Businesses today are highly dependent on distributed
applications to support every aspect of operations. If these
applications under-perform for remote users or fail, losses of
productivity, revenue and opportunity inevitably result. It is
thus critical to ensure the consistent performance of
applications across the network.
One of the gating factors controlling application performance is
bandwidth. As more applications and services are activated on
the network, they contend for the finite available bandwidth.
Bandwidth can be an especially critical factor for companies
with small or overseas locations that may not have high-capacity
network connections to the data center.
Typically, IT organizations approach this critical relationship
between application performance and bandwidth by managing
supply. This supply-side management approach is characterized by
adding more bandwidth or implementing technologies that
prioritize use of the bandwidth that’s currently available.
But IT organizations can no longer depend on supply-side
bandwidth management alone. Demand — driven by more
applications, higher volumes of data and increasing intensity of
use — is just growing too fast. Funding for technology
infrastructure is growing too slowly. And the consequences of
service interruptions are too great. In fact, supply-side
management alone fails to address a variety of issues. Some
applications aren’t very well designed for deployment on the
network, so they won’t perform well, regardless of how much
bandwidth you throw at them. Some applications will perform a
bit better with more bandwidth, but those incremental
performance gains aren’t worth the cost of the additional
infrastructure. In some cases, management needs to consider
retiring an application altogether. In other cases, steps must
be taken to reduce end-user demand.
Simply put, network managers have to do more than just manage
bandwidth supply. They have to apply best governance practices
to the consumption of bandwidth, so that utilization of network
resources is closely aligned with business drivers. Only by
exercising this kind of governance can IT use its infrastructure
dollars in the most effective possible way.
The Governance Lifecycle
Good bandwidth governance actually begins well before an
application is deployed on the network. With the right
technologies, developers can start assessing the behavior of
their applications over the network early in the design and
development stages. That way, they can resolve excessive
bandwidth consumption or poor performance issues as soon as they
arise, rather than later in the game, when such problems can be
very costly to fix.
This kind of testing should continue right up to deployment, so
that there are no surprises when the application is rolled out
onto the production network. It should also be done every time
the application is upgraded or modified, because subtle changes
in code often have unexpected impact on the behavior of
applications on the network. IT can apply these bandwidth
governance best practices to applications that are already in
production, too. For example, before throwing bandwidth at an
application performance problem, network managers should first
model potential solutions to find out if the additional
bandwidth will, in fact, deliver expected improvements. What-if
scenarios should also be run to answer key governance questions
such as “Will current bandwidth levels support the addition of
20 users in our Atlanta office?” and “How will night shift users
be affected if we start backing up remote servers over the
network at 2:00 AM?”
Only by answering these kinds of questions in advance can
network managers ensure that bandwidth is being used for the
best possible business purposes.
Bandwidth Governance Best Practices
To achieve best practices bandwidth governance, IT organizations
require technology capable of replicating the production network
environment as it exists today and as it might look tomorrow.
This “virtual enterprise” should be capable of assimilating all
the factors that impact application performance in the real
world: live applications, the data center that supports them,
the topology and bandwidth constraints of the network, the
number of distribution of end users, etc.
By leveraging this virtual environment, everyone involved with
bandwidth governance — from application designers and QA staff
to network managers and architects — can more effectively
control bandwidth utilization and preempt potential consumption
and performance problems. They can also verify the effectiveness
of any planned supply-side measures, such as QoS and bandwidth
grooming, they plan to implement in production.
Unfortunately, most IT organizations rely only on development
LANs (which don’t reflect conditions on real-world enterprise
networks) or mathematical simulations to assess the behavior of
applications. These resources are useful, but don’t provide the
precision or flexibility necessary for the kind of true
bandwidth governance IT will have to implement if it is going to
maximize returns on development and infrastructure investments.
That’s why it’s essential that IT organizations re-evaluate
their bandwidth management strategies and their technology
portfolios. Those that continue to manage application network
performance in one silo and application development in another
won’t be able to govern bandwidth effectively across the
application lifecycle. Only with an accurate, flexible and
proactive approach can IT bridge the gap between development and
production, and thereby meet its goals of reliable performance,
cost-efficient service delivery, and tight alignment of
expenditures with business priorities.
To learn more, visit www.shunra.com. Shunra empowers enterprise
organizations and technology vendors to eliminate the risks
associated with rolling out complex, distributed, applications
and services. The Shunra Virtual Enterprise (Shunra VE) solution
provides accurate, highly granular insight into how networked
applications will function, perform and scale for remote
end-users. It creates an exact replica of the production network
environment, allowing users to safely develop, test and
experiment with applications and infrastructure in a lab
environment before deployment in production.
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