: road tolls, cutting non-essential journeys, car sharing and so on.The internet is going through pretty much thesame experience, but at a much faster pace.According to the American Institute of Physics,traffic on the internet has doubled in volume andspeed every two years since 1990. But behindthese impressive growth rates there are problemswith handling the volume of internet traffic andmaintaining quality of service. In short, there ismore congestion on the internet whilst at the sametime it is becoming ever more important forbusiness communications.Few doubt that the adoption of the internetprotocol (IP) as a global networking standard hasbeen a good thing. It has allowed all sorts of applications to be IP enabled and make use of shared networks. As well as data traffic generatedby computers, this now includes much voice andincreasingly video and television traffic, both of which have to date largely run over otherproprietary networks. Using a single standardallows the traffic to pass seamlessly from thepublic internet to private IP networks and for thedata to be received on any suitable IP enableddevice, be it a computer, telephone, television etc.But such applications consume huge amounts of bandwidth and, although the capacity of theinternet has at times seemed limitless, theproblem will move beyond local bottlenecks to a jamming of the main arteries if something is notdone. Of course, more bandwidth can be added,but this has a cost, and investors will not want tolose their shirts again paying for upgradedinfrastructure as they did in the late 1990s.Private physical IP links connect the differentparts of some businesses together, but this is evenmore expensive than adding shared bandwidthand is not practical for connecting the remotestparts of very large organisations. For example, theUK’s National Health Service, despite spendingmany billions of pounds on its own IP backbonerelies on broadband connections over publicnetworks to link in most of its many smalloutposts.Another possibility is that organisations andindividuals can pay for priority time on the publicnetwork. But there is fierce debate aboutmaintaining so called net-neutrality where allusers and traffic are treated as equal. Whilst thedebate goes on, arguably, the net is not neutralanyway. The creation of virtual private networksallows businesses to make use of secure tunnelsthrough public networks; what goes through thetunnels and the priority given to such traffic bynetwork operators is, well, private.So network operators and the businesses theyserve have had to start looking at the same sort of solutions that are being considered for roadtraffic. Preventing unwanted or unnecessarytraffic, packing more into individual items of traffic (on the internet these are called packets)and making sure traffic is moving as fast aspossible and that it is prioritised when necessary.

Stopping unwanted traffic

Many a motorist would beindignant if it was suggestedtheir journey wasunnecessary, even if inmany cases it is true.Fortunately consensus onthe internet is easier toreach. All would agree that stopping the flow of junk email or spam, which is estimated by someto be greater than 90% of all email traffic, is agood thing. This problem has been compoundedin the last year or so by the growth in the numberof image-spam messages, which are typicallyabout three times the size of text based ones and

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June 2007

the increasing propensity of users to send aroundpicture and music files attached to emails.Spam is also used to help propagate viruses andother unsafe content, another good reason to stopit, but today similar dangers are as likely to beencountered whilst surfing the web. Whilstemployees might think that unlimited access tothe web at work is a good thing, their managersincreasingly do not and are seeking to controlwhat employees can and cannot do. This is not just a security issue; employees streaming videoor using free internet telephony consumebandwidth. This has a double impact onproductivity – not just is the employee wastingtime but they are wasting bandwidth that mightotherwise be available to other business criticalapplications.Applications that are essential to the businessmight be considered to be above the fray – nottrue – they too can be wasteful of bandwidth.Imagine if a salesman newly enabled to sellremotely by being given a company car was toreach an agreement with a customer – “

hold on I will just drive back to the office and get acontract

” – after returning with the contract –“

hold on while I just drive back to the office and get pen

”. Of course this would not happen, butmany business applications behave just like this,they have not been adapted for running across theinternet, they are far too “chatty”. In the shortterm, if they cannot be adapted they can at leastbe made to run faster, but longer term suchapplications need to be modified or replaced.

Accelerating wanted traffic

Having done all that is possible to getrid of the unwanted traffic the nextchallenge is to accelerate the good stuff.There are no speed cameras on theinternet so the faster the better,especially for applications where latencyis unacceptable like voice communications. Thereis much that can be done.A lot of internet traffic is repetitive. A businessmight want all its employees to watch a newhealth and safety video, but if all employees inremote branches stream it in from HQ then hugeamounts of bandwidth are consumed. Suchcontent is static and can be stored in a local cacheat the remote office. When a new version isreleased it can be downloaded once for use manytimes. With the right products local cachemanagement can be automated. Regularly usedcontent is stored locally and only downloadedagain when an update is detected at the originalsource. Cache management applies to internalcontent like the health and safety video and publiccontent, for example software updates or publicreports.But not all content is static. What about a livevideo feed, say a US based CEO addressingemployees in all global offices about a newacquisition? Here technology can still savebandwidth. For example, it is possible to send asingle video feed to hubs in Europe and Asia,from there it is split and fed through to localoffices; much bandwidth being saved in theprocess and providing a better overall end userexperience.Some traffic cannot be cached or split in this way.One-to-one communications, be they voice and/orvideo will always require a real time connectionand access to some high priority bandwidth. It isstill possible to accelerate such traffic using datacompression algorithms that allow more to becrammed into fewer packets of information beforetransmission. It is also important that effectivealgorithms are available to encode and decodedata before and after transmission (often referredto as codecs).Of course compression can be applied to alltraffic prior to transmission – all bandwidthsaving is good. And there are other things that canhelp; making sure large email attachments areonly transmitted once when addressed to multipleemployees and blocking certain types of attachment which are unlikely to be work related,only downloading changes to data (deltas) whenbacking up computers at remote sites and movinglarge volumes of data around at off-peak timeswhen there should be plenty of spare localbandwidth are examples.

USA

AsiaEurope

Stream splitting for live video over IPHQLocalHubs

LondonParisRomeTokoSeoulBeijin

Branches