Bandwidth management but not as you know it...

This is part 1 of a two part post inspired by an article I found myself reading earlier this month titled ‘better understand bandwidth and your enterprise’s needs’. The article by Bruce Gain provides a practical hands-on approach to managing bandwidth for network admins who handle the network and the traffic through it.

Network layer 4

The article is a great example of how many organizations look at managing their bandwidth and how they might manage staff access and use of applications and web services above and beyond asking their ISP for larger pipes. The article and approaches contained within tends to resonate well with those viewing management of bandwidth from a network layer 4 traffic, WAN, network-admin, datacenter perspective : )

What about the application layer?

Well it's all very well and good talking about management of bandwidth at layer 4. But, actually when we start talking about how to ensure staff access and use of applications doesn’t have a negative impact on network bandwidth, we should be taking the discussion to the next level, the application layer of 7. At this layer an organization is able to use many more intelligent ways of managing the traffic to and from applications and manage how their use will impact or not impact the existing network infrastructure and resource.

How can this be achieved I hear you ask? Well in this situation an application delivery controller (application traffic manager, layer 7 load balancer, what-ever you wish to call it) can be used.

Other factors at play

Many organizations have applications running internally that take up network resource. Bandwidth is a key shared resource, and its misuse by one staff member could adversely affect the level of service that other staff members might experience.

At this point we should also consider two further elements that impact this discussion. Firstly, it may-be that unlike in the article which references ownership of dealing with the network bandwidth usuage residing with network admins, the onus may actually move to the applications teams whom have responsibility for the roll-out and use of applications on the network. We also need to think about the impact of staff access and usage of applications and services on the network, and how this might affect an organizations capability of offering services from an external facing web services point of view. The external facing web services may give customers and partners access to applications that are critical to doing business with them. Alternatively it may offer users/visitors the ability to buy goods and services over the web. An organization will need to seriously think about how they are going to ensure that the most valuable users get the best possible level of service from the resources available.

In part 2 of this post, available towards the end of this week, I will discuss how Zeus Traffic Manager (application delivery controller) can be used to implement and manage service policies. Service policies can deal with the issues that can cause bandwidth headaches for many IT professionals and organizations.

Mark Gyles

Comments

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