Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 6

	This Month's Issue:
	The Shifting Market

Optimizing Application Performance
on Large Branch Networks

By Thierry Grenot

In today's global economy, it's not uncommon to find organizations struggling to share enterprise applications with hundreds of branch offices and mobile workers across the world. As a result, corporate WANs are now playing an ever more important role in providing remote branches and mobile workers with fast access to critical business applications. Optimizing the performance of applications over the WAN has become a critical issue and top priority for most IT departments.

Managing WAN application traffic flow in organizations with a limited number of offices can be demanding. Yet, some businesses have hundreds or thousands of offices that must share and manage information over the network. These organizations-- such as those in the banking, insurance and travel industries -- must optimize application performance using a more strategic approach.

One issue that many large organizations grapple with is that applications used within the company may be very different (e.g. transactional trades, reservations, payment authorizations, email – even music broadcasts). Thus, network teams are often confronted with a massively complex environment: dozens of applications, thousands of sites and tens of thousands of workstations.

This complexity means that a huge number of situations can occur in the network, each one very different from the next. As a result, the slightest incidents with centrally located servers may cause enormous repercussions at branch offices, including a complete failure of network services. Interestingly, these problems are very similar to those experienced by network operators and managed service suppliers, which must consider many different networks.

These large organization challenges are compounded by the great size and complexity of meshed networks, coupled with the characteristically small size of the central IT team and the fact that small office sites often can’t justify having dedicated equipment at them. In addition, these organizations are challenged to deliver a good quality of experience to the mobile workers to ensure their productivity. In such cases, network managers have often wondered out loud whether properly managing applications on a large branch network is possible or just a fantasy.

For example, consider office flow matrices. Despite the general movement toward server consolidation of different applications, branches often exchange information with other sites. For example, some branches host applications from server centers or provide load-balanced access to regional offices. Yet, in some instances, corresponding sites can

These organizations -- such as those in the banking, insurance and travel industries -- must optimize application performance using a more strategic approach.

differ from one branch to the next (the Boston branch and the San Francisco branch may not be in contact with the same regional office and therefore receive different information). This situation translates to "some-to-many flows" where a small number of sites communicate with a subgroup of offices. To guarantee application performance, this partial meshing needs to be taken into account by the company’s optimization system. This system should automatically determine the groups covering central branches and be capable of managing situations where there is competition between the different flows.

Today, responsibility for this intricate application performance delivery is falling more and more on the shoulders of network professionals. To manage this wide range of day-to-day situations, these individuals need to be armed with tools and methods that allow them to get information, make decisions, and rapidly apply them.

Network managers need three ingredients to optimize large branch office applications successfully:

an overall view (applications, traffic matrices, network performance, and applications)
the ability to guarantee the performance of critical applications at all times
the jurisdiction to act locally in case of any incident (alarms, local analyses of flows)

In addition, network managers need to manage their budgets and supply high-level information to management, or even to their internal customers.

Traditional network traffic tools offer management rules and traffic monitoring for each site, but they soon surpass their limits

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